The Senior Director of Advanced Analytics at a major global pharmaceutical company was frustrated — not because of a lack of tools, or a lack of skills — this guy had both. Sophisticated data capabilities, an extensive tech stack, and colleagues in public affairs, marketing, and communications with real strategic potential. He was surrounded by superstars.

His frustration was that he kept getting brought in at the end, after a campaign was done, after the strategy was set, and after the important decisions were already made without his insights.

His job, as he described it to me, had become collecting clips and just lobbing them over the fence. That's not measurement, it's definitely not research, and it's certainly not evaluation — it's simply gathering data. He knew what he was capable of, he knew the power of the engine he was operating, and it was being underutilized.

If you're a communicator sitting on a powerful media intelligence platform like Meltwater, there's a good chance you're doing the same thing: firing it up once a day for 10 seconds to pull your clips, when you're actually sitting on something as powerful as a 747 jet engine — and using it like a hairdryer.

And the reason this happens isn't laziness or a lack of sophistication — it's a missing piece in your compass. It's the S: Star Players.

They're the people inside your organization who are accountable for moving the business forward — the VP standing up a new business unit, the sales leader trying to hit a number, the product leader launching a new capability, the HR leader building a new practice.

When a CEO gets in front of investors or analysts and has to explain how the company is going to hit its goals, they almost always have one person already assigned: a single-threaded leader whose job is on the line if the initiative doesn't deliver. Those are the people you need alliances with, and serving them — really serving them — is how you go from order-taker to trusted advisor.

The first move is getting yourself invited to the party — and you don't do that by waiting to be called.

Think about the pharma example. There was a conversation already happening, strategy being set, decisions being made — and he was finding out about it after the fact, relegated to being the clips guy. The problem wasn't his capabilities. It was that he wasn't showing up proactively with value.

Here's the analogy: if your neighbors are throwing a party and you weren't invited, you don't call the cops. You knock on the door — but you don't show up empty-handed. You bring a bottle of wine.

In practice, that means taking the intelligence you already have access to and bringing it to your Star Players as they're designing strategy, not after.

You can make safe assumptions based on what you know about the initiative, run a landscape analysis, and come to them with something real — how the brand shows up in this space, what competitors are doing, what your target audience knows, feels, and does right now.

The people setting strategy want to know these things because it makes them more powerful, and the reason they don't think to bring you in is simply that they don't yet know you can do this. So they'll gather whatever information they have, set the strategy, then come to you and say: write us a press release, and then tell me how many impressions you got. That's how you get relegated to doing the clipping.

Netflix decides to launch an advertising offering — suddenly they need to reach a completely new audience. The comms team could wait for the head of that division to brief them, or they could show up first with intelligence:

That's knocking on the door with a bottle of wine.

Once you're in, you know what they're really talking about, you can keep feeding better intelligence on an ongoing basis, and you can build much stronger stories together — because now you actually know what they're trying to accomplish.

This is where you harness the full power of the 747 engine, and for that, you need three types of insights.

Genevieve Brammall at News Corp showed exactly what this looks like in practice. They had number one share of voice — brand was strong. But sales weren't where they needed to be — business insights told a different story. The gap was in the audience insights: she looked at the data and saw that the people who weren't buying were women, and when she dug into why, it turned out women didn't see themselves in the product.

That audience insight led to a new brand strategy, which led to better business outcomes.

Brand. Reputation. Business outcomes. Three-legged stool — and suddenly you're not delivering clips, you're giving someone a briefing that makes them more powerful. That's when you become indispensable.

Good comms doesn't happen in a silo, and business is a team sport.

He had the engine and the skills — what he didn't have was a clear picture of who he should be serving proactively.

In a conversation together, I pulled up the transcript from his company's most recent quarterly earnings call to see what his CEO was actually focused on. It was right there. Seven bullet points outlining the key strategic initiatives the company was going to focus on in the next quarter and beyond.

My client honed in on item number six, which sat squarely in his department's remit — but the two biggest priorities the CEO talked about were (of course) the items in positions one and two. Initiative 1 was hitting a sales goal for a drug already in market. Initiative 2 was developing new drugs in the pipeline. Two completely different leaders, two completely different mandates, two completely different types of intelligence they each needed.

Once he thought about the people heading up those two business units, he immediately knew what conversations to have and what intelligence to build for each of them. That's the power of thinking about the persona first — it focuses your efforts, and it tells you exactly how to fire up the 747 engine for the right people.

When you do that, you become proactive instead of reactive, and you have stakeholders who genuinely value what you bring. In tough times, when budgets get cut and tools get scrutinized, those are the people who will help you defend yours. That's what you want.

So far in our four-part series we have covered:

Next up, we will tackle:

It’s a question all communicators must be ready to answer in a simple three ingredient recipe. No dashboards. No reports. Just clever strategy driven by data and research. Presented in a story.