A market gets the tools that it deserves.

There is a long-standing joke in the PR industry that the most popular tool is Excel. It isn’t very funny.

Excel isn’t used to track the value that the PR industry creates but instead as a crude relationship management tool. It’s the wrong tool for the wrong job.

The PR industry tool market emerged from Cision, Kantar Media formerly Precise, and Meltwater. The promise of these organisations has long been cloud-based integrated workflow.

It is a promise that has been broken in the past few years.

Each has grown through acquisition from an original proposition of a database and media monitoring solution. Along the way content, distribution, analytics, and measurement tools have been acquired and bolted on.

Cision has spent more than $1bn on the acquisitions of Visible Technologies (2014), Vocus (2014), Gorkana (2016), PRNewswire (2015), Prime Research (2017), Falcon.io (2019) and Trendkite (2019).

Kantar Media, itself owned by WPP, acquired Precise in 2014. Meltwater is a relative upstart founded as a media monitoring and business intelligence software business.

“These vendors have Sellotaped together a lot of legacy tech into one big stack that they're trying to get a return out of for their shareholders,” said Darryl Sparey, Managing Director, Hard Numbers.

Cision, Meltwater and Kantar are aimed at the enterprise agency and in-house market and are expensive. They are also focused on earned media. The tool market is built on media relations and not public relations, or even the integrated PESO model.

“The problem with all of them is the focus on media, so they come under the heading of media and content tools rather than the business of relationships,” said Catherine Arrow, Executive Director, PR Knowledge Hub.

Most recently Vuelio has sought to challenge the status quo of the platforms, but it too is a financial vehicle, created by parent company Access Intelligence, wrapped up as a tool platform.

Vuelio acquired Cision UK (2015), ResponseSource (2018) and Pulsar (2019).

Paying for tools

Investment in software tools has historically flowed into more lucrative areas of marketing tech such as advertising, demand and performance. Until recently few PR agency or communication team budgets had a line item for tools.

Where the PR industry has benefited from tool innovation it is typically by retrofitting marketing tools to PR applications. Examples include Brandwatch, a social media monitoring tool, and Hubspot, a marketing automation platform.

“The real opportunity for smart PR firms is marketing automation and integration and mastery of CRM platforms such as Hubspot and Marketo,” said David Brain, Co-Founder at Stickybeak, Board Member at Enero, The Spinoff and Parkable.

Change is coming in the PR industry but it is woefully slow.

Tools built for the PR industry

CoverageBook is a reporting and automated metrics tool that removes the admin from media reporting and measurement.

Propel My PR has built a Salesforce style CRM solution for PR. It is focused on relationships and is built by PR people, for PR people.

Interoperability, the benefit of a platform approach, whereby data is handed off from one tool to another via an application programming interface (API), is a challenge. But this too is also changing.

Buzzsumo, acquired by Brandwatch in 2017, is an influencer identification tool. It identifies popular content in a network and the individuals sharing it. It’s also an effective monitoring tool.

“By outputting Buzzsumo data via RSS you can create an automated media monitoring capability using Google Sheets that provides the URLs to input into other tools such as CoverageBook or URL Profiler,” said Andrew Smith, Director, Escherman.

Thank you

This blog post started life as a discussion in the Marketing, media and PR community of practice. Thank you to all the contributors.