The junior executive who swapped endless cut and paste for valuable analysis and insight.

When Fraser graduated, he had a solid degree and a collection of new skills, which he was excited to put to good use. After a succession of fruitless interviews, he finally got himself into a role in a mid-sized public affairs agency.

He was immediately put to work alongside several other graduates, plugging keywords into Google to hunt out media coverage – “insight”, they called it. He copied whatever he found into a word document and presented the results to his line manager, to be passed along to the client. Within a few days of this dredging drudgery, he knew this was not the exciting future he had expected. So, when his boss asked if anyone wanted to trial a new bit of software, he quickly volunteered.

With a couple of hours’ initial training under his belt, Fraser worked closely with one of our analysts to determine the best key words to deliver the best results. While colleagues joked about dodging the bullet of wrestling with new software, Fraser spent his days calling the analyst with questions, learning the system’s capabilities and refining the results.

After four weeks, it was reporting time. Rather than explain how the software worked or the steps he’d taken, Fraser presented his manager with a detailed breakdown of a client’s media status, including stats, graphs, analysis and recommendations. A world away from a word document of ‘cut-and-paste’ coverage.

The agency signed up and their client started paying for these reports – helping to turn media monitoring from a necessary overhead into an income stream. Three years on, Fraser splits his time between generating reports for key clients and training others to do the same. And it’s not just his role that’s changed: more than half of the company’s analysts and account managers have swapped labour-intensive manual monitoring for more valuable and more engaging market intelligence. Win, win.