Data helps in understanding what matters most: Kevin from Vyond

From being an actor in Hollywood in LA to today working as a Marketing Communications Manager in Vyond, Kevin’s career journey was pretty unusual. 

Transcript (auto-generated)

0:43So I got into marketing communications by a pretty unusual path. I started working in  Hollywood in LA in the entertainment industry– working as an actor in commercials and tv– a while ago. And then I followed my curiosity on camera to get into creative services which brought me into copyrighting and from there marketing communications and eventually I continue to follow my curiosity into pr and comms.

Understanding data

01: 11: For the first five years or so of my career in marketing communications, I was really cut from data either for small organizations that didn’t have that kind of data capability or I was working as a freelancer where that data was made invisible to me. And it wasn’t until I started getting into tech companies where I was able to really harness the power of communications and demonstrate its business impact.

Integrating data into stories

1:42: My favorite way to use data is– for horizon scanning in particular. I like to turn to data not only for reporting and demonstrating impact to key stakeholders, but more than anything, I like to use data to guide our how our brand will contribute to the conversation. Figure out what topics matter most of our audience and use it to get closer to our customers to deepen our customer empathy.

Solving challenges with data

2.08: For a long time at my current organization, we sort of had, we had a big question to solve, which was how do we reach this particular audience in HR. And, very often our intuition led us to talking more about mental health issues which are important but we had a hard time understanding how that fit into our product and our brand and what we could speak to. It wasn’t really until we gave ourselves access to a media monitoring platform that we were able to deeply understand what conversations we could actually contribute to in the HR space.

My go-to metrics

2.49: Share voice is always valuable, although I’m also always tweaking who are competitor set is to understand share a voice. And, then you know, this is a silly one but a basic one but I love demonstrating estimated reach for a piece. So when we finally land some coverage or a great highlight, I love being able to shop from the raptors to the rest of the organization and just how many eyes are on it.

Tools for data insights

3:19 So today we’re just sort of starting on this journey but we’re using signal AI, but we’re kind of looking at all kinds of platforms beyond a media pitching platform to sort of harness all this data. 

The way to future

3. 36: I think it will rely on data to really get a full and accurate view of the media landscape. Otherwise, we’ll just be working off with assumptions.

My 2Cents

3:52My hope is that communications disciplines will continue to get more human, to get more empowered. And I hope that people starting out, their careers have to spend less time than their predecessors on things like crisis management and risk control. We can get more into storytelling.