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Exec Connect Live video highlights: Data for progress, Comms driving ESG, and a new Reputation Ranking
11.28.22 / 4 min readSignal AI Exec Connect Live brought together CMOs, CCOs, and other PR & Comms leaders to hear from pioneering thinkers and practitioners at the forefront of turning data and technology into tools that inform corporate strategy and communications.
With speakers from elite agencies and Fortune 500 companies, attendees heard insights on:
- The myths about tech and understanding what’s possible for Communicators
- What the next five years holds for ESG and technology
- The Reputation data revolution and the rise of External Intelligence
- How data can be harnessed to deepen corporate reputation impact
Watch all the sessions in full.
The Myths We Tell Ourselves About Tech
Dex Hunter-Torricke, VP of Global Communications & Public Engagement for Meta Oversight Board and a former personal speech writer for Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, delivered his keynote speech discussing the myths we tell ourselves around technology and their impact both on society and company performance.
Speaking on progress at the expense of stability, an inventor’s attempt to wirelessly beam electricity to homes in New York, and the importance of authentically telling your story, this session was full of fascinating examples of how communicators need to face up to the myths that exist within their ecosystem and tell their story in full.
“The more attention we pay to coming up with very intricate, highly calibrated and clearly incompatible messaging for different audiences, the more silly we look. Every audience and every issue is connected, so it means the story has to be told in its totality and authentic to who you are.”
ESG, Technology and Business Leadership – What is Coming in the Next 5 Years?
Our second session saw industry heavyweight Jen Prosek, Founder of Prosek Partners, host a fireside chat with Blackstone’s Global Head of Corporate Affairs, Christine Anderson, to discuss ESG and technology. Drawing on their own personal experiences of the rising importance of environmental and social issues, they spoke about how businesses are prioritising these not just for reputation but for performance, and harnessing data to do so.
Blackstone’s Anderson highlighted the reputational impact of business decisions and investments, and how data has helped her to navigate the complex and tricky issues around ESG.
“I’m obsessed with data. It’s everything in ESG performance. But data isn’t easy though, there’s all sorts of intricacies to it though particularly around what you’re measuring.”
What’s driving Corporate Reputation in 2022?
Reputation is a company’s best asset but it is notoriously hard to measure and understand. In this session, Signal AI executives Dan Gaynor and Shann Biglione launched a new global reputation ranking, the Signal AI 500. This brand new ranking of 500 of the world’s largest organizations uses data from the Signal AI external intelligence graph to craft actionable reputation insights – quantifying the aggregate impact of all company actions and communications and delivering the AI-powered reputation benchmark.
Gaynor and Biglione shared a number of insights with attendees like when companies are most likely to hype up ESG, what pillar contributes the most to reputation: Innovation, Performance or Purpose; what topics will be great differentiators in 2023 and more.
Using Data to deepen Reputational Impact
In our final session, our panel of comms leaders discussed how they utilize new data and intuitive metrics to better demonstrate the value of their work and impact on business objectives.
Dan Simon, Chairman and Co-Founder of Vested, discussed how the role of communicators has become more central over the last few years, driven by multiple factors including talent, social issues and brands having fragmented identities.
Benjamin Thiele-Long, Director of Executive and Business Communications at Petco, gave some insight on how his team make use of data in a way that wasn’t previously possible, leading them to make the right choices and provide tangible results.
Deidre Latour, former Chief Communications Officer at GE and former President at Edelman, said how data has helped comms leaders prove their impact to numbers driven executives internally and protect the internal stature of communications.
David Benigson, CEO at Signal AI, discussed his fundamental belief that the A in AI should stand for augmented, not artificial, as the technology is there to help us do better work and make more informed decisions, not to be the only thing communicators rely on.
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