NielsenAs an analyst covering the mobile operating system market at Nielsen, I noticed the smartphone landscape was shifting fast: RIM was steadily losing ground to Android and Apple, while Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 struggled to gain traction. Rather than report these shifts as isolated data points, I saw an opportunity to frame them as an ongoing competitive story that readers would want to follow month after month.
I worked closely with corporate communications to pull share data and turn it into bite-sized, easy-to-digest stories built around what we dubbed the "Smartphone Wars." I published these updates monthly, tracking the back-and-forth between platforms and consistently pointing back to our paid data products as the source. The horse-race framing gave the tech press a recurring hook, and outlets kept coming back for the next installment.
By 2013, the approach had taken hold: 7 of the top 10 most-read stories on the Nielsen Wire, our corporate blog, were "Smartphone Wars" mobile stories I had collaborated on. The series became one of the most reliable drivers of press coverage and traffic for Nielsen's telecom research during that period.
