Danielle Terrelonge, founder and managing director of DRT Communications Ltd, recounts that her journey to becoming an entrepreneur was equally exciting and challenging. While her corporate experience as marketing manager at Tru-Juice was one that she enjoyed, Terrelonge’s undeniable passion, intuition and faith led her to start a public relations agency, where she felt she could make the most significant impact. DRT Communications focused on foreseeing and anticipating news and trends impacting her clients across the Caribbean.

Terrelonge recalls working on an inter-regional client project with Red Bull, which resulted in an extended team travelling to Austria, the USA, the UK, and Canada. They uncovered how technology is used to monitor traditional media news. Her team then encouraged her to launch a media monitoring platform for the Caribbean. The result is a marriage of her core focus of keeping abreast of the brand narrative with her company’s fully technology-enabled media monitoring division.

While facing the challenges of acquiring, financing, and commissioning the technology to work in the Caribbean context, help came from her father who discovered a company with similar experiences who provided insights into how the technology could work. The media monitoring tool is currently available in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad, with partnerships in Guyana, Cayman, and The Bahamas.

The platform, which comprises hardware and software, was “trained” to understand the nuances of different Caribbean dialects to develop a higher level of accuracy. The technology also identifies keywords and phrases that feed into an aggregated report automatically. The platform capability allows for news monitoring, ad monitoring and social listening. Terrelonge said that for the social listening aspect, the technology can identify trending conversations and who started the conversation.

Terrelonge emphasised that media monitoring is essential since established brands that execute robust marketing and public relations campaigns want insights into their industry share of voice, sentiment analysis, and mentions in traditional and digital media in real-time. They want to measure their campaigns effectiveness and return on investment ultimately. The platform works with SaaS (software-as-a-service) technology and the software licensing allows it to also feed into a global system of partner companies like LexisNexis.

While the technology is robust, Terrelonge notes that the “human touch” is crucial. Her media monitoring team intercepts the auto-generated reports to ensure that the information is relevant to the client. The software also complements the public relations aspect of DRT Communications because it allows Terrelonge and her team to identify and develop brand narratives instantaneously. She recounts an instance where one of her clients wanted to engage in social good. The media monitoring technology captured a story about a charitable initiative that the client could support.

Terrelonge anticipates leveraging cloud-based technology for data storage that will also help the media monitoring division scale. The next step is upgrading the platform to include viewership monitoring. Ultimately, she sees DRT Communications as the “regional giant” in media monitoring allowing their clients to be more strategic in planning and maximise the value of their marketing budgets.

Terrelonge’s wishes include enriching the legacy of her “techie” and entrepreneurial family background to be a beacon of inspiration for others. She hopes that her experience will encourage others to start working on their ideas to impact the future and use technology to enable those solutions.