Behind the Meltwater Brand with Dino Delic: Ep. 38 of Red Sky Fuel for Thought Podcast

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:Why influencer marketing, ESG and misinformation were the hot topics at this year’s Meltwater SummitWhat differentiates companies that succeed in the short term from those that succeed in the longterm This episode is part of our Behind the Brand series, which pulls back the curtain on an iconic brand to focus on the people shaping that brand’s communications and marketing strategy. We launched this series in April 2023, with Gráinne O’Brien, senior director of corporate affairs for Kellogg Europe. This month, host Linda Descano welcomes Dino Delic back to the pod (he previously chatted with us in December 2020 about our Word of the Year). Dino has been with Meltwater since 2009, having grown with the company through four promotions and roles in Melbourne, New York, Chicago and now Los Angeles. Now with 27,000 global customers in 50 offices across six continents, and 2,300 employees, Meltwater empowers companies with a suite of solutions that spans media, social, consumer and sales intelligence. Linda kicks off her conversation with Dino by asking him to describe his role at Meltwater, to which he replies, “My job is to help our team help our clients connect the dots as much as possible with all the external data that we collect. What we're really helping companies do is collect information outside of their four walls, make sense of it and make more informed decisions so they can better understand where they're spending money wisely and not spending money.” Dino says he landed in the external intelligence field many years ago, by accident. “I studied marketing, but I got my first sales job at the age of 18; I was just hooked on interacting with people. It turns out, if you like problem solving, sales is a pretty good profession. But I didn't stick around in a sales career for over two decades now because I love sales. It was just through pure luck that I landed on a company that has such an interesting data set.” The company also has an immense following, having recently attracted more than 800 attendees and more than 50 speakers, including Bethenny Frankel and Trevor Noah, to the Meltwater Summit in New York. At the Summit, Meltwater introduced two new AI Assistants, leveraging the latest technology in generative AI (learn more through the link in our show notes). The first is a PR Assistant which helps PR professionals draft press releases and personalize pitches to journalists in record time. The second is the AI Writing Assistant, powered by the ChatGPT API, which drafts highly engaging social content, saving teams time and increasing social engagement at scale.  Dino says, “There's a lot of interest in AI, especially because of how excited people are that automation can save time, but I'm kind of sick of the conversation going into fear mongering about AI. Especially in professions in strategy, customer service, sales, brand marketing, PR and comms, the biggest gripe for everybody is that they're so busy, that they don't have time to do their job because they have to do a lot of manual work. There are so many t