April saw a major acquisition from Hootsuite, as well as licensing news from Australia and OpenAI. Meanwhile, Dataminr was rather active as it signals plans for an IPO and we have product updates from Digimind, Clip News, PR Newswire and Pulsar.
Hootsuite acquires Talkwalker
Hootsuite is acquiring Luxembourg’s Talkwalker for an undisclosed sum. The intention is to bolster Hootsuite’s social listening capability, which sits alongside its social media management toolkit. Talkwalker was acquired by Marlin Equity Partners in 2017 but operated as an independent company. Marlin also invested in Meltwater when it delisted from the Oslo Stock Exchange. Hootsuite’s last acquisition was Sparkcentral in 2021.
Isentia wins copyright case
Australian News Channel (ANC), which owns Sky News in Australia, has lost a copyright infringement case against Isentia, the media monitoring company owned by Access Intelligence. ANC had granted exclusive monitoring rights to Streem, a rival Australian media monitoring company owned by Cision. However, Isentia continued to share Sky News content to government clients. It argued that Australia’s Copyright Act permits the use of copyrighted material for Government services. Isentia was ultimately proved right in a Federal Court ruling. It will be interesting to see if the ruling impacts other exclusive monitoring arrangements in Australia.
OpenAI partners with the Financial Times
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has announced another news licensing deal, adding the UK’s Financial Times to a growing list of publishers it’s paying for content access. (The company has recently announced deals with the likes of Le Monde, Axel Springer and Prisa Media). On the content licensing front, the pair said the deal covers OpenAI’s use of the FT’s content for training AI models and, where appropriate, for displaying in generative AI responses produced by tools like ChatGPT. In addition, ChatGPT users will be able to see select attributed summaries, quotes and rich links to FT journalism in response to relevant queries, which sounds a little like media monitoring.
Eyes on Dataminr
Dataminr has released a slew of announcements this month. The company shared news of the expansion of its contract with NATO to provide the Dataminr First Alert service. First Alert is currently being used by over 145,000 users globally. Dataminr, a company that has been at the forefront of AI development, has also announced the implementation of a new AI-powered feature: ReGenAI. The new tool pairs predictive analytics with generative AI and allows users to regenerate event alerts in real time as events change, which is an impressive claim. Finally, Dataminr has announced the hiring of new president and COO Brian Gumbel as the business starts looking towards an IPO. (As a reminder, Dataminr’s last valuation was $USD 4.1 billion.)
USC Annenberg: Global Comms Report
The latest USC Annenberg Global Comms report has been released. The survey includes US respondents and examines the role that businesses, and executives, can play in social issues. Crucially, the report looks at the changing expectations of stakeholders and some conclusions tally with the Edelman Trust Barometer, released in January. It’s worth a read every year.
Media Intelligence Product Updates
Here are some of the product announcements that caught our attention this month:
Greece’s Clip News has announced the creation of its own AI tools for analysing media data, based on Greek language models. It’s the first of its kind in Greece. The tool was developed in a collaboration with Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s (AUTh’s) Intelligent Systems Lab of the Informatics Department (IS Lab).
Digimind has launched it’s 10.0 series. The updated Digimind Social now comes with AI Sentinel, a smart alerting system that autonomously identifies and comprehends the underlying reasons behind conversation surges that could harm a brand’s reputation.
Cision’s PR Newswire has partnered with SoSha to create SocialBoost, a new social media tool designed to enable social sharing of press releases. The offering will allow organizations to craft social media posts for end users to easily share on their social media channels, boosting organic social engagement.
Pulsar has launched a global media contacts and distribution product, Pulsar CONTACTS. The tool allows PR, comms and marketing professionals to access a media contacts database. The database evolves in real-time to stay up to date and accurate.
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