All eyes on Cision’s finances
Cision created a new corporate entity on November 1, a move some consider to be the first step before an asset sale or collateral transfer. Cision’s CEO, Cali Tran, subsequently moved to the role of chairman at the company. Prasant Gondipalli, Cision’s CFO, has stepped in as interim CEO. According to Bloomberg, Cision has $USD 2.5 billion of debt. It’s $USD 1.2 billion first-lien term loan is due in 2027. Moody’s Ratings downgraded Cision to Caa1 earlier this year and projected the firm would have little, if any, revenue growth in 2024 for reasons including expectations of subdued buyout and financial activities weighing on PR Newswire.
Forrester: Emplifi & Sprinklr lead
Forrester has released its Forrester Wave report on Social Suites. The report found that when evaluating social media management platforms, customers are often disappointed with AI features that don’t meet expectations, despite vendor hype. Success factors include going beyond basic AI content assistance, prioritizing customer service and user experience over individual features, and carefully considering whether an all-in-one suite meets both core social media needs and emerging capabilities like employee advocacy and influencer marketing. Emplifi and Sprinklr were both highlighted as leaders. If you want to read the report, Brandwatch has made the report available to download.
Ruder Finn launches AI tool
This is not strictly a media intelligence story, but global PR agency Ruder Finn has launched rf.aio, a proprietary AI platform developed with influenceAI that monitors and optimizes how brands appear in responses from major LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama. The platform analyzes LLM responses to brand-related queries across factors including awareness, accuracy, and brand affinity, then creates and places corrective content to help train public models to prioritize trusted, factual sources and address any biases or misinformation. It’s an interesting use case, and is a very good way to detect reputational risk.
Golin big winner at AMEC Awards
November was packed full of measurement activities, as AMEC celebrated Measurement Month. Part of the festivities are the annual AMEC Awards. This year, Dr. Anne Gregory was honoured with the Don Bartholomew Lifetime Achievement Award. In the top-tier Platinum categories, Burson won the Most Effective Campaign of the Year for their Strategic Intelligence Platform for PR, while Golin secured the Communications, Research and Measurement Team of the Year award. Notable Gold winners across categories included Methods+Mastery for their Google Platforms work in social media measurement, Smoking Gun & Versuni Philips for best use of a measurement framework, and Golin’s work for Specsavers won in several categories including best use of integrated communication measurement. Congratulations to all those who won awards.
Media Intelligence Product Updates
Here are some of the product announcements that caught our attention this month:
Cision has announced a collaboration with Google Cloud to enhance its AI-powered communications solutions across its product suite, including PR Newswire, CisionOne, Brandwatch, and Streem, leveraging Google’s Vertex AI platform and Gemini models. The partnership builds on PR Newswire’s recently launched AI Suite of Tools and aims to provide customers with more powerful AI-delivered insights, enhanced productivity features, and future-proofed strategies.
Singapore’s GovTech has unveiled BrewBytes, an AI-powered news-scraping application that helps public servants efficiently search, analyze, and summarize news from global sources, featuring capabilities to assess political, economic, and social impacts of news stories. The tool, developed with Tote Board to streamline media monitoring and research tasks, was showcased alongside other AI prototypes at GovTech’s Innovation Day event, including solutions for vehicle price verification and government translation services.
InfoVision has launched AlphaMetricx, an AI-powered media analytics platform that combines custom LLMs with human expertise to provide real-time media monitoring and analysis for PR professionals and corporate communicators. The subscription-based platform offers traditional and social media monitoring, customized dashboards, and proprietary metrics including PR Impact Score and Message Congruence, with the ability to learn and adapt over time for more accurate insights.
According to a post on Reddit, Meltwater is changing its broadcast and podcast monitoring partner from TVEyes to Kinetiq. (I’ll leave it to you to verify if Reddit is true.)
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