Ed Harrison’s mission to bring Isentia back from the cold
2018 was a horror year for market intelligence firm Isentia with the writing off of the company’s King Content acquisition, the departure of long standing CEO John Croll and having the dubious honour of being the year’s worst performing ASX media stock.
Current chief executive Ed Harrison spoke to Mumbrella’s Paul Wallbank about how technology and the company’s Asian assets are key parts of his plan to get the business out of the doldrums.
If the burden of running a company that was Australia’s worst performing listed media stock last year seems heavy, Isentia CEO Ed Harrison isn’t showing it.
Harrison, the former CEO of Yahoo7, took the reins of the struggling media intelligence firm in August 2018 to replace long-standing boss John Croll who stepped down after two tumultuous years which had seen the company struggle with a floundering share price and the $48m writing off of the company’s disastrous King Content investment.
Isentia boss Ed Harrison: “We have this great recurring revenue base through subscription channels”
Huge fan of what’s happening at iSentia. Sounds like they’ve really got a clear direction and vision, based on stripping out dumb operational costs and expanding into complimentary product sets.
Well done guys and onwards / upwards!
Suspect this might be a rocket stock later this year…
Yes sir but the writer fails to of course mention herewith about the news last week in Bangkok about the copyright crimes perpetuated by Isentia against multiple Thailand media. If you can please conduct a Google search you shall see enough news from past week about these alleged crimes by Isentia. So why sir did you not ask the CEO about these transgressions?
Ed is a fine leader and given time will develop the business to where he wants it to be.
Specialist in failure.
Nice work, Ed and team. If anyone can lead isentia through a successful transformation, you can. Watch this space….
We were a long standing (and very high fee paying) client of iSentias for many years. We needed to look for some cost savings and our finance people queried why our iSentia will was so high. So we asked them to pitch to us along with Meltwater and one other for our business. Five people came into the room on their day of the pitch, five people we’d never met including one who claimed to be out account manager. And the first words out of their mouth was ‘so, what do you want from us today?’. They didn’t even bother to pitch they just thought it was money in the bank for them. Their product didn’t match half of the Meltwater capability, their customer service was appalling and they were charging us about $80k more than Meltwater are now for a far superior product. As you can imagine we terminated our contract and are far happier with Meltwater who have excellent customer service. As every one is starting to realise, it’s all about the customer. iSentia needs to realise that too.
But Isentia was just last week accused of alleged copyright theft in Thailand. Why did this article about the company not reference that? Here is one of the venerable Thai media suing Isentia in Bangkok: https://www.matichon.co.th/international/news_1518121
[Edited under Mumbrella’s comment moderation policy]
To add on to what Henry House has said,
Whatever plan these guys have in place, is not new nor innovative.
“There’s a lot of analytics and new charting the way people can build and analyse their different metrics and dashboards. So being able to generate reports really early.
“We also have quick access to video streaming so one click and you can watch video from broadcast.
“There’s also real time alerts, if you’re a business or client of ours now, you can set up keywords and whenever those words are mentioned or phrases are mentioned in the broadcast environment you’ll be passed through that click to view in real time. So that’s a significant improvement.”
None of this sounds new to anyone in the industry particularly if you’ve used any social listening tool out there in the market.
It definitely won’t matter when they don’t even treat copyright with any regard.
https://mumbrella.com.au/isentia-embroiled-in-copyright-battle-with-thai-media-group-matichon-583143
Of course an employee is going to give miserable customer service if they themselves are being neglected by the company they work for. I’m a former employee of Isentia, and I can say with absolute honesty that I really hope this new CEO can turn that absolute trainwreck back around. I know many good people that have suffered during their time at Isentia [Edited under Mumbrella’s comment moderation policy] Hopefully Harrison can turn Isentia into the company that its hard-working staff members need it to be.
One of the most efficient and remarkable management team on the earth. Why? Well because most of the new executives joined in H2 of FY19 and they managed to deliver a true miracle in short span of 4-5 months. Share prices must be going gangbusters. Wait what 32 cents. Ouch.