Axis Communications

In June 2003, Agility PR was established by Miles Clayton and Axis became our founding client. Miles worked increasingly intensively with Axis UK MD Dominic Bruning on a high energy PR programme initially designed to educate the predominantly analogue/coax-wired CCTV market in the UK on the merits of moving to what we began to call ‘IP Surveillance’ or network video.

Thought leadership and case study content, as well as news stories, media relations and a new product review programme, were the primary areas of focus in those early years. From 2004, Axis was already starting to grow fast, now in both the US and UK, as well as across Scandinavia.

Strong financial gains in 2004 paved the way for investment in building Axis’ highly successful channel training programme, the AXIS Academy, from 2005, and Agility PR began promoting this to network integrators, encouraging them to add network video installation and configuration to their list of offerings they could install for their customers. In addition, they offered the training to CCTV installers who were willing to explore migrating customers from traditional CCTV to IP surveillance.

As Axis’ fortunes grew, PR activity was extended to vertical sector-focused campaigning in markets where early adoption of IP video was already well underway by 2005. This started with the education sector and then moved across to retail, transport and critical national infrastructure, city surveillance and Smart Cities, and more.

Agility PR went on to continue working closely with Dom Bruning as he assumed a more senior role as Axis’ first EMEA Marketing Director from February 2006, supporting Axis’ rapid expansion across the EMEA region. Agility PR supported Dom with defining the key criteria for selection of local PR agencies right across EMEA. And once selected, we provided content and guidance to local agencies which were taken on in the DACH region, across the Middle East, Benelux, Spain and Italy.

During this busy period, Agility PR continued to handle ongoing media relations and content creation for Axis in the UK and Ireland, working with the new MD of this region, Steve Gorski. We routinely generated over 20 pieces of high quality trade media coverage in the UK and Ireland from 2006, and steadily increased both quality and quantity of media coverage so that during 2008 we averaged 34 pieces of coverage each month and increased our coverage quality score from 509.2 in 2006 to a 744.4 per month average quality score, even as the effects of the global banking crisis rolled in.

From 2009, Agility PR stepped back from its retained role with Axis, instead handling the writing of premium content, focused mostly on high value case study write-ups and pioneering the production of high quality video case studies through until 2017. These projects often meant working with Axis’ Video Management Software partner Milestone Systems and others, with a view to optimising the case studies we often wrote for both companies.

During a relationship with Agility PR that ran from 2003 to 2017, Axis evolved from an emerging challenger to analogue CCTV incumbents into the global market leader in network video surveillance. Its unwavering and senior level support for marketing over much of this time no doubt played a major part in its success as a business.

This extraordinary growth trajectory, which was at its most intense for Agility PR in the six years from 2003 to 2008, culminated in a SEK 23.6 billion (£1.8 billion) takeover offer from Canon in February 2015, with Canon securing control of the company in April that year.