Interview with Vilūnė Kairienė, Head of Monitoring and Analysis at Mediaskopas, a media monitoring company in the Baltics.
Hi Vilūnė, what is your background and what is included in your current role at Mediaskopas?
Interestingly, Mediaskopas is my first ever job. Back in 2007, I started to look for some additional work while I was studying Philology (I was a 19 year old student at the time) and found that Mediaskopas was looking for a media intelligence specialist: the role sounded really interesting to me! I passed the tests and there I was, at the beginning of my journey into the media intelligence ocean, which has lasted almost 15 years up to now.
Over time, I’ve been promoted through different roles and now I’m here as Head of Analytics and Data Solutions. It’s a position that is perfect for me, I really cannot imagine a better fit.
My current position includes not only managing a team of data analytics experts, but also ensuring that our managers and team members are working toward a common goal. The most important part of my job is to convert insights into strategic opportunities for our company - I work closely with leaders across departments to support and implement high-quality, data-driven decisions.
What differentiates Mediaskopas from other media intelligence companies?
I think that the Mediaskopas’s primary strength is its people. The company is ready for its clients 24/7, and this is vital because crises never arrive at convenient moments, especially in the PR field. The second thing that makes Mediaskopas a leading media intelligence services choice is our AI-powered system allows us to create different products for each client that are tailored to every need and which makes each and every communication process easier.
Mediaskopas is a part of the Baltic Media Monitoring Group (BMMG), which operates in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. What are the greatest challenges to offer comprehensive products and services throughout the different countries?
The Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) are not big countries, but they are really different. Different markets and varying customers' needs mean that we always need to be a few steps ahead of our competitors. But this requirement makes us stronger. In most cases, we have the tools and products customers need available before they even ask for them.
Have you recently, or are you about to release any new technology-based solutions that will add to or improve services you offer your clients?
Working on new technologies is a never ending process in BMMG companies. While I can’t give any specific details, I can say that up to five new solutions are being developed as we speak and that automated intelligence and machine learning are everyday parts of what we do.
All customers come with different levels of knowledge. What challenges do you face when it comes to onboarding new customers for media intelligence?
As we are working in an environment that changes each and every day, our onboarding and all other customer service processes are based on providing exceptional and appropriate care and assistance. The biggest challenge, I would say, is to prove to every new client that we can indeed provide everything we say we can and that “everything is possible".
Is there any aspect of your platform that you believe has great potential but has not been fully embraced by your clients yet?
Our platform has allowed our customers to reach back into and use the full media archive for years. I think it's a real treasure, but it also requires time and effort to dig into. Of course, time is money, so it is usually only our analysts who are digging into the archive.
Privacy around the use of social data is an emerging challenge. How do you think that will affect the media intelligence industry?
We are covering all possible types of media at the moment: print, online, news wires, radio, TV and social.
The biggest challenge these days is indeed social media and its privacy issues. We do see a growing interest in it, but the social media pool is so big that even our customers, who work with social media on a daily basis, are unsure where to start and what the metrics are that they should actually monitor. They ask themselves questions like whether covering Facebook alone is enough, or if they should also be working with TikTok.
The real winners will be the companies that not only cope with massive data pools but can also measure the real impact of each and every post, video, and link.
How do you think the media intelligence industry will change over the next 5 years, and what are the greatest challenges ahead?
As media is changing really fast - the impact of print is falling drastically while online is increasing - media intelligence companies will need to change as well. I see a big change from where the industry is today compared to 15, 5 or even 2 years ago.
More recently, COVID-19 has had a major impact. Now it seems that everyone and everything is online, so media intelligence companies must be the first ones to gather all that information, digest it and present conclusions in real time. The last quarter is history to learn from, but not to be working with.
By Peter Appleby
