Interview with Ted Frank, CEO, Backstories Studio - Speaker at 5th Annual Global Big Data Conf Posted on : Jul 24 - 2017

We feature speakers at 5th Annual Global Big Data Conference - August 2017 to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Ted Frank, CEO, Backstories Studio (Topic : From Stats To Movie-Style Story: How To Get Execs To Follow Your Data)

Interview with Ted Frank

1. Tell us about yourself and your background.
I come from advertising, which taught me how to be simple, consulting, which not only showed me what works (and doesn’t) in corporations, but also introduced me to data and brilliant people who produced great work but still could not get heard. That broke my heart so I decided to study one thing that was holding everyone’s attention: movies. From there I dug deep and leaned all the ways we could apply their storytelling techniques to strategic work–– even complicated charts––so smart people with important things to show can get heard.

2.  What have you been working on recently?
Right now, I’m bringing a segmentation to life for a large consumer-products company, but also helping one of their execs develop and deliver a keynote presentation so she’ll knock it out of the park. She’s in complete command of it now so I know she will.

3. Tell me about the right tool you used recently to solve customer problem?
For the segmentation, my client had a big quant deck filled with salient insights, but no one could really remember who the segments were. By creating persona videos, we were able to turn their data into a story and each segment into a real person that stakeholders could relate to and want to create products and marketing for.

4. Where are we now today in terms of the Big data, and where do you think we’ll go over the next five years?
It feels like we’re just now getting a grip on the real power of data, but I could easily see dynamic data getting even easier to capture and follow, and predictive models getting even more accurate.

5. You’ve already hired Y number of  people approximately. What would be your pitch to folks out there to join your Organization? Why does your organization matter in the world?
Backstories matters because with more ways of capturing data, it will be even more difficult for data professionals to stay out of the weeds and tell a simple, compelling story. It’s just in our nature to want to share everything and it’s very hard for anyone to keep it simple. I’m lucky in that I can understand both data heads and their stakeholders, and then, help them build a bridge.

6. What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your talk on "From Stats To Movie-Style Story: How To Get Execs To Follow Your Data”?
Dave Decelle from Netflix and I will show you four key ways to turn an overly complicated deck into a series of jaw-dropping moments. Seriously, come watch us and you’ll see what we mean.