Bitvore looks at virtually all of the world’s English news content every single day. In order to understand it, we oftentimes break it down into smaller slices aligned with certain issues. For example, we wanted to take a look at executive titles in technology related industries. We grabbed 60,000 corporate precision news items over the course of a couple of months in that sector, and extracted the titles of the people quoted or discussed in the articles. We extracted 9,045 unique titles. The frequency of results weren’t much of a surprise.
- CEO (42.68%)
- President (21.01%)
- Chairman (15.00%)
- Chief Executive Officer (11.09%)
- Chief Executive (9.29%)
- President and CEO (9.15%)
- Analyst (8.02%)
- Spokesman (7.97%)
- Director (7.73%)
- Vice President (7.27%)
- Judge (7.13%)
- Chief Financial Officer (6.93%)
- Attorney (6.74%)
- Managing Director (6.45%)
- Executive (6.24%)
- CFO (6.15%)
- Chairman and CEO (5.49%)
- Leader (5.19%)
- President and Chief Executive Officer (5.13%)
- Spokeswoman (5.07%)
- Head (5.03%)
- Executive Vice President (4.57%)
- Senior Vice President (4.38%)
- Chief Operating Officer (4.07%)
- District Judge (3.98%)
Obviously some of these titles are similar or the same. Other common titles included founder/co-founder, manager/general manager, VP/Vice President, Partner, SVP/Senior Vice President, CTO/Chief Technology Officer as well as more exotic titles such as Acting Director of Enforcement and Market Oversight, Activist Investor, Air Vice Marshall, Alexa AI Assistant, and 45th President.
Have you ever wondered what executives really do with their time? Using our news analytics, we wanted to find out. One of the things we like to do with our data is evaluate the co-frequency of terms with other values. We took a subset of our signals - values that indicate something important or financially impactful happened - to see how these executives were collectively spending their time according to news announcements. To determine this, we rolled up our signals into 11 categories:
- Executive/Executive Changes
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Legal/Lawsuits/Patents
- Product Sales/Product Launches
- Fundraising
- Labor/Labor & Employment Issues
- Bankruptcy/Bankruptcy Filings & Procedures
- Layoffs/Workforce Changes
- Competition/Competitive Positioning
- Fiscal Issues/Financial Statements
- Regulatory Issues
What did we find out?
CEOs appear to split their time more equally between all aspects of the company as compared to other titles. No surprise there. All titles show up in news for either executive changes, executive announcements, or appointments, though Marketing, Sales, and CFO titles are mentioned twice as often. Marketing titles also touch on almost all business activities, but not as much as CEO activities. It's a little surprising they were not more represented in product activities. CTOs spend most of their time working on products and fundraising. Regulatory issues seem to be confined to the CEO, CTO, and CFO. The CEO and CFO are most mentioned in bankruptcy activities, as well as mergers & acquisitions.
While these percentages don't represent actual activities as they occur inside a company, sector, or industry, they do provide good insight into what news companies think is important enough to put out into the public arena. These results look interesting enough to dig into further to find other correlations, casting a wider net and a more detailed study over a longer period of time.
