FTI Spotlight Series: Jakob Rasmussen

Jakob, tell us a about yourself, how long you’ve been at FTI and about the team you’re on.

I joined FTI a year and a half ago to help build the data and insights team. I joined from a career in public affairs where I mainly worked with leading pharmaceutical clients and other healthcare actors.

At FTI I wear two hats; one of which is strategy and consulting and other is data science. We use advanced analytics and various modelling approaches to gain insight into our clients’ challenges, which we then use to help them navigate strategically. Wearing both hats allows me to unpick client challenges and respond to them with advice supported by data. We call it decision science or decision intelligence.

How do you feel the communications landscape has changed over the past two years as a result of COVID or any other factors? Have data-driven insights become more integral to a company’s planning or strategy?

The importance of data has been a burgeoning trend for the past five to 10 years, more so in the last five. Data has always played a role, but in communications we’ve really seen how much of a role it has evolved in that period of time, and in the past two years it has become paramount.

I think that there are at least two reasons why this is happening now.

The first is technological. With recent advances, we now have the ability to extract meaningful data, distill insight and do it at scale. The second is the rise in importance of data in communications in business. Communications as a business function has become more strategic, and that strategy feeds into business decision making, where data is critical.

What unique solutions is FTI bringing to help clients navigate the changing landscape?

Innovation. The way we approach problems is more bespoke than other companies. We develop the technologies that we use to solve client problems ourselves. Most tools others in the industry use are off-the-shelf tools for various types of analytics, but often we find those don’t solve for the problem we have, or speak to new ones that might arise, so we create our own data solutions.

Can you describe ways that primary research and data science inform campaigns for client?

What a lot of clients care about is trying to anticipate the conversations that will happen in reaction to their campaign. They want to test messaging before it gets sent out into the ether.

With that in mind, we try to work with clients and use analytics and approaches that we’ve developed to virtually test the messages and anticipate some of the conversations that the clients will come up against. We also advise them on how they might go about preparing to address some of those conversations, should they happen, when they run the campaign.

This also enables us to create measurement and evaluation frameworks to help our clients demonstrate the impact that their campaigns achieve, which is important to our clients.

What piece of advice can you give companies or brands who are using this primary research and data science to reach their stakeholders?

Less is more! Companies often contact us and say they want more data to help them make decisions. My advice to them is often that they actually need less data. They need to ask themselves whether they’re able to make sense of the tsunami of data they are already facing. That is where we come in. We try to strip away complexity until we are able to isolate the few variables and data points they need in order to make the right decisions.

What advice would you give young career professionals who are just starting out in this business and in this role?

First, I would say “start now”. Technology and data, in particular in this industry, drives almost everything we do now and what we will do in the future.

Second, be patient. Some of these skills and some of these technologies require a depth of expertise that takes quite some time to acquire. But don’t give up.

What have you learned personally the most from your time at FTI?

I’ve learned that the world is full of companies trying to make a difference and trying to do the right thing, though it’s not always clear what the right thing is. That has really struck me while I’ve been working here; how hard our clients work to try to do the right thing and how difficult it often is to figure out what that thing is.

Finally, what’s the last book you’ve read or show that you’ve streamed that has impressed you?

I recently listened to a really good podcast called “Decision Intelligence” with Cassie Kozyrkov, who’s the chief decision scientist at Google. She is extremely good at distilling very difficult concepts for a mass audience when it comes to data science and decision science.