Tan Sukhera Podcast Transcript
Tan Sukhera joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Tan Sukhera. Tan Sukhera is the CEO and Founder of Piar, a media intelligence company based in New York. His experience working in the world’s leading media intelligence companies, serving clients of all shapes and sizes from startups and NGOs to Fortune 500 puts him at the forefront of global best practices, especially as it pertains to measurement and evaluation of communications.
At Piar, TAN unlocks valuable insights for marketing, social, public relations, and communication teams. The team solves the problem that even the world’s biggest brands are guilty of, reporting for reporting’s sake. In today’s world, everyone has dashboards, data, and reports, but the shocking truth is that none of it really means anything.
What matters is being able to answer the hard questions. So what? Why does it matter? What’s the impact of your efforts on the organization? What about your impact on society, on politics, the economy? That’s how communication leaders can move from having information and observations to actionable insights, insights that make decisions, making easier and aligned to your strategy.
Well, good afternoon, Tan. Welcome to the show!
Tan Sukhera: Hey, thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. This is awesome. I appreciate you making the time and we’re doing kind of a late one tonight. Normally I’m in Australia or Singapore or Hong Kong doing these, but this is so fun. I love it. Tan. And we’re going to jump right into the questions here, though.
Okay. So, 1st question I’ve got for you. Could you share the journey that led you to found Piar and how your extensive experience with the world’s leading media intelligence companies influence your vision for Piar?
Tan Sukhera: Sure, Brian, that’s a great question. So basically, in a nutshell for me, I have a background in the startup marketing agency space at home in Canada.
And then I ended up moving out to the Middle East and Qatar running a startup marketing agency. And I, I was fortunate that I was able to kind of live abroad for around eight years or so of my life. And Part of that journey led me to South Africa, actually after, after Middle East, and what happened was it was a once in a lifetime opportunity that happened where I was actually able to become a news anchor on television in South Africa, and that was a really, you know, really informative transformative time for me.
I learned so much about, like The news and broadcast media and journalism you know, South African politics but really like things like dealing with media contacts and bulletins, rundowns, things like that. And so, then while I was there, I ended up stumbling upon media monitoring. Now, for me, that was a very, kind of a lucky thing for me, because I loved it. My entire background with the marketing agency stuff, and then the news sort of all came together with media monitoring. And I was again, really lucky to be working with the leaders’ head and shoulders above the rest in, in African media intelligence.
And I really sort of like, went right up to the top of their ranks pretty quickly working with like, all the biggest brands in Africa. Yeah. From telecommunications to banking, automotive, like you name it really any, any major sector. And so, when it was time for me to come back home to North America, I felt like that was my calling to this day.
I still think that that was my calling, you know? So, then what I did right away is I joined the ranks of decision, for example. And then after that, I ended up joining even an independent heading out there heading up their insights department. And then I joined the ranks of meltwater and a lot of success, like in Chicago and got transferred back over to Canada.
I did like a full 360, just sort of chasing the heights there of media intelligence. And now around 7 months ago I ended up starting off my own. Your communications measurement consultancy, that’s Piar and really, we’re just tackling an elephant in the room. It’s the fact that everybody’s got data and reporting these days. Nobody knows what to do with it.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I love the story. We talk about everybody’s story that comes on as a guest and 10. That’s just awesome. I love. How and things happen happenstance sometimes, right? And you fall into this, like, like, you did as an anchor there in South Africa. That’s I just love the story and things happen because of that.
And it’s, it’s our passion and our curiosity that drives us to move and we kind of fall on these little, little opportunities that I like to call and that’s just amazing. So, I appreciate the share. And Tan, you’ve mentioned that despite the abundance of dashboards, data reports available today, much of it fails to provide meaningful insights.
How does PR help clients move beyond reporting for reporting’s sake to actionable intelligence?
Tan Sukhera: So, it turns out that dashboards have low efficacy, it might come as a surprise to a lot of the listeners here who are in public relations and communications or using media monitoring tools or software. Now, don’t get me wrong.
It’s, it’s, it’s built into the way, because in the end of the day, it’s how information is being distributed, right? Like, I remember back in the day when. Media monitoring would send you your clips. So, the mentions of your brand in the media on, like, a USB stick or on a CD. And now, because of technology, the cheapest way to do it is distribution via software.
And so, what’s happened now is these software giants, these tech giants run out of, like, San Francisco and like, Silicon Valley, Chicago, a place like that are sort of the big. Behemoths in the space, right? Turns out, though, that when they just ship out on a dashboard or in software, like all your media hits and things like that, turns out there’s a lot of mis clips inside of that or false positives.
Or not that much information when you interrogate it closely, and if it has information, often there’s no insights. So, it does actually that data. It’s like a big data, right? There’s like this quote by Eric Schmidt at Google. It says, like, every day we make, we create as much information as we did from 2007 or 2008.
From the dawn of civilization until 2007, something like that. It’s like huge data that we’re dealing with right now. Think about how many times brands are mentioned on social media or traditional media. So, data requires interpretation. It requires an analyst layer to answer questions and to guarantee efficacy of the data in that process.
So, we basically need to sift through information to get to an insight and the sieve, like the strainer is asking the question. So what?
Brian Thomas: Well, there’s just so much data and you highlighted that about the data. And I gosh, now I can’t even keep up, but they say, like. I don’t know how many petabytes are, are built per day, but people again, I love how you as I call it air quotes “reporting for reporting sake”.
And I know this being in technology is people just put up these dashboards to say, Hey, I’ve accomplished something. We’re tracking something that’s meaningless. Right? And I just really appreciate that you, okay. Got the laser on this and you want to highlight the things that are broken. So, I appreciate the share tan and tan switching gears to the next question.
The role of media intelligence is understanding public sentiment and market trends is critical. How does PR leverage technologies like machine learning and natural language processing to analyze and interpret this data?
Tan Sukhera: I love this question. That’s a great question. Brian. I think we can, we can nerd out on data analytics here for the listeners.
So basically, in a nutshell, what we do is we cluster, we wait and we interrogate the data. So, we do something called PR coding. It’s not to be confused with, like, computer coding. It’s like going through mentions of, of that you’re getting on your brand, your competitors, spokespeople, products and services, that sort of a thing and kind of looking at it.
Almost like in an Excel document and looking at the metadata that’s associated with that clip and then going back to the source of it and starting to build out more and more columns of information. In other words, enriching that data. So, using the latest sort of machine learning techniques NLP techniques and some proprietary technology that we developed in our nascency huge thanks to our CTO Ihab Suleiman.
But we were able to distill information really down to these like meaningful nuggets of insights. It’s also worth noting though here that it’s global best practice, right? So, it’s basically what a billion dollar company does, but I’m doing it with a team of like 5 to 10 people. And and lastly, 1 thing that I would probably know here is it’s all aligned to standards that are outlined by a Mac a Mac is the International Association for the measurement and evaluation of communication.
So, we’re, we’re all a Mecca aligned. They’re really the North star of the entire kind of industry globally in, in, in media measurement and measurement of communication. We’re, you know, that’s really the Holy grail for us. And so we’re, we take it very seriously to make sure that we’re aligned to best practices and thought leadership. That’s coming out of a Mac.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate that. I make is in your business is really your North star and you’ve got to get that right. But nowadays, with as much data as we talked about earlier, Yeah. There are just no way humans can even come close to a, a, a thousandth of a fraction of a percent right to, to sort through all this data and machine learning, obviously, and some of the latest AI technologies that have come out have made such strides to keep up with the amount of data that we have to sit through.
So, thank you for sharing and the last question of the evening. Would you give to organizations that are still hesitant to integrate media intelligence into their strategic planning and how can they start to leverage these insights for competitive advantage?
Tan Sukhera: So, firstly, media intelligence is usually meant for companies that are not really worried.
About their survival, but rather are sort of, they care about reputation, things like reputation, competition, thought leadership that sort of a thing. And so, what I would say here is that social listening and media monitoring is actually really critical. If you want to be competitive and you’re in that situation, you’ve really got to zoom out and you’re going to set the right goals and objectives up front the right smart.
Smart goals and objectives and you’re planning and you’re planning, you sort of have to reverse engineer, like, what does success look like and bake that into the strategy. And then from there, I would advise. To focus on things like topics, themes and strategic messages. To earn media coverage around that set you apart from your competition so that that’s sort of in a nutshell I don’t know.
There’s a lot of steps there, but that’s how small brands or Can that’s how small brands basically compete with behemoth brands like giant brands It’s picking battles in a clever way essentially and you can only do that by first listening, in really in the industry we have this habit of like You know, some of my mentors, they call it S.O. S. sending out stuff, you know, but communications, it’s two-way. And we, we really need to listen more.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And I’ve used that throughout my career. Actually, by the way, is that communications are a two-way street. That’s so important. No matter what industry or what your role is, I appreciate that, but also the fact that now with all these tools that have come out, the little guy can play with the behemoths as far as in this media space.
Well, so I appreciate the insights tan and tan. It was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Tan Sukhera: Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Tan Sukhera Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
