HELLO
HELLO
AFS Logistics is a group of shipping strategists dedicated to helping businesses better understand and manage their freight costs. But despite a 40-year history and $11 billion in freight spend under management, brand awareness was limited. Since the beginning of our engagement in 2022, we’ve pursued a public relations strategy focused on raising their profile by sharing insights on the market through a variety of PR outputs.
The TD Cowen/AFS Freight Index is a quarterly research report that harnesses those unique insights AFS can provide, offering a historic snapshot and forward-looking projections for pricing data across truckload, less-than-truckload (LTL) and parcel transportation. As part of the quarterly rollout, we handle promotion with a press release, emails, webinars, social media posts and PR interview opportunities, among other deliverables.
A critical piece of promoting the freight index is to tell the story behind the pricing data. While preparing for the third quarter release of the Index in 2023, the logistics industry was at the center of two major national news stories: a possible strike by Teamsters employees at UPS and the impending bankruptcy of Yellow Freight, then the nation’s third largest less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier. The confluence of these stories and the release of the Freight Index presented a rare opportunity to bring AFS into large, mainstream media publications and continue to bolster their presence in trade publications.
We positioned the press release to focus on these two major stories, what the pricing data said in relation to them and why they mattered to those who don’t normally spend their days in the logistics world. The release provided a strong foundation for pitching AFS subject matter experts (SMEs) to publications that wouldn’t typically cover the freight industry, but would be interested in a major bankruptcy, possible interruption to consumer package deliveries, and labor issues.
This approach also resulted in a live TV interview on CNBC. As part of previous freight index promotion, we secured interviews with an editor at CNBC for two stories on their website, and with major breaking news stories emerging from the logistics space, we were able to bring the AFS perspective to the small screen on CNBC’s “Power Lunch.”
This strategy earned AFS more than 2 billion PR impressions across print and digital media. This process also built relationships with valuable editorial contacts that secured further coverage in other major publications, including Fortune.
The increased profile created by this strategy also improved metrics for other deliverables that promoted the Index. For example, a webinar in which experts from AFS discussed the report’s findings, the possible strike at UPS and the Yellow Freight bankruptcy saw attendance grow 54% compared to the previous quarter’s webinar.
