Stephen Hall

Leads the Media & Analyst Relations function for a global professional services firm (90+ countries, 13,000+ employees), overseeing strategy, KPIs, and team performance.

Media Relations & Corporate Communications

• Developed and implemented media strategies that elevated ZS’s visibility in top-tier national publications.
• Cultivated journalist and influencer relationships to drive positive coverage for senior executives and SMEs.
• Led crisis communications and reputation management, ensuring consistent messaging across channels.
• Oversaw content strategy for press releases, thought leadership, and bylined articles.
• Partnered with marketing and product teams to craft differentiated market messaging.
• Spearheaded executive briefing development for high-stakes media and analyst interactions.

Analyst Relations

• Strengthened relationships with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC to enhance ZS’s market positioning.
• Secured and improved inclusion in key industry reports (Magic Quadrants, WAVEs, MarketScapes).
• Managed analyst inquiries, briefings, and advisory sessions, aligning insights with business and product strategies.
• Translated analyst feedback into actionable intelligence for brand promotion, product marketing, and sales enablement.

Function & Team Leadership

• Led a high-performing analyst and media relations team, ensuring alignment with corporate goals.
• Managed cross-functional collaboration across varied teams, stakeholders, agencies, and vendors.
• Owned and optimized AR/MR budget for cost-effective engagement.

Key Achievements

• Increased Media Coverage: Secured a 50% increase in tier-one media placements and doubled message pull-through year-over-year.
• Refined Executive Strategy: Streamlined SME roster and positioned ZS leaders as key industry voices.
• Enhanced Market Perception: Leveraged analyst insights to refine go-to-market strategies, driving business growth.
• Boosted Analyst Recognition: Increased ZS’s mentions in key analyst reports by 200% year-over-year.

Directed strategic media and community relations across 34 independent Blue Cross Blue Shield companies, unifying disparate communications efforts into a consistent national voice for the brand.

• Responsible for enterprise external brand communications during pivotal moments in healthcare, including national COVID-19 response. Drove balanced, high-impact coverage in tier-1 outlets such as The New York Times, Politico, and Modern Healthcare.
• Developed and implemented executive visibility programs for senior leadership, producing thought leadership content and securing placements in top-tier policy and business media, which elevated BCBS’s role in healthcare reform and public health innovation.
• Collaborated closely with internal departments including Government Affairs, Policy, and Digital Strategy to ensure cohesion across messaging, campaigns, and advocacy communications.

Key Achievements

• Created a centralized media monitoring and intelligence hub to identify reputational risks and inform rapid-response strategies, significantly improving issue management and stakeholder alignment.
• Built and managed a cross-functional communications team and agency partners to execute multichannel PESO media strategy, achieving a 27% year-over-year increase in brand share of voice.

• Led stakeholder communications teams responsible for media monitoring, community management, and intelligence reporting to company leadership. Managed the creation and execution of a streamlined morning briefing, integrating diverse messaging channels—policy, advocacy, and executive thought leadership—into a cohesive daily product.
• Drove collaboration between communications teams and subject matter experts, consolidating numerous niche reports into a single, impactful briefing. Adapted quickly to evolving leadership priorities and corporate vision while fostering team retention and morale by emphasizing individual strengths during a particularly challenging period in healthcare PR.

• Managed media monitoring and measurement for 34 BCBS companies, leveraging listening tools and alerts to analyze brand mentions across traditional and social media. Led community management and online customer service, overseeing press releases, content, and ad publishing.
• Produced two daily newsletters to inform executives and stakeholders, optimizing process efficiency and increasing readership by 40% YoY through data-driven insights from PoliteMail and Salesforce. Enhanced community management with a structured tagging system, template responses, and improved tracking of campaign metrics, sentiment, and customer service issues.

• Extensive media monitoring duties and routing of noteworthy/newsworthy articles, press releases, studies, etc, to internal stakeholders and executives. Published a daily media summary newsletter, to send company-wide, containing industry news of note.

• Led team that created, grew, and managed online community of 10,000+ doctors, residents, and medical professionals purchasing educational materials to pass their various board exams.
• Responsible for creating, editing, and proofing engaging content for company's social media presence and online community - including videos, faculty/staff interviews, and infographics.