When Allison Demas set up shop in the basement of Beacon Insurance’s offices on Stanmore Avenue in 2011, she sunk most of her savings into the venture, persuaded her mother to invest on “pure blind faith” and secured a loan from Republic Bank. No Caribbean company had done what she was proposing, to track, electronically, what was running on local radio, television and in newspapers, then sell that data to advertisers and media houses.
Fifteen years later, Media InSite has 32 full-time employees plus a network of regional contractors. The company tracks media output across the Caribbean for a range of clients in the private sector, public sector and international organisations, and counts among its clients companies that once doubted it would survive its first year.
“I remember going to a major manufacturer to pitch for their business,” Demas said. “The marketing manager looked at me and said, ‘How long have you been around?’ It hadn’t been a year. She said, ‘How do I know Media InSite is going to exist in the next five years?’” She didn’t quite recall what she said to her, but that company became a client. Fifteen years on, Media InSite is getting ready to mark its anniversary.
A Caribbean childhood by design
To understand how Demas got here, it helps to start with her parents. Her father was the late William G. Demas, her mother a paediatrician. Demas senior was an economist, the first Secretary-General of Caricom, a three-term president of the Caribbean Development Bank, and Governor of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago from 1988 to 1992. To his daughter, he was “the quintessential Caribbean man”.
“His dream was Caribbean integration. I grew up in a household that was very Caribbean conscious. My mum is Jamaican. I lived in several Caribbean countries: born in Trinidad; attended Miss Simpson’s preschool in Jamaica for a few years as well as Bishop Anstey Junior School in Trinidad and St. Margaret’s Primary School, Georgetown, Guyana. I sat Common Entrance in Guyana, and for secondary school attended Bishop’s High School, Georgetown, Queen’s College in Barbados and Bishop Anstey High School in Port-of-Spain.
Demas did a law degree at UWI, Cave Hill, in the early to mid 1980’s around the same time as Kamla Persad-Bissesar, Pennelope Beckles and Prakash Ramadhar, before moving to London to attend London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Along the way, Demas forged friendships which only deepened her Caribbeanness in the way her father dreamed. One of her London flatmates for one year was a young, self-assured Mia Mottley. She, Allison and others would sit for hours as Mottley, now a three-term Prime Minister of Barbados, outlined her plan for the region’s development. “I always had a strong sense of making a contribution to the Caribbean. When I started Media InSite, I knew I was not going to be limited to Trinidad and Tobago, my vision was always for a company serving the Caribbean,” she said.
From copyright law to data
Demas’ path to business ownership began with the decision to study law, which she said she chose “by default”, because she struggled with mathematics and the sciences but excelled in English literature, geography and history.
“I felt I didn’t have much of a choice, and I was also feeling my way, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she said. She completed her degree and went back to London to work.
During that period, she married fellow attorney Garvin Simonette and began working at a law firm. One day, a copyright case literally fell on her desk which sent her headlong into the world of intellectual property (IP).
“I was fascinated.”So much so, Demas started University of London courses on IP, even though she wasn’t enrolled.
“I knew my way around the university so I would sit in on lectures and read all the material, even though I couldn’t take the exams. So I kind of taught myself,” she chuckled.
Eventually, she attained a master’s degree in intellectual property and copyright entertainment with a focus on commerce and technology from Franklin Pierce Law in New Hampshire.
In 1994, Demas returned to Trinidad and Tobago after four years in London, and shortly after she was invited to join the board of directors of the Copyright Music Organisation of Trinidad and Tobago (COTT). She left again to pursue her masters and was later hired as chief executive officer of COTT, where she stayed for seven years.
At COTT, Demas helped embed the culture of respect for intellectual property and paying to play in a country that was accustomed to selling “pirate” music – cassettes and CDs.
“Back then, the average business person resented the notion of getting a licence to play music in their establishment.”
Her priority was education. She shifted the perception of COTT as “music police” to music partner with a marketing strategy that promoted “music driving business”.
Media InSite is born
It was at COTT, around 2009, that Demas spotted her next pivot. “I was ready to leave COTT but I didn’t want to go back to law and I really liked business. I had learned how to run an organisation and I wanted to run my own. Also, I was fascinated with technology.”
New technology made it possible to track radio airplay electronically rather than by ear. Broadcasters, who already controlled the music rights conversation, showed little interest in tracking music but advertisements, were a different proposition.
“If you could track music, you could track other media content. That is an area that could be monetised,” she said.
True to form, Demas did her research. She purchased used tracking equipment, secured a licensing agreement from Media Guide, a subsidiary of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and started by logging newspaper and radio advertising. Television came later, as did news monitoring and social media.
Growth not a straight line
The company started with seven employees. While other companies had attempted to do what Demas was proposing for T&T, like the global ratings company Neilsen, clients soon realised imported data didn’t match local realities.
“There was no substitute for local knowledge and insight, and being on the ground, the value that Media InSite provides.” She has successfully demonstrated that value to private sector and State-owned companies.
Over the course of running Media InSite, Demas was never daunted by challenges. When the COVID-19 pandemic threatened, she pivoted, again, and reshaped the business rather than breaking it. Advertising-monitoring revenue collapsed as clients pulled spending, but demand for news monitoring, particularly from financial services and insurance firms, picked up the slack.
When lockdowns lifted, Demas calculated the savings on rent and utilities and made the company predominantly remote: roughly 80 per cent of staff now work from home, with the rest rotating through a serviced office. A 15-minute Monday morning video huddle and quarterly in-person meetings now stand in for the “water-cooler moments” lost to remote work.
While Media InSite is the realisation of her vision, it has been nurtured by her family and network. Demas’ husband, who passed away late last year, was a silent but major business partner contributing capital and counsel.
Often referred to as an innovator, Demas is equally attuned to her team’s emotional well-being.
“I would see really high performers getting very low marks for attendance and wonder why,” she said of a staff base that is roughly 60 per cent female. She traced much of the absenteeism to health concerns – fibroids, painful periods and related conditions. On the recommendation of her HR consultant, Media InSite introduced paid menstrual leave. The company has since included in its HR manual Intimate Partner Leave (paternity or maternity) and support for persons who may suffer abuse by an intimate partner.
A media industry she can’t fully read
While she is certain about where she plans to take Media InSite, Demas is far less certain about the future of the industry her business depends on.
“I would not like to be a media owner in these times, because the commercial model is really being threatened.”
She values the democratisation that digital and social platforms have enabled, but worries about disinformation eroding outlets she considers “the arbiter of truth.” Regional radio is “holding its own,” she said, though Media InSite’s own data shows a dip in listenership this year. Whether subscription models can work in Caribbean markets she honestly doesn’t know.
She is excited about deeper investment in artificial intelligence, including the possibility of building Media InSite’s own large language models, layered with the human judgment she insists machines still lack, particularly around local idiom and sentiment.
“ ‘That real bad!’ can mean something is great in our dialect,” she said. “A machine may interpret something as predominantly negative without taking into consideration our local nuance.”
Fifteen years in, with Media InSite’s footprint running from the Bahamas to Guyana, Demas says she has no immediate plans to retire. “My daughter, Aisha, says she doesn’t think I’ll ever retire.”
“My mum always told me, ‘Allison, as a woman, you have to work twice as hard as a man to succeed. And that stuck with me.” Half-jokingly, Demas said it is also what contributed to her becoming a workaholic.
“Mummy has no idea what the business does, up to this day,” she joked.
