Auxipress kicked off 2022 with the announcement of Arnaud Steinkuhler as the new Chief Operating Officer, thank you to Arnaud for sharing his time with AMEC GMD Johna Burke on his new appointment.

Exciting news, congratulations on your new appointment, what is your main goal for 2022?

Thank you! After repositioning in May 2021, we ended last year with historical records in sales. We are definitively the sole provider of a full “cross-media” solution & insights services for brand management in Belgium. Now it’s time to boost our leadership as a Brand Intelligence company with an entire team ready to reach new heights!

How will machine learning and AI influence your strategy?

Our strategy is based on our ability to develop value for our current clients usually in PR/Communication, and step in new departments, delivering insights to marketing and digital teams.

Machine learning and AI is certainly key, but let’s not forget that at the end of the day it’s really about our ability to succeed to make our clients and users experience a great customer journey.

Did we understand properly their needs? Did we onboard them correctly ? Are they sufficiently empowered with our insights, our client service, or data ? Do they perceive easily the value of our services…

You’ve been in the industry for many years, what is the most exciting development you’ve tackled and how is that shaping your vision for Auxipress now?

Media monitoring has evolved to a broader mission: understanding how brands are perceived by all stakeholders (media, audiences, partners, economic and political players, etc.).

By being able to listen in real-time and at massive scale – and therefore beyond traditional media monitoring constraints and processes – enables us to scale up and help marketers keep their activations on track and stay relevant to their audiences.

You’ve worked with opinion and social trend information throughout your career, how have you seen that sourcing change and what’s the biggest change you expect in the coming years?  

Today, for us, it’s more a question of what challenges we are solving for our clients than a question of sourcing. Of course, we must have a large source of data and content, it is mandatory, but it is also very important that our sales and solutions teams capture the real challenges of our customers in order to support them beyond of the sale of products by offering them a global solution that really makes sense and is well thought out for each company.

The challenge of the coming years has already started today with marketers using more and more technologies and vendors, but finding it difficult to have a unified system to drive their performance, ideally through a single hub of data and information. Thus, to stay in the race, it is crucial to integrate the MarTech stack of the marketeers of tomorrow, if you do not want to be left on the side of the road.