Avid crisis comms

Avid crisis comms: Hollywood disaster to PR win

The challenge

The entertainment industry publication Variety published an article reporting that Avid Media Composer editing software was crashing and refusing to reboot, reportedly bringing Hollywood movie and TV productions to a halt. This news quickly spread to numerous national and international business and trade publications, with many naming Avid in their headlines – putting the company’s reputation, relationships and stock value all at stake. But it wasn’t Avid’s fault, so we were faced with a race against time to change the narrative.

Results

Changed sentiment

Turned coverage sentiment from overwhelmingly negative (71%) to neutral (92%) within 24 hours – far exceeding the goal of 50%.

Achieved 85% message penetration

Reassured Avid’s users that it was working diligently to identify the cause of this issue and later educated them on how to prevent recurrence. In doing this, we exceeded our message penetration target of 50%.

Turned the tides

Turned headlines in Avid’s favor, from “Avid bug crashes Mac Pros across Hollywood”, to “Chrome bug, not Avid software, causes damage to MacOS file systems.”

Dodged a hit to stock prices

Mitigated the effect on Avid’s stock price, which fell from $6.24 to $6.06 within 24 hours of the story breaking but increased to $6.19 a week later.

How we did it

Maintained regular communication with U.S. journalists covering the story while Avid worked to determine the cause of the glitch.
Kept Avid’s customers informed via the media with regular updates to maintain trust and transparency.
Our global team responded quickly to incoming media inquiries from Europe, despite the significant time difference with Avid’s team in LA.
Disseminated a video of Avid’s CEO and CPO acknowledging the problem and explaining the steps customers needed to take to prevent it from recurring.
Contacted all journalists who covered the issue asking them to update their headlines and stories as soon as Avid could confirm that a Google Chrome update was at fault.

To see how we can resurrect your brand’s reputation in a crisis, get in touch.

The lorries turned the tide for us. I’m so proud of the collaboration. We truly could not have done this without them.
Donnelle Koselka - Corporate Communications Avid

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