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

Interview with Gábor Bundschuh, Head of Development & Innovation at D-TAG Analytics Inc, a media intelligence company in the US.

Hi Gábor, what is your background and what is included in your current role at D-TAG Analytics?

I have been working with different Information retrieval related solutions for more than 30 years and I have relatively strong experience in AI/ML/NLP tools, data and information management.

D-TAG’s main goal is to support the decision making challenges of companies as effectively as possible. We have a self-developed solution for analysing any type of unstructured, textual contents, especially social media posts and/or documents.

In what ways does D-TAG Analytics differ from other companies?

At D-TAG we are trying to identify the special demands of our potential customers in industries we consider very important, such as pharma, insurance, and banking. Our solution covers both legacy type data sources and social media; it is a hybrid solution for heterogeneous data.

With the help of a well-configured and sophisticated data pipeline and fine-tuned NLP background processes, we enrich the data to be analysed effectively, and turn them into information.

The final goal is to have information instead of bits and bytes.

What are your greatest challenges ahead at D-TAG Analytics, when it comes to serving your customers and developing your offering?

The fine tuning of data (effective data enrichment and metadata handling) is a particular challenge because the quality of data is the most important prerequisite of the analytics. The clarity of the collected data and the quality of the data (metadata) enrichment process are the key points of our approach. Based on data with good enough metadata backgrounds, we can use efficient taxonomies, topic management, entity extractions, and other means in order to be able to discover a large amount of information and — very importantly — to give further ideas to the customers about what they are searching for or what they can be interested in. With the help of this information, we cannot only answer predefined questions, but we can also use the results to formulate new questions and get answers to them very quickly and efficiently.

All customers come with a different level of knowledge. What is important when taking on a new customer?

The starting point in a project is standing on the same page with our customer. At the same time, we want to give them as much experience and knowledge we have as possible, and explain how a typical information retrieval or analytics solution works, what the information is trying to show, and how they can understand it. I think that beyond the predefined business requirements, it is also important to give new ideas based on some “hidden information” we were able to discover.

When it comes to the actual data behind the media intelligence you do, what kind of data or media not currently used can be interesting in the future?

Most solutions on the market are able to handle any kind of data format coming from any kind of repositories, on premise or cloud based. On the one hand, handling the rich media content (picture, voice, video) effectively is still a challenge, especially in the case of special languages. We are continuously trying to find ideas and tricks in order to improve the quality of the speech to text processes. On the other hand, it is very important to improve the quality of AI/NLP/ML related processes, because as I have already mentioned this can be the token of the excellent results. The level of a successful automation will depend on the granularity and complexity of business demands.

Can the entire process of media intelligence be automated in the future?

I think that the short answer is yes, but the detailed, longer one is no. The basic elements and the processes around important milestones of the information management pipeline can be almost fully automated, the level of the automatisation will increase, but the detailed nuances will still play important roles, and will use ML capabilities. But they require manual corrections, improvements and considerations as well.

How do you think the media intelligence industry will change in the next 5-10 years, and what are the greatest challenges and excitements ahead?

The quality of the analytics will increase, the range and type of customers and end users will expand, and at the same time, the tasks will be more varied.

Changing customer needs pose an increasing challenge to us which won’t be easy to handle from professional nor from other points of view, although technology will also continue to evolve in the meantime as well.

Understanding the relation between the existing data contents and the customer’s business needs will remain one of the most important tokens of a successful project. Technology will help to understand this relationship more deeply.

By Peter Appleby

Interview with Ivor Bihar, COO of Mediatoolkit, a media intelligence company in Croatia.

Hi Ivor, what is your background and what is included in your current role at Mediatoolkit?

I’ve been working on Mediatoolkit since the company’s beginnings in 2014. Currently, I’m Mediatoolkit’s Chief Operations Officer leading and growing the company’s teams including sales, product development, design, and marketing across the various stages of the company’s development. Since we began, Mediatoolkit has grown from two to over 50 people, with the goal to achieve 80% growth in employee numbers in 2022.

What differentiates Mediatoolkit from other media intelligence companies?

Since the beginning, we’ve been developing our proprietary online media monitoring technology that tracks more than 100 million online sources in any language across 250 locations in real time. This is the major differentiator.

It’s our goal to enable customers to make better business decisions based on relevant information from the media delivered by Mediatoolkit. Our whole organization focuses on helping PR and Media Monitoring professionals in any industry to gain value through using Mediatoolkit.

What are your greatest challenges ahead at Mediatoolkit when it comes to serving your customers and developing your offering?

Standing out in a crowded market is a challenge for every provider in our space. We’re laser-focused on delivering the best possible experience and continuing to expand the coverage of the ever-expanding number of sources that grows daily.

Educating our customers on what to do with the data we provide is always a challenge, but we want to make sure that clients receive the full value of Mediatoolkit.

Have you recently, or do you plan to, release any new technology-based solutions that will add to or improve the services you offer your clients?

We’re focused on market and user research to ensure that the features we deliver consistently are in line with user expectations, and that they solve real problems. Our focus is also on educating our customers and the market about PR topics: vanity metrics, connecting their PR effort with their company’s results, setting and measuring PR KPIs and the other usual suspects.

We’re also developing a new product that will combine media monitoring and machine learning to enable Disaster Warning System powered by artificial intelligence.

All customers come with different levels of knowledge. What are the most common misconceptions that your clients have regarding what media intelligence can give them?

Media intelligence capabilities are still not well-known throughout all industries, and we often get very different requests. Some companies look at media monitoring as a niche and a small part of their PR or marketing efforts, while others, in contrast, see it as the solution to all their problems.

So far, the most common misconception is that media intelligence is a magic bullet that you set up just one time. Many don’t realise that regular effort must be put into media intelligence if you are to get relevant results and adapt to changing circumstances and contexts of companies and the markets they operate in.

When it comes to the actual data behind the media intelligence you do, what kind of data or media not currently used can be interesting in the future?

We are in an industry that is always hungry for more sources of information, and we have to keep up with new platforms and ways people share content online. Organizations, however, are facing issues with large volumes of data they are unable to process and drive insights from.

If we drill down to a source level, one of the examples of underutilised sources is definitely Reddit. It’s still not recognised enough, and many customers don’t consider it. On the other hand, TikTok is becoming more and more important, but its impact remains to be seen when it comes to media monitoring.

Privacy around the use of social data is an emerging challenge. How do you think that will affect the media intelligence industry?

Just like social media platforms are working to protect users’ data privacy, we also need to ensure compliance with changes and educate our clients on the importance of respecting privacy. We take data privacy very seriously. It’s our responsibility, but also a challenge, to continue increasing our database of tracked sources without compromising an inch of anyone’s privacy. It is challenging to consider all the regulations, but it’s a necessity that cannot and will not be avoided.

If the future holds anonymised and aggregated content, building trust around the technology that provides insights on top of that data will become an even bigger challenge for the industry.

Is there a specific mouthwatering case that you know of where media intelligence has played a crucial role for a client?

Mouthwatering cases are where clients immediately see substantial business benefits and a quick return on their investment. The most common use cases that our customers use Mediatoolkit for are crisis management, campaign, brand monitoring, competition analysis, and sentiment tracking.

The most recent example that wowed us is a market research company that, prior to using Mediatoolkit, had to spend two months of their projects creating a hypothesis about the markets they are researching. After implementing Mediatoolkit, that process took only two days.

Cases like this are the ones that continue to push us to deliver relevant and timely information to help our clients make better business decisions.

How do you think the media intelligence industry will change in the next 5-10 years, and what are the greatest challenges ahead?

It’s not news that the amount of data available on the internet grows exponentially. Companies have been going digital for years now, with the recent pandemic pushing this trend further. With these two factors combined, the ability to track and monitor online media is becoming crucial to big brands and smaller businesses wanting to expand their business and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Additionally, the industry has focused solely on the coverage and getting more and more sources and data. The situation is shifting; we should all focus on interpreting the data and enabling customers to make data-driven decisions. The ones that will succeed in the future will develop technology that understands data as humans do while being able to analyse what is relevant and what can make a lasting impact on the business.

By Peter Appleby

Interview with Raina Lazarova, Co-founder and COO of Ruepoint, a global media intelligence company.

Hi Raina, what is your background and what is included in your role at Ruepoint?

I have spent the last 10 years in the media intelligence space, first at Precise Media Group (UK) followed by a stint as Global Services Director at Kantar Media’s Reputation Intelligence business in the UK where I oversaw international customers and key vendors.

Prior to joining Precise, I was involved in the Business Information and Knowledge Process Outsourcing sectors, working with global companies such as Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones Factiva, LexisNexis, EBSCO.

In 2017, I became one of the founding members and COO of Ruepoint, a global media intelligence business with offices in Ireland, the UK and Bulgaria.

What differentiates Ruepoint from other media intelligence companies?

Undoubtedly, our biggest asset and differentiator is our team. We are very fortunate to have surrounded ourselves with skilled, motivated and passionate people who continue to surprise us every day with their creativity and exceptional effort.

Ruepoint caters for the needs of those customers in the market who need a “white-glove”, fully managed media intelligence service, typically combining media content from a variety of geographies and languages, and therefore requiring a blend of high-touch, multilingual skills, strong domain expertise and capable technology. The services we deliver are typically used by PR and communications teams, the C-suite and other key business stakeholders.

Increasingly, Ruepoint is working on cross-functional requirements, integrating data and seeking to draw insights from a wide variety of data sets from paid, earned, social and owned media, through market research and consumer insights, point-of-sale, and other business data. Customer expectations are constantly rising, and in all fairness, we are deliberately driving this change, as it gives us the opportunity to differentiate ourselves as thought leaders and drivers of change, delivering true value to our customers.

What are your greatest challenges ahead at Ruepoint when it comes to serving your customers and developing your services?

Historically, one of the biggest challenges in our industry has been the commoditisation of the media monitoring market. It is the part of the business that is typically characterised by higher margins, which have been eroded in recent years due to pressure from SaaS providers, promising to deliver the same value at a fraction of the price.

Ruepoint’s response to this trend has been to focus on what we are best at – delivering a high-touch editorial and analysis service, leveraging domain expertise in key industries, coupled with a consultative approach to media measurement.

Do you plan to release any new solutions that will add to or improve the services you offer clients?

We constantly strive to improve the services we offer to customers by listening to what they tell us every day. Often, that involves very specific problems that require custom solutions. We bring in experts from across the organisations, from source management, through editors and analysts, to account managers to build a multi-faceted solution that answers those needs.

All customers come with different levels of knowledge. What are the most common misconceptions that your current and potential clients have regarding what media intelligence can give them?

We treat each customer with full respect, constantly trying to provide thought leadership and best practice to help PR and communications teams excel in their job and deliver demonstrable results to their organisations. We recognise businesses operate in wildly different competitive environments that largely define their communications objectives.

At the same time, I believe that demand is a function of supply and in markets where we see misconceptions about the value of media intelligence it is largely due to the services available to that market. To address a common misconception about media measurement specifically in our home market of Ireland, for example, we have invested heavily in educating the market about the value of integrated measurement in the last four years.

When it comes to the actual data behind the media intelligence you do, what kind of data or media not currently used can be interesting in the future?

As a sector, we need to constantly keep our finger on the pulse of any emerging media and data sources. I expect that private, subscription-based networks and formats such as Patreon and Substack will present the biggest challenge to the industry in the near future. Increasingly, content creators are looking for revenue generating models by publishing their work – podcasts, newsletters etc – to a very targeted audience prepared to pay for this content. How we as an industry go about monitoring these networks will be very interesting to see.

What in this industry has surprised you the most over the years?

It has been fascinating to watch the industry move from a largely “scissors and glue” operating model 10-15 years ago to a technology-driven sector using the latest cloud native infrastructure and AI technology. At the same time, customer requirements, very much helped by the efforts of industry thought leaders and AMEC, have evolved from number crunching to seeking to prove true business value. This has been an incredible journey to take part in for Ruepoint and me personally.

How do you think the media intelligence industry will change in the next 5-10 years, and what are the greatest challenges ahead?

If you had asked the same question 10 years ago, the biggest fear of the industry was the “inevitable” demise of print media with the rise of digital and social. That clearly didn’t happen, which only comes to prove how wrong we can be in our predictions.

I think AI will be increasingly used to aid the human analysis of big data sets, but without replacing the need for cognitive intervention.

A challenge the industry is already facing is the pressure to deliver revenue growth at healthy margins from managed monitoring and evaluation services. I understand why the SaaS model is attractive to shareholders, but I think the market for platform solutions is already highly saturated. Ruepoint is focused on leveraging a mix of high-skilled editorial resources and proprietary tech to deliver the best value-for-money services to customers where and when they matter.

By Peter Appleby