Interview: Porter Novelli’s Kaylea Bowers on Staying Grounded in the Nitty-Gritty and Using Data to Inform Brand Purpose

Staying grounded in data

I start by asking what Kaylea does day-to-day, and hear about how she mixes her time between working with her team on their projects, putting out fires, and talking clients through insights and recommendations. The most unexpected thing she told me was how much time she spends deep in the data.

“I spend a lot of time digging into the nitty-gritty. I’ll dive into Brandwatch and use it to pull together reporting, or keep a pulse on different projects we’ve got going on, or set up new projects. Just this morning I was creating 10 Brandwatch queries for a project we’re working on.”

While delegation and support are part of Kaylea’s role, she’s keen to keep her hand in the messy world of analysis, understanding how the technology works and what the new possibilities are.

“I’m embracing my strategic counselor role, but to provide that counsel, it’s for the benefit of both our clients and the teams I work with that I stay grounded in exactly how things get set up, how they work, and how we move through to that final delivery. It’s a lot easier when you really understand the process.”

Developing programs

I ask Kaylea about her approach to her work. After all, her team are dealing with 12-14 different projects at a time, across a wide cross-section of industries and locales.

There are core standards and practices her team will offer to each client, she tells me. But where does each project differentiate?

“When it gets into an industry level or at a specific client level there are definitely nuances and that’s something that I pride our team on taking into account. It goes back to really understanding the client’s business, and not being the man behind the curtain – actually getting to know them.”

In her time at Porter Novelli, Kaylea has developed a number of frameworks for measurement and analytics that help her team work efficiently. This helps keep standards high while the team crafts customized solutions for clients.

An example is how her work reflects Porter Novelli’s focus on purpose. “Purpose is at the core of what we do, and what we do best is to help clients find, live, and tell their ’why’ – their authentic ambition to positively impact society,” she says.

“One of the things I’ve been working on recently is how we combine analytics with this ‘find, live, and tell your purpose’ model. The approach we have taken is to blend the research that we have, and we have a world-class primary research team with years of rich, historical data, with social analytics and traditional analytics.”

In practice, this means the team can present a complete view of how company purpose is or isn’t manifesting itself across different channels. Is it translating into relevant media coverage? Is the brand’s owned social presence reflecting their principles?

“How can we dig into the existing landscape to help inform the plan that we’re going to develop and make sure we’re being true to the brand, true to the environment in which they’re operating, and true to the audience they already have?” she says.

Kaylea doesn’t just use analytics to develop plans and then report on their progress – it’s also very much part of the live execution of the programs her team helps to build.

“Once we have developed that plan and as the program is unfolding, we make sure that we’re using analytics not just as a reporting function, but for program optimization throughout – how can we tweak things here and there?”