Prattle was a young data startup that had just secured a $3,300,000 round of funding, and it was ready to take on the world of investing. 

It had a great story to tell about AI’s impact on asset management but didn’t have it spelled out on its most important digital property: its website. As head of marketing at Prattle, I decided it was time for a new site with updated design and a clear message for its visitors. 

From the first wireframe sketches to final mockups, I managed the production of—and usually personally created—the entirety of the new site. 

This endeavor included producing all of the art that was featured on the site; every bit of every graphic was crafted by me or my team. In addition to managing the design team, I also wrote all the copy and managed the development team as they worked to transform our mockups into live code. 

Homepage product explainer, below the fold

Homepage value proposition explainer, below the fold

Blog section on the homepage, below the fold

Top of blog homepage

Top of About page

Team page

The finished site turned the executive team’s heads. Beautiful, modern, and functional, the new take on Prattle’s online presence was exactly what the firm needed as the hub of its largely earned media and inbound-marketing strategy, generating hundreds of leads at the largest financial services firms in the world. It was so popular, in fact, that the founders have left the site largely unchanged for 3 years. 

Dan Salmo, then Director of Software Development, had this to say about the endeavor: 

“I worked with Alex on building the new website for our startup. He is a blast to work with – high energy, super smart. He has the ability to really take the lead and drive a project forward. He is a huge asset to any team. And the website redesign must have worked because we did have a successful exit with that startup.”

Basis Technology wanted to take center stage at financial services conferences, but we had a lean budget (i.e., no pay for play). I knew we needed content and an organized effort, so I led the campaign affectionately dubbed “Project Speak Everywhere.” As project director, I managed the end-to-end development of all content, the conference selection and application process, as well as the preparation of all speakers.

From abstract to full deck, I designed a set of presentations around the messaging I developed for Basis Technology in finance: That the firm was taking its decades of experience working for the global intelligence community and applying it to financial services.

Chris Mack at the Open Data Science Conference delivering “AI for Good” 

This messaging was fleshed out over 5 different presentations at 11 different events, with almost every member of the executive team speaking as part of the campaign.

Slide from Chris Mack’s presentation “AI for Good” that he delivered at 3 different conferences

This campaign was an experiment that few thought could be pulled off—but we succeeded. We received 12 speaking opportunities (we spoke twice at one event), free of charge, taking the stage at Money20/20, FinCEN’s Innovation Hours, and AImpact, among many others. 

We also won awards for our work, particularly Declan Trezise’s presentation at AI Innovation Night:

(Sorry for the pump fake)

Prattle segment on Bloomberg TV

As Prattle’s target market was large asset managers and institutional investors, I decided that PR could play a key role in both lead generation and gaining credibility. Following my suggestion, the founders hired a PR professional for Prattle, Jon Ryan, with whom I worked to earn key media placements for the firm. 

Together, Jon & I created Prattle’s story pitches, media relationships, and contributed pieces. We also collaborated with Prattle’s technical leadership, like Director of Quantitative Analytics Joe Sutherland, to come up with clever analytics and story angles.

Our efforts earned Prattle high value placements in the Financial Times (multiple), Bloomberg (including a spot on Bloomberg TV), Business Insider, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, and Quartz.

 These placements powered the highest peaks in the history of the company’s web traffic.

My team and I before event.

Basis Technology needed to make inroads into the financial services community, but we had never thrown an industry-focused event. 

On the back of two thought-leadership booklets on AI and finance I had produced for the firm, I led the charge to create the company’s first finance event in the heart of the financial world: NYC.  

The idea was to create an invite-only, private event, with a target attendee range of 45-75. I reached out and secured the speakers, helped them reach out to their networks; I led the branding, which included doing all the concept designs; I created the theme, wrote the brochures, and led the outreach, driving signups. 

(Here are the event pages, in case you want to check them out: Eventbrite link; site page).

On top of all this, I created the presentation delivered by Basis COO Steve Cohen at the event. 

Jo Ann Barefoot, regtech & compliance influencer, tweeting on The Honest Talks

The event was dynamite. 

– We hit 75 total attendees (selling out multiple times in the process, so we had to raise the registration cap)

– The sales team earned numerous follow-up meetings with target accounts and deepening our impact in the space.

Because of these results, Basis is now looking to produce several follow-up events as a series, the next one in Tokyo in November 2019.  

Gregg Schoenberg, an event attendee, TechCrunch writer, and all-around badass had this to say about the night: 

“Alex produced one of the more memorable tech-related events of my recent memory. AI is a topic that can be easily demogogued and/or saddled with tired cliches. Alex avoided all of that. The Honest Talks was compelling from start to finish, and his MCing was skillfully performed. Just as importantly, he made it all look easy.”

Prattle was a data startup that was out to change Fed watching—the act of interpreting central bank communications—with AI. The technology was there, but a concise and compelling story? Not quite. After writing the book all about central banking and this technology for the firm and its founders, I proposed we write a new piece: one that clearly articulated what Prattle did and why people should care. 

I broke the booklet into 3 chapters sandwiched between a no-nonsense intro and conclusion. 

The first chapter introduced AI (specifically sentiment analysis), why it was important to finance, and why Prattle’s founders came up with a different take. 

The second chapter was a brief history of central bank communications, why these institutions have become more open over time, and how they use the power of their words to influence the global market. 

And the final chapter tackled the technology itself, explaining how it worked and why it was so unique. 

I researched, wrote, and edited the entire Primer.

I also did the layout and design:

The Prattle Primer cover; all icons are my work 

The Primer; top of TOC

First Chapter; top of page

The Primer quickly became the firm’s single most important piece of sales collateral. 

It was a must-have for every prospect meeting, an obligatory attachment for early-stage sales emails, and conversion-driving content offer that took center-stage on the company site. 

It was the seed of the company’s blog and newsletter, defined the voice of the firm’s content, and was part of the foundation of the brand aesthetic. From PR strategy to site design, it helped shape everything about how the company looked and talked about itself.  

Prattle’s Director of Sales, Oliver Harriehausen, had this to say about my work on The Primer: 

“The rise of fintech startups in finance, especially those serving up alternative data, has brought intense competition to traditional research and disrupted the way traditional research is created, marketed, and sold. Whereas traditional research is created on ubiquitous fundamental market data (macroeconomic data as well as corporate earnings), alternative data is created via algorithms, machine learning, and AI, topped with a touch of human supervision. This new process and the new products derived from this process were, until then, never before consumed, let alone discussed or written about. 

In the early days of Prattle, the financial world was hungry for new data sources yet lacking in understanding and infrastructure to integrate into an existing process. As my colleague at Prattle, where sales and marketing operated as a wholly-integrated system, Alex was quick to identify a need to create The Prattle Primer, the most essential piece of early-stage collateral Prattle owns. By design, Alex takes the reader on a high-level journey to 1) understand, 2) contextualize, and 3) apply these novel datasets. He reduces a complex and abstract process to something tangible, believable, and less scary to adopt. 

Running sales, my team understood that the only way to convince innovators and early adopters to buy our data was to build trust that our products worked and to have confidence in our process. The Prattle Primer did just that, and I credit Alex for explaining what it means for NLP-powered algorithms to analyze large bodies of text data, improve via Machine Learning, and use AI to run online, in continuous form. 

I am incredibly grateful and in many ways indebted to Alex for directly helping my team close new business and bring aboard customers that understood what we did. An added benefit emerged for the company as a whole: Prattle now had a consistent narrative to describe what it is we do. This can’t be emphasized enough; The Primer was, in its own way, a self-reinforcing mechanism that allowed our business to flourish as the team communicated uniformly with conviction and consistency.”

]]> http://alexdetmering.com/blog/porfolio/producing-the-prattle-primer/feed/ 0 http://alexdetmering.com/blog/porfolio/earning-media-at-basis-technology/ http://alexdetmering.com/blog/porfolio/earning-media-at-basis-technology/#comments Sun, 15 Sep 2019 22:13:55 +0000 http://alexdetmering.com/?p=359 TLDR: Basis Technology had no presence and no story for the financial press—really any media vertical—but they wanted both. With zero budget, from scratch, I created both. I put the firm in front of hundreds of thousands of readers and listeners with earned media placements (like the one in the picture below).

Basis Co-ounder, Steve Cohen, on Nasdaq TradeTalks

Basis wanted to get famous, particularly in financial services. Although they had made sales inroads in the industry, they had never earned any media attention and wanted to gain footing—so I led the charge.

The bad news?

They didn’t want to spend any money. 

The good news?

I didn’t need any.

I organized the entire media effort by assembling the media list, conducting outreach, and even starring in a few interviews. I created the messaging and interview briefs and also coached the Basis representatives, including its founders, Carl Hoffman and Steve Cohen.

And I did all this with 5-7 hours/week of my time on a shoestring budget.

What resulted was a campaign that produced over 50 placements in a little over a year, with Steve’s appearance on the #1 global fintech podcast, Breaking Banks, as one of the campaign’s highlights:

Here are some of the high points, broken down by industry: 

Financial Services

Bloomberg

- [awaiting posting]

Breaking Banks

- “AI’s Role in Financial Access”

Barefoot Innovation

- “AI’s Potential and Perils for Finance: Steve Cohen of Basis Technology”

The Financial Revolutionist

- “Weekly briefing 144”

- “Weekly briefing 127”

 FactSet Insight

- “The Problem with Magic” 

 Business Insider 

- “Money20/20 Asia’s featured speakers share 2019 FinTech Forecast“

 Nasdaq Trade Talks

– “Realizing AI’s Potential”

- “AI Built for Mission Critical Applications Are Making It Into Finance”

 Fintech Finance 

– “Money20/20 USA 2018: Alex Detmering & Steve Cohen, Basis Technology”

 FinTech Focus

– “Rise of Machine Learning”

 ACAMS Today

- Steve Cohen’s Understanding AI Column

 Data Science

Experiencing Data 

- “010 – Carl Hoffman (CEO, Basis Technology) on text analytics, NLP, entity resolution, and why exact match search is stupid”

 KD Nuggets

- “The Definitive Guide to AI’s “Black Box” Problem” 

 The ODSC Blog

- “Innovators and Regulators Collaborate on Book Tackling AI’s Black Box Problem”

- “Alex Detmering of Basis Technology on The Honest Guide to AI for Risk”

- “The Need For Mission Critical Text Analytics”

- “Real-Life Robocop: How NLP Is Fighting Financial Crime”

- “AI for Good: Bad Guys, Messy Data, & NLP”

Basis Technology, an AI tech firm, wanted a thought-leadership piece to make some noise in financial services—specifically, anti-financial crime.

They wanted to start selling into this space but lacked cornerstone content and a compelling message. So, I came up with a proposal for The Honest Guide to AI for Risk: a no-nonsense account of AI, its history, mechanics, and potential impact on financial crime risk management. 

Financial institutions have been riding the AI-marketing-hype cycle for years, and this piece would position Basis Technology, a 25-year firm, as a truth-teller and trustworthy technology partner in a sea of pretenders.

I conceived of the piece, stem to stern. I performed all the research, drafting, layout, and design management. I even drew the sketches that the designer (the wonderful and incredibly talented Liz Emmert) adapted into the e-book’s art:

Cover art, sketch to final

Chapter 1 art, sketch to final

The 44-page book was an instant (and sustained) hit:

– Outside of the product brochure, it became the #1 most-used piece of collateral by the sales team.

- It was featured in The Financial Revolutionist (120k subscribers), the RiskTech Forum (run by Chartis Research, the #1 risk technology publication), and the Open Data Science blog (~50k subscribers).

– It also became the messaging and branding foundation for The Honest Talks, conferences that the firm put on in 2019 in New York and Tokyo—the first of the firm’s conferences to target the vertical.

– Finally, it generated hundreds of qualified leads at financial services firms.

And readers loved it. Not long after I had handed a copy to Ken Blanco, Director of FinCEN, he sent me a handwritten postcard:

Please ignore hand shadow…it’s the only pic I have of the postcard…because the original got destroyed : (

Final Cover for How the Fed Moves Markets

The founders of Prattle had their backs up against a wall: a book deadline three months away and not a word written.

And this was no ordinary book.  

It was a history of the Federal Reserve and all the other major central banks, focusing on their use of communication as monetary policy. It also discussed how modern AI techniques could be used to understand the effect their communications had on the markets. 

The founders asked me to manage the entire production of this book. 

Aided by a team of interns from Harvard and WashU, I completed the rough draft in two months. 

An extensive rewrite of one of the founders’ thesis on the Federal Reserve’s history provided the material for the book’s first section—a three-chapter chunk I spun up in one coffee-fueled, two week sprint. 

The final two sections, however, needed to be written from scratch. 

To tackle the latter chapters, the founders and I collaborated on a series of one-page outlines for each chapter. I took these outlines and broke them into a series of tasks—from time series graphs to good, old-fashioned research—and I assigned interns according to their skillsets and interests. I combined these research blocks into coherent chapters with the outline, and then transformed the raw content into book-worthy prose. 

After the final month of editing, I submitted the finished piece, How the Fed Moves Markets, to the publishers, Palgrave MacMillian.

The book was a success. 

Its agent predicted that the book was going to be one of the publisher’s best of the season, and his prediction turned out to be prescient: As of July 31, 2019, the book had almost 6000 downloads off of Palgrave MacMillian’s site (a fraction of the total, as the book was sold on all major platforms). 

Inspired by and grateful for my effort, Prattle’s founders fought to have my name included on the cover as the official editor, but this was against the publisher’s policy. In lieu of that honor, founder Evan Schnidman included this note in the foreword: 

“Finally, this book would never have been possible without Alex Detmering. Alex is not only our director of content at Prattle, he is also our technical writer, editor, researcher, thought-organizer, and the manager who pulled this all together. Like Bill and I, Alex has subjected his family and friends to the strains of this process, so we would like to extend a particular thanks to Stephen Fairbanks who provided editorial support to Alex and therefore to us. We would also like to thank Sarah Detmering, Alex’s wife, for tolerating the long hours of work Alex has put into this project.”

Basis Technology was looking to develop a brand-new approach to building data sets for AI, dubbed “active learning,” but they needed serious funding to back an ambitious R&D project. 

The firm’s execs decided to apply for a $2,000,000 research grant from KORIL, a Korean & Isreali foundation that backed high-potential, innovative product development projects that included both Korean and Isreali companies. 

Basis Technology was going to submit two applications targeting different market applications of active learning technology, and I was selected as the lead for the application aimed at financial services.

The 60-plus page application included:

- Detailed R&D project breakdown (three-year budget & Gantt chart)

- In-depth descriptions of the technology, its advantages vs. current approaches, and its applications

- Market size, competitor landscape, and target customers

- Business model and commercialization strategy

Oh, and one more thing: the whole process needed to be squeezed into my evenings over the course of a month.

I managed the production of the entire application, orchestrating the work of our brilliant chief scientist, Kfir Bar, and our Korean partner, WISEnut. I also personally wrote substantial portions of the application, particularly those that addressed the application of the technology to the financial services market (my background). 

It was a monumental undertaking…but it had a happy ending: months after submission, we found out the application I had managed won the $2,000,000 grant.

We also found out that the judging system scored the writing quality of each submission, and that my application had the highest score in the history of the grant.