How data-driven storytelling can take you around the world
A measurement pro shares the story of his campaign for the Maldives’ tourism sector, a project made possible by emotive storytelling backed by data analysis.
“We should go to the Maldives together.”
That is not a sentence one would expect to hear a few minutes into a conversation with a previously unknown colleague at a conference. Yet that is what happened to me in late 2015 at a gathering of LexisNexis Business Insight Solutions (BIS) executives.
The previously unknown colleague was a lawyer from Malaysia, Gaythri Raman (now managing director of LexisNexis Southeast Asia), who was working with the Maldivian government on a rule of law project at the time. She was interested in my line of business—I was heading up BIS global media intelligence—because she saw business opportunities with the tourism ministry. A new minister had recently been appointed, work on a new strategic destination marketing plan was underway, and insights from systematic analysis of media might just be the missing ingredient to bring their plans to life.
It was one of those “great idea, that’s never going to happen” moments. At least that’s what I thought at the time. Less than six months later, we were presenting to the minister and his team in a thankfully air-conditioned office in Male, the very densely populated and usually stiflingly hot and humid capital of the Maldives.
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