Aegon

Jonathan Henderson is the Head of Public Relations at Aegon UK, a provider of pension, investment and protection products. Aegon UK is part of the Aegon Group, one of the world’s 10 largest insurers. We spoke to Jonathan about his experiences working with Signal AI.

The challenge

Jonathan and his team needed a media monitoring solution that went beyond a traditional press clippings service and allowed them to track more without paying more. The ability to view, share, and measure the effectiveness of press coverage as soon as it was published was a key requirement. Broadening the team’s capability to track competitors and benchmark against them, as well as follow sector-specific topics and spot trends were equally important to Jonathan.

The team wanted to use their media monitoring service to stay up-to-date on insurance-related news and use that intelligence to inform their PR plans. But without paying a premium to do so.

“We wanted a service that gave us unlimited access to media data so we could measure the effectiveness of our PR activities and benchmark against competitors.”

The solution

The PR team at Aegon had a trial of Signal AI and liked what they saw. They were especially impressed with the ability to track news as it was breaking and create additional searches and email alerts to monitor spokespeople, competitors, and industry topics at no extra cost.

Jonathan sought feedback from a few of his contacts within the industry who were already Signal clients before he went ahead and signed up. The training and onboarding provided by Signal AI’s Customer Success team was swift and straightforward. The team has found the platform easy-to-use and intuitive making the creation and maintenance of searches and alerts fast and efficient.

“With Signal AI’s uncapped searches we can gather more media insight and market intelligence without paying more. We now track our spokespeople, perform competitor analysis, and monitor industry topics.”

The results

By extending the scope of the news Aegon monitors, they have been able to identify common themes and emerging trends to inform their content production. They’ve spotted opportunities early and capitalized on the insights they’ve gathered using Signal to create content that they know is of interest to their target audiences.

Jonathan and his team use Signal AI to regularly analyze headlines and news stories to make sure their campaigns are highly relevant and topical. Email alerts keep them in the know and up-to-date with everything that’s going on in the industry. Aegon has full control over their news feeds, but any questions and queries they do have are resolved quickly via the platform chat function or through their client success representative.

“Signal gives us the flexibility to monitor whoever and whatever we want in the media without increasing our costs. The insights we’ve gathered are crucial for tailoring our messages, informing our campaigns and seizing opportunities we would have previously missed.” 

Download the Aegon case study