The curious thing about a difficult technology is that its inventors usually know too much about it. They see architecture, functions, benchmarks and edge cases. A prospective buyer sees a crowded market and a dozen tabs open before lunch. Between those two views sits Broadpath Communications, a Greater Philadelphia firm founded by Gretchen Roede in 2013. Its job is to make the first view intelligible to the second.
Broadpath calls the desired state “relevance.” That can sound like one of those words agencies laminate and place in a conference room. Here it has a precise commercial meaning: a company must enter the set of brands a buyer would seriously consider. Public relations, analyst briefings, white papers, search, social posts and events are delivery vehicles. The first product is the argument beneath them.
“Only by being relevant can your brand be considered. And only by being considered can your business grow.”Broadpath's operating premise
The category is the first customer
Consider IPR Secure, a regional data-center and managed-services company with two decades of operating history and a new multi-cloud management tool called Wrklōdz. It had proof. It had software. It also had a naming problem. Disaster recovery, business continuity, data storage and cloud services overlapped in ways that changed from vendor to vendor. The category itself was foggy.
Broadpath scored competitors against buyer priorities and recommended that IPR present itself as a “hybrid cloud service provider.” The phrase was familiar enough for existing customers and broad enough for prospects moving workloads into the cloud. Wrklōdz then became the distinctive capability inside a comprehensible company, not a clever product floating outside one. Broadpath rewrote the website, built vertical case studies and established a publishing calendar. The resulting email program averaged nearly an 18 percent open rate, according to the firm's case study.
This is what Broadpath actually sells: discovery and competitive mapping; corporate positioning and message systems; website and long-form content; media, influencer and analyst relations; executive visibility; email and social distribution; and, more recently, generative-engine optimization. The clients are technology companies whose sales depend on trust and explanation - startups creating a category, mid-sized specialists trying to own one, and established brands entering a new one.
Four days in Las Vegas, months in the sentence
Blue by ADT provides the loud version of the model. ADT was famous for professionally installed security, while close to 80 percent of American home-security buyers wanted self-installation. The company planned to recast LifeShield as Blue by ADT and unveil it at CES 2020. Broadpath prepared the message, briefing materials and spokesperson talking points; previewed products one-on-one; ran embargoed phone briefings; arranged a Pepcom demonstration; supported the CES booth; and pursued reviews after the announcement.
The result was more than 100 top-tier placements and north of 394 million impressions during the four-day event. Those are Broadpath's reported figures, and they are the showy part. The more transferable detail is sequencing. The agency did not begin with mass outreach. It began by defining ADT's entry into DIY security, then equipped each channel to repeat the same useful idea.
Make the market repeat your distinction
The QuantaVerse assignment was harder because the product used AI to investigate possible money laundering, a job in which “black box” is less a metaphor than a reason for a compliance officer to end a meeting. Broadpath audited the competitive conversation and moved the company away from being another point tool. QuantaVerse would stand for the complete anti-money-laundering investigation process. Content explained that position; media, analysts, podcasts, awards, events, newsletters and social channels distributed it. Congressional staff meetings put the technology into a regulatory conversation.
The campaign generated hundreds of millions of earned impressions and coverage that included American Banker, WIRED and The Wall Street Journal. QuantaVerse appeared in an Economist video and was acquired by AML RightSource in 2021. An acquisition has many parents, and a communications agency cannot responsibly claim the whole family tree. But the case shows what positioning can do: give customers, regulators and reporters a common way to understand why a product belongs.
Voxware, a warehouse-voice software veteran, faced a different failure: the market perceived it as second or third even as it introduced a cloud product. Broadpath shifted the story from the old warehouse virtues of safety, accuracy and speed toward customer experience, cloud efficiency and brand loyalty. It also commissioned research with a wonderfully repeatable finding: 37 percent of online shoppers said a wrong holiday shipment would make them abandon a brand. Voxware eventually led share of voice in its market, the agency reports.
Directional display only. Impressions, open rate and share of voice are unlike measures and should not be compared as a single scale.
Small by design, specific by necessity
Broadpath sits between a general marketing agency and an in-house communications department. Its public leadership team is Roede, vice president Kevin Jurrens and account supervisor Mark Tordik. Their biographies emphasize technology fluency and the ability to simplify. The firm's experience list runs from smart homes and cloud infrastructure to health IT, industrial IoT, fintech and supply-chain software. The recurring customer is not a particular sector so much as a company with a complicated product and a long consideration cycle.
It is a professional-services business, not a software platform. Broadpath does not publish a rate card. A current agency marketplace listing estimates a $10,000 minimum project and $150 to $199 per hour, useful as a rough buying signal rather than a quotation. The alternatives are an internal team, a larger integrated agency, another technology PR specialist or a patchwork of freelance writers and media consultants. Broadpath's claim to difference is that positioning, technical content and earned attention happen as one system under senior practitioners.
The awkward requirement: something worth saying
There is a copyable lesson here. Before buying distribution, write down the buyer's problem, map the alternatives, choose the category you can credibly occupy, collect evidence, and make one strong idea perform six jobs. A customer result can become a case study, a press pitch, a sales asset, an analyst briefing, a search page and an executive post. Repetition is not laziness when the market has not learned the sentence yet.
The method has conditions. It needs access to executives and customers, a product with a defensible difference, evidence that survives scrutiny and enough time for a market to notice a pattern. It is poorly suited to a company hoping that press coverage will substitute for product-market fit, or to leaders who want attention but will not take a clear position. Earned media can validate substance. It cannot manufacture it indefinitely.
This is why Broadpath's newest interest in AI-generated discovery is less a pivot than a change of audience. Search engines and answer engines also need credible, current material to decide which companies belong in a category. The machine, like the buyer, cannot consider what it cannot place. Broadpath has been working on that placement problem all along.