14 - 20 June 2001

Connecting thoughts and ideas worldwide

Garvan Keating, founder of CountryProfiler.com, talks to Blanche Gatt about the in-depth on-line report on Malta that his company is compiling, and explains how this project could benefit the island

Maltese efforts to raise its profile as a centre for foreign investment are just about to get a helping hand from an unexpected quarter. Country Profiler.com, a Canadian-registered international media company producing on-line reports that provide in-depth insight into a country’s top 100 companies, government and organisations, has chosen Malta as their first profile.
Featuring interviews with business leaders and key public sector representatives, the report, says Country Profiler (CP), is concise yet detailed, and will be aggressively marketed throughout the business world, with regular adverts in leading international publications and the web link emailed directly to around 5,000 CEOs and chairmen of the leading companies around the world. Within a year and a half, CP plans to have produced similar reports on 120 other countries around the world.
“Through our work we have access to the most influential people in the business world, the global decision-makers,” said CP founder Garvan Keating. “With this report we can help put Malta on their agenda by showing them what opportunities the island offers. We also have long experience of providing information to these people, so we know what they want and how to present it. Our idea is to try and identify what are the untapped opportunities that exist, and put this information into a format that is easily accessible to anyone who wants it. Then it’s up to Malta to take it from there.”
The concept for CountryProfiler evolved from the traditional country reports that are frequently produced for newspapers around the world. “These printed reports are limiting in a number of ways,” explained Garvan, “first being space, second being the high cost of production that is inevitably passed on to the sponsors. We sought to add value for the reader (decision makers), for the companies being profiled and for those interested in gaining increased exposure by sponsoring the report.
By producing the reports for the Internet, CountryProfiler.com is able to bring together a wealth of information and create a concise, comprehensive report that has no limits. Instead of focusing on one key market, CountryProfiler.com reaches an international audience with a focus on the key financial markets.”
As a journalist working for a European media company, Garvan felt that the Internet was the ideal way to present the interviews that he had been conducting worldwide. In July 2000, Garvan teamed up with a Canadian web design company, PIC Productions to begin conceptualising his vision for CountryProfiler.com. They have recently announced they will be releasing their first on-line report, on Malta, in July.
“We have been asked why Malta very often,” Garvan said, “especially in South Africa and Ireland, where we already have main sponsors signed up and keen to see the reports on-line. However, Malta was our first choice because we saw a lot of opportunity in a country that is not very well-known around the world, and yet has so much to offer. Most people don’t know, for example, that Malta is an ideal testing ground for new technology, one of only five such countries around the world. Malta’s size was also an important factor; the country is small enough that we could put our report together comfortably, and access the information we needed with relative ease.”
Currently in the process of compiling the hundreds of pages of information that will make up the completed report, CP will be targeting their reports to top decision-makers in key commercial and financial markets, promising to promote each individual CP country report directly to the markets that have the most economic influence on the country being profiled.
“The report will be open to everybody,” said Garvan. “However, London, Frankfurt and New York are the main markets, so we concentrate our efforts on the key decision makers of the top corporations in these countries. Our marketing plans for the Malta report include prominent advertising in the traditional press, namely the Financial Times, Die Zeit and the Wall Street Journal, as well as direct email of the link to the 5,000+ company leaders on our database.”
Describing the report as the most in-depth report on Malta that has ever been constructed, Garvan explained that the material for it was compiled using various sources of information. “Apart from interviewing the CEO’s of Malta’s leading companies,” he said, “we got a lot of assistance from MDC, MFSC, the Chamber of Commerce, the FOI, MIA and the DOI. The response throughout was very positive, and with the exception of 1 or 2 CEOs, everyone was very enthusiastic about helping us gather all the material we needed. And, I think the few who haven’t cooperated so far are concerned that we may charge them for publishing the interview. However, with CountryProfiler there is no charge for participating, and 90 out of the 100 we approached have been very helpful.”
Based on a schedule of sponsorships, CP’s financial model allows them to focus on the companies of interest, rather than just the ones willing to pay. “Each report will be sponsored by five main sponsors and 12 secondary ones, whose investment entitles them to occupy prime advertising positions through the site. However, the other companies are included totally free of charge, and there is no obligation to buy either sponsorship or advertising linked to their inclusion.”
Although additional advertising on the site is excluded as a result of the sponsorship deals, companies that are featured are also offered the opportunity to pay for a web link to their own corporate sites direct from the CP pages. So far CP has signed up MFSC as one of their main sponsors, as well as a number of secondary ones, and are in the process of negotiating with several companies and agencies for the remaining slots.
Country Profiler also plans to capture the contents of the entire report on a mini-CD which they believe could be a useful tool for government agencies, embassies and consulates trying to promote Malta as an investment centre. “We are currently putting together the details such as cost and distribution for the mini-CD,” said Garvan, “but already the mini-CD has generated a lot of interest in business circles.”
The Malta report was compiled by a team of experienced journalists from the UK and Ireland, who have spent the last two months on the island. Concurrently, the design of the webpages was created at the company’s headquarters, in Toronto, Canada. Garvan plans that the Malta report should be completed within the next few weeks.
“Once the Malta site is on-line,” he said, “we will remain on the island for a few weeks to ensure it is all running smoothly, and then move on to South Africa and Ireland, whose reports should be on-line within a month. They will be followed by Hong Kong and Finland and we aim to have reports on 120 countries around the world on-line within a year and half.”