Earning Media at Basis Technology

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).

Steve Nasdaq

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:

Steve Breaking Banks

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