Insight tops the agency agenda at exclusive Cision breakfast
A select group of senior communicators gathered in London yesterday to discuss how insight and measurement technology is helping agencies tackle the biggest challenges facing PR today.
Representatives from 16 agencies including Bite Global, Good Relations, Grifco and Hills Balfour met with the Cision team for an intimate roundtable breakfast in The Gherkin.
At the top of the agenda was how to accurately measure the impact of PR initiatives and convey their true value to clients.
Neil Bayley, head of corporate brands at Good Relations, said: “For consumer campaigns you can reach the audience and talk to them and you can be quite confident in your understanding of the channels and how those channels influence them.”
Alex Hunter welcomes guests to this exclusive agency breakfast event
He continued: “If I have a client who’s got an energy efficiency proposition and they want to talk to financial directors, it’s really hard to get a sharp segmentation for that market.”
Alex Hunter, Cision’s head of relationship management for agencies, outlined how despite yielding the best results, earned media’s success has failed to translate into increase marketing investment.
Meanwhile, paid and owned media budgets have grown exponentially in recent years. In its most recent CMO spend survey, Gartner forecast that they would increase significantly in 2017.
“These industries have better ways of demonstrating ROI,” said Hunter. “We are looking at ways to help take your journey from the initial conception of your distribution, through to whether a customer is making active decisions against comms that you’ve made.”
He argued that data-driven insights hold the key to unlocking earned media’s true potential. When communicators can measure the impact of their work, they can make the case for increased investment in PR and comms.
Erica Harris, senior account director at Cision, highlighted The Stroke Association’s AMEC award-winning ‘#NewEra’ campaign as an example of what’s possible with the right measurement insights.
Having access to in-depth analysis while the campaign was running showed the charity it should adjust its strategy to target coverage with links to its campaign petition. As a result, it doubled the number of signatures its earned media coverage was generating.
Communicators from Aduro, Bite Global, Capsule Communications, Cognito Media, Cool Blue, Golley Slater, Good Relations, Grifo, Hills Balfour, Instinct PR and Kindred attended this Cision event.
