Case Study: TAE TECHNOLOGIES & GOOGLE

The optimist algorithm

TAE Technologies was to co-publish with Google a peer-reviewed paper in the Nature journal Scientific Reports describing a novel machine learning algorithm that would radically speed their plasma research and have widespread implications in AI. As the company’s communications partner, we knew we had an opportunity to use this to highlight the caliber of the working relationship with Google, to build excitement around the company’s efforts to solve the fusion challenge, and to increasingly validate the company’s bench strength in research and development in physics and engineering.

What we did

We approached this opportunity carefully, attempting to garner maximum media attention while ensuring accuracy covering a complex topic in the most efficient way possible by channeling our information from a press release we issued on behalf of TAE and a blog post written by Google.

While the TAE press release captured the immediacy and newsworthiness of the achievement with brevity, the Google research blog post outlined the technical aspects of the collaboration in depth. The post was written as a long open source interview, posted by Ted Baltz, Senior Staff Software Engineer of Google Accelerated Science Team.

The press release and blog post were published simultaneously and leveraging the two together worked in our favor. Reporters were able to both interview TAE’s CEO and cite and source our posts to accurately explain complex and technical ideas, without having to interpret information and making informational errors. This ensured accurate reporting of hard science, and plenty of pull-quotes to color coverage from the dozens of media picking up the story.

Using both materials as the context for our announcement, we were able to pitch the news in advance under embargo to high level media with whom we have strong relationships, focusing on major outlets that have covered science, nuclear energy and technology in the past. Securing a placement in The Guardian, among other notable first-wave hits, created a cascade of coverage underneath it as scores of smaller publications were quoting directly from The Guardian article, as well as the press release and blog post at a rapid pace.

The TAE/Google announcement earned more than 65 placements and was featured in outlets from all over the world. The most notable placements are included below.