launching PayNode's payment technology to a vertical market

As aviation pr specialists, we anticipated a fundamental challenge with aviation trade media, who could easily see a fintech launch as a dull, marginal story.

Our compensating strategy was to exploit a weakness in other companies’ pr output: boring, formulaic photography. By convincing our client to fund a larger photography budget, we aimed to deliver vibrant, photo-led stories that editors wanted to run, achieving cut-through for PayNode’s messages via eye-catching coverage.

We developed photographic concepts to tell PayNode’s story of ‘Making Payments Fly’ and hired a top creative photographer to bring them to life. We spent half a day preparing a studio, making paper airplanes from bank notes and suspending them from ‘invisible’ fishing lines, creating a portfolio of striking, message-rich images.

As many customers would be financially unsophisticated SMEs, we crystallised PayNode’s proposition in a number of simple, accessible messages, such as ‘PayPal for Private Jets’.

To further head off competing news, we used timing to our advantage. We briefed many key publications on an embargoed basis ahead of NBAA and EBACE, while also being on the ground in Orlando and Geneva to manage a press conference and further on-site interviews.