At the time, Surfsight was Lytx's channel-facing business unit. I was Head of Product Marketing & Technical Documentation. Most of our initial growth came through the Geotab marketplace, the largest in fleet management, built around MyGeotab, its GPS tracking platform.
The challenge
Engineers at both companies had integrated the camera into MyGeotab itself, so fleet managers see video and telematics together in one place. Surfsight went public at Geotab's Extend conference in March 2021 as the first solution available through the new Order Now program. Customers could buy the hardware inside the Geotab platform, with licensing, a pre-installed SIM and support all handled by Geotab.
That created two problems for the brochure. The first was product. Fleet managers set rules for speeding and harsh braking directly in MyGeotab, a triggered event pulls the clip automatically for review, and the camera flags handheld phone use, eating, smoking and fatigue against Geotab's GO9 device data before correcting drivers through its own speakers. Describing the camera and the telematics data separately would have sold two products to a buyer who wanted one.
The second was ownership. Being first through Order Now meant working directly with Geotab's marketing team from the start, and two marketing teams had to agree the piece represented them both before either signed off. Lytx legal added its own requirements around the machine vision and privacy claims, which appear as footnotes in the final version.
The proposal
A four-page co-branded brochure, published under Geotab's copyright and distributed through the Geotab Marketplace, built to AODA accessibility standards. It runs in three moves:
- Joint credibility. Both companies introduced together, with 40 years of combined industry leadership and Geotab's ABI Research ranking establishing that the reader is buying from two known names.
- The integrated product. Six capability blocks covering configuration, scale, safety, compliance, real-time driver feedback, and efficiency, each written so the camera and MyGeotab appear in the same sentence.
- The purchase path. Order Now explained as a Geotab program, with the marketplace contact details closing the piece.
Approach
Review cycles ran jointly through Geotab's marketing team, Surfsight's, and Lytx legal, and the piece went out under Geotab's copyright through their marketplace.
