FTI Spotlight Series: Asha Oberoi

With over 20 years’ digital media and Insights experience – how did you get to where you are?

There is a short and a long answer to this question! The short answer is a love of learning new and emerging technology trends. The long answer is that I started my career as a journalist, working mostly in digital media businesses such as BBC News Online, The Press Association and ITN ltd. It was within those three organisations that I honed my skills around digital product development, new and emerging technologies and provided advice to clients about how the news industry was changing. Think, the proliferation of mobile phones, the emergence and dominance of social media platforms and the demand for short form video and audio online. Today these trends are a part of our everyday life, however back in my early career, we were just figuring out how they would impact and change our industry. More recently I have invested in new skills within the Media Intelligence industry – that is media and social media monitoring, quantitative and qualitative analysis of media and social media data and working closely with Communicators on using the insights gleaned from data to drive strategy and business decisions. My advice to anyone starting out in their career today is to never lose the desire to learn or become fearful of change. Jobs rarely ever stay the same, no matter what industry you are in, so a constant and genuine love of learning will ensure that you are always relevant, competitive and useful to your colleagues and clients.

From your sector expertise, what are the key challenges Boards/senior leaders will continue to face in 2023?

If you were to google the answer to this question, (FYI this is a tip in itself, everything is searchable and everything is measurable!), the most common results would be:

1. Climate Risk
2. The Great Resignation
3. Economic Volatility
4. Cyber Security (following the recent breach at Optus at the time of writing this, this topic is probably number 1 across boardrooms in Australia at the moment)
5. The gender pay gap and workplace equality.

From my sector experience, I would say that it doesn’t specifically matter what the number 1, 2 or 3 issue is, there will always be issues for boards and senior leaders to navigate. The question I would pose is: are you really aware of the risks, are you adequately monitoring for issues across clear, dark and the deep web and if you are, what is your level of preparedness for times when issues start to bubble up into full blown crisis? From my experience, businesses that value data gathering, data analysis and data driven decision making are less vulnerable, more prepared and more successful at navigating the complex and constantly changing and evolving business and regulatory landscape. At FTI Strategic Communications, we are specialists in advising boards and senior business leaders navigate the most important inflection points in a company’s history.

What are the emerging trends for Australian based Corporate Affairs teams? 

For Corporate Affairs specialists specifically, and in light of the above or previous response, there are a few key trends to be prepared for. Perhaps I’ll frame it as a series of questions…

1. Are you aware of the possible risks to your business’s reputation and do you know where those risks can come from? Are you monitoring the regulatory, media and online landscape for potential threats or risks and are you using those same environments as opportunities to grow and protect your business and your CEO’s reputation?
2. Are you effectively measuring your department’s activities and reporting that back to the rest of the business in the form of KPI’s or digestible and accurate data?
3. Are you using insights gleaned from accurate and realtime data gathering, to inform your external media and internal communications strategy?
4. Do you have a social and digital team focus within communications, government or regulatory affairs and public policy?
5. Are you an effective advisor to the CEO’s office, with your hands on the steering wheel of the business guiding it through the most important inflection points within the company’s lifecycle?
6. Does your business have a voice and an active role across socials, allowing you to connect to your audience and communicate effectively with them when you need to?
7. And for those observers of the current communications crisis at Optus, who are dealing with a cyber-attack – would you have used Social media channels to communicate and update those affected?

If you are answering no to more than one of these questions, it may be time to review the effectiveness of the strategy you are pursuing and the skills or possible skills gaps across your team. Feel free to give us a call at FTI Strategic Communications, if you would like to discuss anything covered in the above article or if you have a Data, Insights or Social and Digital related business objective.