Month: August 2022

“Sometimes media analyzing is not about unveiling what you didn’t know, but about validating things you already did know”

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Rayna Grudova-de Lange

Interview with Rayna Grudova-de Lange, CEO of DeLange Analytics, a research and analytics agency in Bulgaria.

Hi Rayna, what is your background and what is included in your current role at DeLange Analytics?

As managing director of the company, my role includes absolutely everything. I’m responsible for the strategic vision, partnerships and client relationships and presenting the company to external parties. I need to think about positioning and how to respond to the changing environment, as well as how to implement those ideas. I have high profile analysts and project managers in my team that really think with me here, but in the end, it is me who draws the line.

What distinguishes DeLange Analytics from other research and analytics agencies?

It’s not a secret that we live in extremely dynamic times. Everything changes so fast and clients and their business problems are all different. That’s why I don’t believe in standard offerings and methodologies. They used to work some 10 years ago but not anymore.

We’re different because we take a very tailored approach with our customers, developing analyses and research exactly around their needs. Our ultimate goal is to help the client answer the questions, and to make them ask questions that they haven’t asked themselves before. So we really seek what is behind their request—if they have one at all. We start with close conversations to understand the client and end up with a sketched approach which we think reflects their business case. And we offer this in many different languages for many different markets. My team members are all multilingual.

What are some of your greatest challenges ahead at DeLange Analytics?

At the beginning of the social media era, it was much easier to access the data and provide a comprehensive analysis. Many social channels like Facebook and then Instagram started closing themselves for third party technology providers to harvest their data due to internal politics and privacy. China, for example, is a very important market to cover but because of its internal politics you can only get very limited access. We still include them in in our analyses, but only manually, which means you’re getting fewer valuable data points. We tackle this by introducing something we call “integrated analysis” in our industry. But blending different types of data and analysis to build a comprehensive picture it is very challenging, and it increases costs.

There is also the rising importance of chats like WhatsApp and Telegram. Brands start talking more to their customers via those platforms. They’re important for understanding the relationship between a brand and the customers, and how the customer journey goes. But they are once again closed data.

What is a common misconception your customers have regarding research and analytics?

When you present to experts—the engineers, or the sales team—they know their product pretty well. So often when we present an analysis to clients, they say: “Okay. But we already know that.” Sometimes analyzing is not about unveiling what you didn’t know, but about validating things you already did know.

You may know things because of your experience in the industry, but very often, you don’t have the data to prove it and you need it, for example, to communicate with your colleagues from another country. There is a huge difference between the market in Brazil versus Mexico, or Kazakhstan versus Canada. The misconception would be, I would say, that you constantly need to review new things.

Regarding the actual analytics, what kind of data or media not currently used can be interesting in the future?

I see challenges and opportunities coming around Web3. We see that brands and companies are already trying different marketing strategies for the Metaverse, but we don’t know exactly what types of content (data) we will use, if we will be able to measure it and how. There are many question marks in terms of the strategic developments of the Internet.

You are a board member of AMEC – International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication. What is the most important thing AMEC brings to its members?

I’ve been an AMEC-member for several years and I’m passionate about it. AMEC is the biggest international association for measurement and evaluation companies like mine and bigger corporations. They are all about moving forward through innovation to establish best practices as well as thinking outside the box. They look back at old methods to explain why they are now outdated. Lots of educational resources are freely accessible and they help not only communication professionals, but also students in universities in every part of the world to understand this sector that is in fact quite a niche. I think this form of education is extremely important.

Within AMEC we have specialized groups such as the College & Education Group that I’m part of. We just released a foundation course for measurement and evaluation in communications. We’re producing all our courses and tutorials from scratch. We’re really trying to help the industry become more advanced by creating these resources, by helping people understand.

How would you like to see AMEC evolve in the future?

I would like to see them drive innovation in the industry even further. I think that we are obliged to create new analyses, approaches, and methodologies to answer the latest requirements. AMEC offers all sorts of impactful events throughout the year. For example, there is the annual summit where not only members, but also other external companies can share knowledge, practices, and challenges. AMEC is a great platform for that.

What is the thing that makes you work hard to grow DeLange Analytics to the next level?

When I started, around 2010, we were innovators in terms of establishing and creating social media analyses. Clients didn’t know yet that social media was important. They didn’t know how to use it, measure it and what the effect of that could be. It turned us into consultants. Every one or two years a similar strong development happens—now it is blockchain, NFTs and so on—that people must adapt to as soon as possible to lead their clients, because they don’t know how to react. This makes you a very trusted partner which is incredibly appreciative. It gives me the satisfaction that I’ve done a good job, because I’ve helped somebody do his work better.

By Anna Roos van Wijngaarden

“We do something important, because even in times of war our customers stay with us”

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Oksana Kononova

Interview with Oksana Kononova, co-founder and CEO of Looqme, a media intelligence company in Ukraine.

Hi Oksana, what is your background and what is included in your current role at Looqme?

My background is in communications and analytics. I’ve been working in this area for us for about 16 years. I’m leading teams and projects. At Looqme, most of my tasks are about strategic management and leadership. I need to decide what we’re going to do next, how to find our partners et cetera.

Of course, things are different now with the war. During the last four to five months, it has been a lot of small tasks like talking to all our employees daily to check in how they are and how they are controlling the finances. I never had to do these things before, and I hope very much that it will be over soon.

What distinguishes Looqme from other media intelligence companies?

In general, we show our consumers how to merge social media and mainstream media. We focus on showing the impact of these types of communication. This way we try to grow our customers’ results. We use traditional ways, like reports and different indicators that a lot of companies have, but we also have a great data science team that deals with huge amounts of mentions to develop new things. They are able to find insights that are not visible with the manual approach.

Can you describe how the recent Russian invasion affected the company’s operations?

It’s very stressful: for the country, the people, for me personally and my team. The first months were very scary. I didn’t know if we would survive or not. There was the real threat of Russian occupations in the big cities, so people started to move quickly without knowing where they were going. They were just moving from place to place, and nobody knew when it was going to stop. I had to figure out how to ground all these people somewhere and ensure online internet access, so we could still work together. The same with our customers; for a while, I actually didn’t know how many customers we still had, because we couldn’t contact anyone. Now we do know, and the new questions evolve around what is going on and how to move on.

I think that we more or less reflect the whole economy right now. We had to cut the team with around 10% which was very difficult, but it had to be done to survive. We lost 30% percent of revenue compared to February, and I think that is a great result. Other companies have lost much more. And we have new customers as well. Our major clients are from Ukraine, but we now face a lot of requests outside of Ukraine, globally. This is great. It means that we all are trying to find new ways to do business, make money and stay here.

All people working in media monitoring and analytics know that their product is not a life-or-death question. And usually when it comes to cutting costs, marketing, PR, and communications are the first to go. It was the same during covid times. For me these times prove that we do something important, because even in times of war – when it is difficult to find money to pay for your company’s needs, our customers try not to cancel all contracts and stay with us.

Congratulations, that is amazing. And concerning your consumers, how have you seen their needs shift because of the invasion?

Many people think it is about anti-crisis campaigns, but I don’t see them much. I do see more requests for analytical support for strategic communications. Companies and government ask how specific topics and brands are presented in Ukraine, Europe or globally. The situation changes constantly – basically every hour, and we see that Governmental offices try to cope with this and try to understand how to communicate their messages. They ask us for research to grasp what the difference is between before the war and now, because all strategies ought to be changed.

How have your clients changed their communication towards their customers since the invasion started?

Social media is now extremely popular because we didn’t have much content from traditional mainstream media for a few months. It was obviously all about the war and TV channels were all broadcasting the same content. So, except for social, there were not so many channels companies could communicate through.

There is also the fact that you can’t communicate something funny now because these are not the times to entertain people. Companies must balance between what they have to say to sell their products and keeping it polite, without hurting anyone.

What has surprised you the most in Ukrainians reaction to the invasion?

The courage and bravery of ordinary people. I’m proud of my team members that try to support each other and their relatives and friends through the different communities and people. It is people that gave shelter to people, like I have never seen before. It is something that really amazes me and motivates me to keep going.

What are some of the greatest challenges you experienced with Looqme before, and what challenge of the future will bring the company to the next level?

One of the biggest challenges we had within the company in the very beginning was merging two companies together. I have a degree in management, so I read about the difficulties around different corporate cultures, but only when I finally faced it my own, I understood how important it is to have shared values and translate them into real actions. If you do the same business with a different approach, it is difficult to create a great new team. Also, we made a change in business model from traditional media agency to B2B. We had to create a new design from scratch, develop the product itself from the IT point of view, create a data science team and another type of customer support. Each step of the work has a big story behind it and now, we have really good team.

The future challenges are more about how to choose the things that you should and should not do with your IT and data science team. For example, around 10 years ago people started to talk about integrated marketing and now I think it’s coming back. And we are working on the kind of analytical communications support that can translate numbers into actionable insights – to find something more than just a quantity. But bottom line is that it is difficult to plan anything at the moment.

Will the invasion have any long-lasting affect in media intelligence for the coming years?

No, I don’t think so. Because we don’t see anything new in communications because of this war. We do see a lot of propaganda from Russia and Ukraine that is forced into the European and American media landscape and how China and other countries react. It is certainly interesting to see how that develops but it is not something absolutely new.

What are the challenges ahead related to media intelligence?

Firstly, I believe that media intelligence needs to move faster to keep up with artificial intelligence and machine learning. I think that we suffer a lot from conservative ways of thinking because public relations is not so used to Big Data as marketing. They often expect data to be perfectly clear and precise, which makes us slower because we have to spend time and effort to clean everything up. We need a new approach to data and how to use it so we can move faster and develop modules, because I do believe – as this war proved again – that media is important.

Secondly, that reputation is important, also as a small business. Reputation is built through mainstream media and your actions, and we have to find new ways to communicate it. It is the only thing that now helps Ukrainian businesses to move on. Reputation makes people forgive your mistakes and it keeps you alive when you don’t have any other tools to promote yourself with.

By Anna Roos van Wijngaarden