Access Intelligence has rebranded following a series of acquisitions. I caught up with CEO Joanna Arnold to talk about AI, media intelligence, social listening, platforms and the PRtech market.

Vuelio’s parent company Access Intelligence recently acquired Pulsar, the social listening platform. It follows the acquisition of ResponseSource, a network that connects media and influencers, in 2018.

Access Intelligence is building an end-to-end platform of PRtech tools.

Darryl Sparey and Richard Bagnall are veterans of the media intelligence tool market. I sought them out to help make sense of the deal and the market for media intelligence and tools.

“The Pulsar acquisition makes strategic sense. It has a great opportunity in a market that is noisy and overcrowded,” said Darryl Sparey, Business Development Director, Hotwire.

“There’s an education job to do. I’d challenge the assertion that PR practitioners are ready to spend their day inside an end-to-end platform,” said Richard Bagnall, Chairman, AMEC, and managing partner, Carma.

Sparey and Bagnall’s comments reflect the fragmentation of the PRtech market. It’s a subset of the martech market that has developed through point tools.

Vuelio’s end-to-end strategy is similar to Cision, the market’s $2.74 billion juggernaut. It has spent more than $1billion in the past five years building a cloud based platform. I wrote its planned refinancing recently.

I caught up with Access Intelligence’s CEO Joanna Arnold to get answers to these issues and more.

#1 What does the Pulsar acquisition give Access Intelligence? Who are Pulsar’s customers and what does it deliver for them?

Pulsar expands our capability in social listening, trend forecasting, audience segmentation and marketing evaluation.

One of the propositions we’re most excited about is its planning product. This provides insights at an earlier stage in the marketing planning cycle.

Pulsar typically work with marketing departments rather than communication or PR. Its clients are a mix of enterprise brands such as Heineken, Mazda, NBC and Paramount and advertising agencies such as BBDO, Group M and Mother.

#2 How does Pulsar differ from Cision’s investments in BrandWatch and TrendKite? And how does it compare with other platforms such as Meltwater and Sysomos?

Pulsar has carved a distinct space for itself in a crowded market.

It enables you to segment an audience by communities of interest and then segment the conversation based on the community that's talking. It's a game changer for making sense of public opinion and customer feedback in a strategic way.

It's also the only platform that provides industry specific and custom AI for analysing text and images at scale. It allows you to structure data to address and organisation's specific challenges.

Finally, it includes industry specific data sources such as health care professionals social network Sermo which gives them an edge on competitors in many industries.

#3 AI is over hyped by the PR vendor community. How is it used to benefit clients in the Pulsar platform?

The biggest challenge with AI is helping people to understand what it can do and its application.

Pulsar uses AI to structure data to identify changes in audience perceptions and behaviours and then connect them to their marketing challenges. Users can choose which visual and text mining algorithms to use to analyse their data depending on what category they're researching.

For example, a query to understand breakfast habits would benefit from applying Pulsar's food AI to understand what ingredients are appearing in the images that people share on Instagram.

#4 The media intelligence market is a crowded market. At the low end you've got Signal and Meltwater and at the premium end Cision and Kantar. Where does Vuelio fit and what's your opportunity?

We’re in an interesting marketplace which is ready to be disrupted by a company like ours that is determined to improve our customers’ experience and support them to capitalise on technology to unlock value to their businesses.

Just as in every other technology industry, the challenge is that for too long, we’ve not made it easy for our customers to understand the full potential of our platform – this is our focus for the year ahead.

#5 Does Access Intelligence plan to integrate its database, engagement and social listening solutions?

We already offer our clients a fully integrated platform by which to access our media and influencer database, engagement and monitoring tools and evaluate results. Our model is modular so customers can choose to also include stakeholder monitoring and insights depending on their organisation or market sector.

The Pulsar proposition will be offered to clients on both a standalone and integrated basis depending on their needs. Longer term, our ambition is to provide monitoring, engagement, evaluation and insight in one place whether for politics, editorial, social media or marketing attribution.

It reflects our vision of creating technology that contributes to a world of open, effective communication by improving the relationships between government, business, media and influencers.

#6 Have you any evidence that there is demand in the PR marketing for an end-to-end platform?

We know from our customers that they want to be able to improve how effective their activity is by understanding who is influential to their brand, topic or audience then how to best engage and secure impact.

Increasingly, they want to be able to be able to evaluate and report using metrics that the broader marketing industry uses. This convergence of marketing and PR is one of the factors driving demand for an end-to-end platform.

#7 There’s a gap in the Access Intelligence portfolio for analytics and evaluation. What’s the plan?

I don’t agree that we have a gap. Several our clients use our analytics and evaluation services. We are continuing to invest to scale our analytics and evaluation propositions. This is part of our ongoing commitment to improve our services and help our clients understand what best practice in evaluation is and how to deliver on it.  

#8 What’s the appropriate mix between automation and professional services in media insight, engagement and measurement? What’s Vuelio’s approach to services?

This is an important question and echoes my earlier point around AI. The value of AI can only be realised when you combine it with the human intelligence needed to decipher data into actionable insights. It’s why we invest in our people as much as our technology.