There are way more satellites flying overhead than you think. What are they doing up there? Welcome to the Marketing Accelerator Podcast, featuring 3 Insights in about 3 Minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker, and today I'm speaking with Andrew Mullin. He's the VP of Marketing at EarthDaily. This organization delivers space age data and analytics to organizations and people who feed the planet. Andrew, let's start with the basics. What is space age data and analytics?
Andrew Mullin: EarthDaily is a vertically integrated satellite and geospatial analytics company, which means that we own and operate a network of satellites, and we provide that data and insights thereof from that satellite network. And one of the things that has created many new opportunities with Earth observation is the fact that the cost to get things up in space, thanks to SpaceX and others, has gone down 90%. And that has opened the doors to many other applications of using Earth observation or geospatial analytics, and, in our case, we support the ag industry, so people that lend money to ag, the people that insure ag, the people that trade it in commodities, the people that consume it from a raw goods perspective, food and beverage companies. And so we're using Earth observation to provide change detection and progress analysis of food production - meaning crops - around the world, all day, every day. So real time or near real time.
Drew: Let's focus on a specific issue. I've been to Ukraine, know a few people there. Ukraine's the breadbasket that feeds Europe and North Africa. How did the Russian invasion impact your work at EarthDaily?
Andrew: Sure, we happen to have quite a portfolio of customers, employees and partners, both in Russia and Ukraine. And obviously, the war forced a choice on us in terms of how we were going to respond. And in our case, we sort of dumped all of our business, all of our relationships with Russia, closed our operations there, and focused our attention on how we could support our employees, our partners and customers in Ukraine. And for us, that means the farming and agro business community of Ukraine. And we chose to give away our service for free for the foreseeable future to help them stabilize their business. And that led to this conversation around purpose over profit, and from a senior leadership standpoint, all the way up to our board of directors, how do we walk that road in a meaningful way? Obviously, dumping the business and giving our service away for free, we chose purpose.
Drew: Focusing on purpose over profit, always sounds like the right thing to do, but it could be very difficult to execute. How did you handle that?
Andrew: Yeah, in our case, we're a relatively new company, a little over a year old, with...in relative terms, a small revenue footprint, and the path we chose was to put a call to action out to our peers and others in the space industry and Earth observation as well in the agro business, and say, "Hey, can we form a coalition to support these farmers in this agro business?" And to somewhat our surprise, we've had a very robust response both from Earth observation and from the agro business community. Some of the biggest in the world, like the European Space Agency, like Syngenta, who we've joined forces with to provide direct and material support to the farming and agro business community in Ukraine. And we've been very pleased by strength in numbers and that cavalry responding to that call and to provide that direct support to a part of the world that desperately needs them.
Drew: Doing the right thing usually comes at a cost and are a reflection of the company's core values and priorities. Well done, Andrew.
Drew: The Marketing Accelerator Podcast is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.