Food for Thought: How data analytics is changing the world of media communications
Written by Anthea Cudworth, IABC NSW Vice-President and Communications Director, H.R.L. Morrison & Co
For our first live event this year, we were hosted by Streem, a media monitoring business, conveniently located opposite the News Corp building in Surry Hills. And in light of the delicious lunch they provided, we’ve called this story “Food for Thought”.
CEO Elgar Welch joined us to introduce the business, which was launched in 2017, as an innovative real-time platform providing media distribution, email reporting, media and social media monitoring and analysis. It’s just been acquired by Cision, a US media business, and is looking to expand its reach and continue to push the envelope of media analytics.
Insights and Reporting Lead, Asha Oberoi took us on a journey into the future of media analysis, sharing insights into the significant impact data analytics is having on the quality and value of the media function.
A recent survey of Streem clients identified that 92% of clients were using media insight reports for KPI and performance reporting, 75% were delivering insights to their leadership team and 67% were using it to inform their strategy setting. Chief Comms Officers also value trend analysis such as their share of voice over time, how key topics have been covered and what stories have attracted the most interest over a specific time period.
Asha also noted that some communicators are interested to see how their efforts to limit or curtail a negative story have succeeded by tracking how coverage has fallen over the course of a news cycle.
The top metrics currently being presented by media communicators are:
Net sentiment score
Volume of media coverage
Share of voice
CEO spotlight
Quality and prominence of key coverage.
Asha is also convinced that the old metric of ASR (advertising space rate) or AVR (advertising value equivalency) introduced in the 1940s by marketers, will eventually be discarded as the higher quality metrics adopted by media communicators are increasingly recognised.
And what does the future hold? With the rich data held by organisations such as Streem, they are gaining new insights across industries, they’re building up social listening to support social media teams, and following the acquisition by Cision, Australian teams will start to have more access to licensed materials from around the world.
Our thanks to the Streem team for a valuable and interesting event, for sharing their insights into the media sector, and for the delicious and plentiful lunch, which was a particular highlight.