About three decades ago, when PR was still in its infancy in the region, the one indispensable tool for media mapping was the humble ruler. Measured in column centimeters, coverage of news – or the amount of ink on paper – was the only way to identify impact, and it also served as the primary means for public relations agencies to justify their revenue.
Media intelligence was largely unheard of, and aside from cultivating relationships with journalists, there was little genuine understanding of the media landscape beyond a constantly updated Excel sheet of contacts.
Over the years, with social media – and now Generative AI – redefining the rules of media engagement, media intelligence has pivoted to an entirely different model. Tried and tested approaches to capture media attention are passé, and clients need genuine counsel emerging from agencies to support their campaigns.
When everything that defines media is changing, right from search behaviours moving from Google to conversational engines like Perplexity, the way media intelligence shapes conversations and engagement – between clients, agencies, and audiences – needs to be recalibrated.
That recalibration has already commenced. Media intelligence in the Gen AI era is not simply about drawing on AI-generated content, but in articulating what the AI tool offers to strategic decision-making.
This goes against the grain of what the industry has been used to: Commoditization of media monitoring, replete with dashboards offering so-called ‘real-time alerts’ and word clouds. And with the arrival of the influencer era, with the overt focus on reach and impressions, the industry continues to pride in vanity metrics – even as all these parameters of measurement look increasingly irrelevant.
How many times have we heard already about campaigns ‘reaching’ 4 billion people – over half the world population? Could that be true? Would a campaign, with just about 100 hits in print, some TV coverage and amplification by influencers (however large their number of followers be) really reach, connect with and engage half the world population?
We all know it cannot be true. Reach and impressions are increasingly seen as metrics of convenience that tech companies offer as the alternative to the Advertising Value Equivalent to drive digital media growth.
While these figures may look impressive on a PPT deck or an award entry (more so when we have newswire agencies with shell websites including hundreds in China amplifying a press release’s reach to billions) they do not answer the fundamental question of the C-suite: did this campaign genuinely shift stakeholder perception or deliver tangible business value?
This over-reliance on volume has led to the illusion that algorithms are irreplaceable when it comes to decoding human emotion, sentiment and intent.
Today, map any sentiment analysis using any of the popular media measurement tools, and what you get are the three buckets of sentiments – positive, negative and neutral.
But can machines really read between the lines? Can they identify sarcasm, cultural nuances, regional dialects and industry contexts?
We often see that a purely data-led approach could flag a sarcastic tweet as an endorsement and at the same time misinterpret a factual, balanced report as a full-blown crisis – flagged as ‘negative’.
When we allow technology to map sentiment without human oversight, we are doing our clients a disservice: We are advising them based on flawed premises, disregarding the fact that data needs context and only then it becomes intelligence.
While AI can process millions of data points in a fraction of a second, it takes an experienced professional to connect those dots to a geopolitical shift, the competitive marketplace or an overarching trend.
The true value of media intelligence therefore lies in addressing the ‘so what?’ and drawing on raw data to convert them into actionable foresight. It is about advising clients on where they can lead, rather than simply reacting to what has already been published.
Ultimately, this requires a new framework for engaging clients, which is rooted in value addition. The era of the monthly coverage report, often a static document filled with automated graphs, must change. Instead, media intelligence must be integrated into the business strategy. We need to connect media outcomes directly to tangible business objectives.
We must boldly ask: Did the 4 billion reach translate to business results? Did the 1 million impressions create any genuine impression for your business? Did your thought leadership campaign enhance genuine industry leadership or was it just another paid post that led to inflated impressions metrics?
In an age where data is infinite and human attention is 10X fragmented, agencies must ensure that the output of a machine is underpinned by human insight. That is the only way to deliver real media intelligence.
By Thomas Jacob is the Director – Media & Growth at Katalyst
