PR Measurement market heats up with Michaelson/Echo move

On Monday, Echo Research, the UK based media measurement company, announced that David Michaelson has merged his research company with Echo.. While that may not have garnered many headlines, it is a significant  development as far as the PR measurement world goes, signalling Echo's greater commitment to the US market. Echo opened an office in New York several years ago, but the firm remained primarily a UK player. Michaelson brings a number of high profile clients with him and my guess is that we'll be seeing more of Echo in our competitive space. A space that is growing increasingly competitive as more companies realize the need for PR metrics. Report International, (RI) one of Echo's long-standing UK rivals, also just increased its US presence by hiring Jill Ury, formerly of Delahaye and Cision.
The interesting thing about all these developments is that ten years ago, I was convinced that the future of PR measurement was closer integration with traditional survey research in order to show the connection between attitudes, perceptions and the media. Now all the major players like Echo, TNS/Cymfony, RI and of course KDPaine & Partners, have significant survey research capabilities. Proving my theory that you are never wrong, you're just early.  The really interesting thing to watch will be whether and how well they  actually integrate that research. 

Comments

[KDPaine]

thanks for the comments, Mike. What we're seeing is that the CMO Dashboard is driving the interest in PR dashboards, so there IS hope out there

[Mike Daniels]

The logistics of running integrated programmes of media analysis and stakeholder/consumer research isn't really the issue. The difficulty lies with a combination of our sector's traditional PR clients not being research-oriented (although this is changing), and the silo mentality within large corporates, which means that it's very difficult, if not impossible to have productive conversations with the market research function. They usually have tons of useful data - but are often reluctant to let it out of their control. And the market research function generally don't think it's their job to commission "PR stuff", or have the budget for it. So, we go round and round in circles. What makes it even trickier is the number of market researchers who don't believe that media analysis can deliver data that's robust enough to meet their standards.

However, we believe there's a sea-change in the business environment. There is increasing pressure from the C-suite to maximise marketing dollars - everything possible has now been done to drive down costs at the production/supply chain end - so now the focus is on improving the customer experience to maximise the effectiveness of marketing spends. We're seeing some of our clients implement dedicated marketing effectiveness teams, who absolutely see the need for accurate media analysis data to feed into their models and integrate with consumer and stakeholder research. Consultancies like CCW are in the vanguard here, and one of our parent group's goals is to build a strong data analytics resource to underpin our marketing effectiveness offering.

However, as a sector, we still need (collectively) to drive standards of data collection and analysis much higher, to satisfy new clients whose expectations are based on their experience with market research companies.

You're right, Katie, that our customers are changing in their demands - and I think both Echo's announcement and our newly enhanced research capabilities recognise those changes in customer requirements... Interesting times!