$500K in pre-sales, before the product existed.
Now a permanent revenue line for the agency.
A three-month data and AI roadmap for a global PR agency, followed by an analytics tool that turns contradictory engagement data into daily campaign impact reports — sold before it was even built.
before launch
data and AI roadmap
reporting
the add-on
Client
Hill + Knowlton Strategies, a global public relations agency, now rebranded as Burson.
Goal
Phase 1 was a three-month data and AI roadmap for identifying target audiences and reporting campaign impact. Phase 2 was to lead delivery of the first product: a daily analytics tool showing PR campaign impact, built to generate revenue from day one.
The data was messy, the customers were already paying, and the industry didn’t trust the numbers.
Engagement data arrived from multiple sources, contradictory and of uneven quality. Straightforward attribution and impact measurement weren’t reliable before any modelling could even start.
The product had paying customers lined up before it existed, so it had to generate revenue from day one — no room for a slow, iterative build. And PR as an industry was broadly sceptical of data-driven decisions: H+K’s own data team was highly skilled and data literate, but that didn’t automatically translate into stakeholder or client buy-in.
Three constraints were non-negotiable:
- Contradictory, poor-quality engagement data
- Had to be revenue-generating from day one
- Industry-wide scepticism about data
Buy what’s commoditised. Build only what adds value.
The team leaned heavily on existing external services for core data provision, rather than building that infrastructure from scratch. Internal effort went only into the components that genuinely added value: AI-driven cleaning and classification of diverse, contradictory data sources, followed by statistical techniques to extract a reliable signal from noisy inputs.
Sold on a product description and mock-ups alone — before a single customer had seen the real thing.
Models were refined iteratively, guided by PR industry expertise, until the results held up under scrutiny. The Head of AI didn’t just ship the models — they worked to bring stakeholders along, demonstrating the value of data-informed decisions incrementally rather than asking the industry for a leap of faith.
Impact was presented through clear visual dashboards built for H+K’s clients, stripped of unnecessary technical detail. That combination — defensible modelling plus a clean presentation layer — is what let paying customers commit before the product had even launched.
$500K sold before launch. Then it became the business.
The first product generated $500K in pre-sales before launch, on the strength of its description and mock-ups alone. It went on to become a standardised add-on offered to every H+K customer, and the initial build evolved into Reputation Capital, the AI solution suite now run by Burson. Data and AI are no longer a side project for the agency — they’re a permanent revenue line.
* Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.
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*Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.