Telum Talks To… Dan Bland, Senior Manager, Communications Content and Projects, Techtronic Industries
Interview

Telum Talks To… Dan Bland, Senior Manager, Communications Content and Projects, Techtronic Industries

Telum caught up with Dan Bland to hear about the challenges he encountered transitioning from being a Journalist, his take and advice on upcoming comms trends, and his favourite anecdote from his career. 

Can you tell us more about your role and the upcoming comms plans at Techtronic Industries (TTI)?
With the growth TTI has been going through comes more and more demands from investors, jobseekers, internal employees and curious customers for more communication from the corporate. My role has been to find that demand from our “audience” and deliver the information desired. I’ve found a lot of the time that with any issue in the company people want to know about, be it ESG activities or whatever, someone in the company is already in charge of handling it, but we haven’t broadcasted that action. 

I get to act like an internal reporter and find our person in the factories who’s handling battery recycling, or testing quieter tools, and pull them out of the basement to tell their story. 

Right now, I’m on a tour of our US facilities meeting these kinds of people. When travel opens up everywhere we want to expand the case-study hunt globally.

You transitioned from being a journalist to the comms side in mid-2021, were there any challenges and how did you overcome them?
Definitely. One of the things I’ve really struggled with is the number of meetings, and the layers of buy-in I have to get for launching projects. When you’re used to a daily publishing schedule, the amount of time it takes to get something done can be really frustrating.

There’s also just a different attitude about meetings themselves, I feel. As a journalist, meetings were something I did around my work writing that distracted me from work. Whereas, in many corporate functions, the meeting is the work! I struggled to deliver copy at first as I was being interrupted all the time to have a meeting about it.

For anyone else struggling with that, the content consulting firm New Narrative has a great blog about the topic that helped me convince my bosses I needed to be in fewer meetings.

You managed digital production and visual stories at the SCMP, was there any knowledge you acquired from the digital experience that proved useful on the comms side?
In the sense that I was the connecting point between two disparate skill sets, I think that has definitely translated to my new role. With SCMP's visual stories and daily graphics, there were often journalists who were solely focused on telling stories through writing trying to communicate with graphic artists solely focused on telling stories with data visualisation and illustration. Being able to provide a conduit between those people has been a transmutable skill to helping various corporate functions communicate better. 

Can you share an anecdote from your former writing and reporting career?
So, growing up in Hong Kong, I always loved Harry Harrison’s SCMP cartoons, and I was thrilled when an op-ed I wrote for The Corporate Treasurer got a Harry illustration!

But when the issue went to print, we got a furious call from an advertiser pulling out of any future placements as the banker in question felt we’d personally insulted him. 

The op-ed was about a series of incidents where banks had been stripping out information from their wire communications to evade US regulators and Harry had drawn a bald fat guy in red dollar sign underwear pole dancing for a bunch of terrorists and drug dealers to illustrate the story.

The banker told our sales guy that we had obviously modelled the illustration on him! When our sales guy told him that was just how Harry drew generic establishment white men, the banker retorted “then why is he wearing my underwear?”

Harry later gave me a hand drawing of the illustration and I have it on my desk to this day.

Looking to 2022, what comms trends do you look forward to and how will you equip yourself?
ESG is continuing to be more and more of a focus certainly, but I also think a lot of the existing reporting standards are insufficient. There are fast-fashion and even mercenary companies getting high marks in ESG, when there are fundamental issues with the business models.

I think getting beyond numbers reporting and telling an ESG story about your core business should be better recognised. It’s harder to quantify for investors, but it’s a story companies should communicate.

Any parting words of advice for young starters in the media / comms world?
Demand in the job market for people with communications skills is really high right now, particularly in Asia. As a person interested in journalism that graduated during the 2009 recession, I’ve always had to scrabble to get my foot in the door and I got by with a smile and a shoeshine. My attitude was always to take every meeting and always be seeking, just in case what you have falls through. I think employers now are having frustrations hiring and that’s not the right attitude. Be careful not to waste anyone’s time or be indecisive.  

More stories


Telum Media

Database

Get in touch to hear more

Request demo

Telum Media

Alerts

Regular email alerts featuring the latest news and moves from the media industry across Asia Pacific Enjoy exclusive daily interviews with senior journalists and PRs as well as in-house editorial and features from the Telum team

Subscribe for alerts