Conversations with corporate researchers
Brad Dancer
EVP, Insights, Analytics & Data Strategy, National Geographic Partners
You’ve been with National Geographic for almost 20 years. What has been the most rewarding aspect of your job?
The most rewarding aspect is being able to stay with a company through intense change. The media landscape has changed drastically since I began in early 2000. I still had a VCR when I started with National Geographic. Being able to stay with National Geographic has allowed me to help build a strategy, manage through change and use my knowledge of the business and the brand to help it navigate through all of the change.
Being grounded in the company, building relationships across all parts of the business and having a deep understanding of what makes us successful has been vital to helping National Geographic over the years. While I’ve been here for nearly 20 years, I felt like I’ve worked for five different companies in that same time frame – with more to come as the pace of change is only accelerating. It’s so rewarding to be a part of a brand you love, working in a field that you love while managing through the most change the media landscape has ever seen. I couldn’t have asked for anything more challenging or more rewarding.
Do you have any advice for someone taking on a management role within an insights team for the first time?
Know your business. The amount of people I speak to that don’t know the business they are supposed to be providing insights to is rather astounding. You have to understand the business as a consumer would see it – and as a consumer interacts with it – so that you as an insights leader are able to represent your consumers internally. Your team and others at your company expect you to have strong business acumen about your industry, your company, your competitors – so be a passionate student and infuse that passion with your team. Positive, enthusiastic passion is contagious and creates an atmosphere of intellectual curiosity that good insight professionals crave.
When managing a team for the first time, lean on their expertise, knowledge and experience. You don’t know everything, so listen carefully. We are, in many ways, professional listeners, yet we often forget that when dealing with our teams.
What new methodology do you see yourself leveraging in the next year?
One we are getting more involved with now is understanding deeper natural language processing. National Geographic has a large social footprint across the globe and while there are a number of great syndicated services out there, many that we use, they aren’t great at really digging into true insights from our social footprint. As we pull in more and more comments into our own data lake across our social platforms, we can better evaluate and try out new methods of NLP. We’re focused on this for the next few months at least as we look to enhance other survey, qual, ethnographic and research initiatives with commentary direct on our content. While it can’t replace everything else, there’s a lot to learn and a lot that can help feed other systems – personalization, as an example – that we haven’t unlocked yet.
We are going into this with specific questions as we look for correlations with behavior with what our fans are commenting on in our social platforms and what content they are interacting with across our business. We are looking at ways to better understand complex characteristics of word use – the semantics and syntax of words and the context with which they are used have incredible impact on our brand. Too often, these factors are glossed over or summarized to the point of not being useful.