Winner: Bryan Dumont, Senior Vice President of Corporate Reputation Research, APCO Worldwide
Give Bryan Dumont an inch and he'll measure for miles. As the SVP of corporate reputation research at APCO Worldwide, measurement is the crux of his mission to protect and
enhance companies' most valuable asset: their reputations.
Dumont's seven years at APCO are marked by strategic and advanced innovations to measure things previously thought to be immeasurable: emotions, messages, perceptions. He
spearheaded the creation of one of the first quantitative research models that measures the emotional connection people have with brands, distilling the results down to nine
discrete emotions that most directly impact peoples' connection to products. He also developed Reputation Insight, an approach to defining and measuring corporate reputation
research through structural equation modeling.
If "structural equation modeling" sounds like a foreign language to you, not to worry. While the dialect Dumont speaks is one of advanced quantitative methods (read: numbers),
he can translate statistical techniques and results into a language understood by the senior execs and PR pros among us.
Among other Fortune 500 clients, Dumont has worked with tobacco company Philip Morris USA to help them manage their tenuous reputation in the eyes of an increasingly concerned,
health-conscious public.
Anyone who can pull a tobacco company's reputation up by its bootstraps has the makings of a truly notable PR professional. And, judging from his past accomplishments, there
seems to be little, if anything, that Dumont can't measure.
Contact: [email protected]
Honorable Mentions
Angela Jeffrey likes to keep it in the family. In 1996, long before measurement tools were en vogue, she foresaw their potential and appealed to her hi-tech brother to build a
tool that could create analysis reports. Thus, PRtrak was born (and subsequently acquired by VMS, where she is vice president of editorial research), and Jeffrey has spent the 10
years leading up to today making her mark in the world of measurement.
Katie Paine is a natural-born innovator. She paved the way for media messaging measurement by founding The Delahaye Group in 1987 (sold in 1999 to Medialink Worldwide), and
then pushed it to new heights with her current enterprise, KDPaine & Partners, her 20,000+ audience blog and her recent measurement development, the Do-It-Yourself
Dashboard.
Mark Weiner wears many hats, but all of them accessorize one integral piece: measurement research. As the president of Delahaye, he used both theoretical and tactical
expertise to be a key part of the ubiquitous communications coup d'etat of 2005: working with behemoth corporation Procter & Gamble to validate the "PR-to-sales
connection."