It’s not so long ago that media monitoring was a pure commodity business. Serried ranks of sharp-eyed youngsters would clip newspaper reports about company X or Y; photocopy the relevant extracts and stick them onto sheets of paper, together with the names and dates of the papers or journals from which they came; then pass them to someone else for delivery to the client.
More often than not, that client was a public relations firm. And the purpose of the whole laborious exercise was to prove what miracles the PR executives had performed on behalf of their clients. This wasn’t just a question of counting the column inches; it also involved convoluted methods of converting those column inches into ‘advertising value equivalents’, known in the trade as AVEs. With these, the PR firm could justify its efforts by reference to the amount of advertising budget that would have been needed to buy the same space in the form of straightforward advertising pages.This sort of stuff still goes on, of course, but media monitoring has been changed beyond recognition by computer technology. As with so much else that computer technology touches, it hasn’t rendered the job redundant; but it has increased the speed and sophistication with which it is done, and opened up new opportunities for service providers to add value.
At its simplest, this means that geography no longer stands in the way of quick delivery of daily cuttings. Clients can now receive their clippings almost immediately on their PCs, via modems.
In a crisis situation, such as a takeover, for example, clipping bureaux will deliver extracts or transcripts from broadsheet and tabloid papers, from journals and newsletters, and from the broadcast media – all within hours of their appearance. In the old days, this could only be accomplished by despatch riders and courier services physically delivering bulky reams of paper to clients’ homes or offices in the early hours of the morning.
Today, IROs can walk into their offices and turn on their machines at 8.30 in the morning to see exactly what has been said about their company since they left the office the evening before.
MA Management Services near Colchester, in southeast England, provides this kind of service – among others – and will link the daily computer feeds into the company’s server for internal e-mail distribution to managers. Those managers will see a list of the morning’s extracts, and can tick those they want to see in full. MA also offers analysis of the quality and quantity of media coverage, which can include a software package to produce charts and graphs to illustrate changes in favourability ratings, for example. ‘We can show the trends, by publication, by journalist – or, in a takeover, against the target or the acquirer, says Mike Ferland, of MA Management. ‘We’re tracking what’s being said – not necessarily what’s true. It allows companies to determine who their friends and enemies are within the media.’
But you don’t have to clip papers to monitor what the press is saying. Carma International, a media analysis firm with offices scattered across the globe, does nothing so mundane as cutting up newsprint or transcribing broadcasts. Rather, it buys in those services from external suppliers, so that its executives can concentrate their energies on the value added business of detailed analysis.
‘The real benefit of media analysis lies beyond the focus of justifying one’s past actions – and it is NOT about reducing everything into advertising equivalent values,’ says Sandra Macleod, managing director Europe at Carma International. ‘Careful content analysis of media coverage provides management intelligence. With many of our clients we have seen the impact of good media coverage on direct enquiries, on sales and even on share price.’
In fact, Carma does not restrict itself to covering mainstream newspapers, trade journals and other media; it also tracks broker reports. This can be enlightening for IR purposes, since it does more than just show up which analysts are well or ill-disposed to a client in terms of their specific recommendations to investors – which is something most IROs will already be tracking for themselves. It can also show how much influence individual analysts have outside their regular broker reports.
So, for example, if one particular analyst was out of line with other analysts covering a given company, by being markedly more negative about its prospects, that would matter far more if he or she were also someone who was frequently consulted and quoted by journalists. Tracking press comment systematically shows up such anomalies; and the company can then begin to take action both to try to turn such a broker’s opinion round and to engender more support from other brokers.
PR Data Systems in Washington is also interested in what brokers are saying about companies for whom it is analysing media coverage. But it tracks this through their comments reported in the press rather than through broker reports themselves.
PR Data almost always works directly for client companies rather than PR firms, and those clients supply PR Data with the clippings, usually via a bureau. ‘We first establish what messages are important to the client, then analyse whether they are getting those messages out,’ says Jack Schoonover at PR Data. ‘Clients are also interested in analysis of which media are covering them – the key ones, like the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Fortune versus the smaller ones – so that they can prioritise.’
His firm produces regular reports to its clients, complete with elaborate charts and graphs to indicate the level of media exposure. These are normally sent out quarterly, although the frequency is up to the client and will be subject to change in the event of a crisis. ‘We track distribution, as well, to show which of the media the company is sending its information to are actually using that information.’
That may sound like going back to column-inch counting. And it’s certainly true that even the most sophisticated analysis depends to some extent, at least indirectly, on crunching numbers and outputting percentages. But for IROs, media monitoring has to provide a useful basis for formulating action to improve the impact of press coverage on perceptions of a company’s strengths and weaknesses.
And that presupposes that the IR function regards the media as part of its territory. Many IR people would argue against this, seeking to define IR in purer, PR-free terms. Perhaps those are the ones who have not witnessed – in vivid technicolour – a collapse in their share price following hostile, even if inaccurate, press comment.
The Alliance and Leicester Loop
There are events in a business’s life when there simply isn’t time for detailed analysis, considered thought and the production of elegant charts and graphs. At such times, the feedback loop has to be as short and efficient as possible; and those responsible for generating media coverage have to be able to monitor it fast, make speedy decisions and act upon them almost immediately.
So it was for one of the UK’s leading building societies, the London-based Alliance & Leicester, earlier this year when it announced its intention – subject to the approval of its members – to convert itself into a bank and a public company, listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Such an announcement had been expected for some time but the fun really started on the last day of January. ‘The announcement went out at 8.30 that morning – to the staff, the media, Reuters, analysts and so on,’ says Annette Wrigley, manager of the Alliance & Leicester press office. ‘But we asked for there to be no live broadcast coverage before 9 am, so that the staff would find out about it by reading the faxes on their desks – not by hearing it on the news as they drove to work.’
Wrigley and her 5-strong team of in-house press officers had extensive input from London PR firm Focus Communications before the announcement; and she had additional outside help from Electronic Media Relations, or EMR.
EMR prepared some 70 different audio tapes, including statements from the chief executive, for radio stations to use; and it disseminated updated audio feeds to broadcasters all over the country during the course of the day, using satellite links which connected Alliance to EMR, and EMR to the radio stations. A video news release was also made available.
The Sussex-based firm of Parker Bishop was responsible for monitoring of radio and television coverage as the day progressed, providing written summaries – every 20-30 minutes during the morning – of the 2000 odd items broadcasts -throughout the country during the day.
‘Parker Bishop’s monitoring allowed us to flag up things not being generated by us,’ explains Wrigley. ‘If broadcasters were using their own material and had no comments from Alliance & Leicester people, we would ring them and offer a tape or something else they might need from us. We made arrangements for crews wanting to film in branches, for example.’
