“Mikko’s beacon will help him to seal his sandbox.”

This blog post is the second in the series about SensorFu’s product teaser campaign. Last time we were left with an illustration about Kasper escaping a box (see it here). The escape was too easy due to a weak spot in the box. In this episode Mikko wants to see and seal the weak spots — and preserve the state he has achieved. A beacon fits to the bill.

The Beacon

This episode illustrates the idea of using beacons to make sure the box stays sealed. SensorFu’s web page shows a beacon Mikko has deployed inside his sandbox. It emits signals that should never be seen outside. If those signals get out, Mikko gets immediate warning.

Mikko’s beacon will help him to seal his sandbox.

We are really pleased how it turned out. We almost had to cancel the whole episode as there were no fitting YouTube-videos to visualize our message! While dwelling in our despair, we found the solution. Jani draws like a 6-year old, and 6 years of experience in our field is plenty. Time to stop outsourcing our graphics to YouTube, let’s pull our operations back in-house!

The message

So what is the itch the beacon is scratching? In his previous life Mikko (one of the founders), did plenty of security checks for critical systems. He knows the effort and money companies invest to establish security controls. He also knows that they can fail us. A bit too often to let it slide. We are used to monitor that our networks stay functional. We get immediate warnings when they don’t. But we are not there yet with security controls. That is the itch.

Early Results

We ran a focus group study to see how the audience reacts to our message. The group size was one and her profile didn’t fit at all to our target audience. But the study was free of charge, so why not? It revealed that 100% of the group thought the beacon was actually a trashcan. By this time, we had already spent a whopping 13.88€ (a stylus and an app) to the project, so there was no way we would walk back on this. The illustration stays.

Viral Effect

There is another object planted to the top right. We are going to let the readers to speculate if it is a disembodied eye or a flying saucer. We are counting on a fact that the speculation will go viral and earn us the much-needed attention. Has Twitter ever crashed due to retweets? Just saying. #willitcrash.

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