Some say that having access to data is like shining a light on the dark corners of a business: The cockroaches scurry and the flowers bloom. In other words, data lets the C-suite know which investments are working and which are not.

In the marketing and public relations realms, data has given companies the ability to craft paid advertising that works for different customer sets, but the crucial “word-of-mouth” factor has remained largely untouched.

Cision CEO Kevin Akeroyd said that big data is transforming tech, sales, service, commerce — and advertising, or at least the advertising that a company pays for. But, he told John Furrier (@furrier) host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, “This mission-critical part called ‘communications earned media’ has not been through [the transformation].”

Akeroyd gave the example of a Fortune 500 beauty products company Cision is currently working with.

In their B2C marketing, he said, “They will harness data. They will develop 30 different audiences, right?'” This might result in 30 different banner ads and other types of targeting, he explained. “You will see a completely different website than I will based on data-driven personalizations.”

The situation in earned media is starkly different,  Akeroyd explained. “What do they do in communications? One press release and one infographic goes to all 12,000 communication outlets. No data, no versioning, no nothing.”

The influence economy

“Now with our communication cloud, just like with the other marketing clouds, I can actually do data driven intelligent messaging and content delivery to the influencers that get at the discrete audiences,” he said.

The aforementioned company might garner a mention from a New York Times columnist — terrific, but does the company’s tracking end there? Should it? Akeroyd said that Cision’s “influencer graph” will try to close the “black hole” between the influencers and the people who view their content.

This will give the business unprecedented insight into how their earned media performs for them so they know which outlets matter and which don’t, he said.

Watch Part 1 and Part 2 of the full video interviews below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE