Another is the expression of your key messages. By always reading, understanding and considering our clients’ coverage, we can understand the broad qualitative impression being left and, critically, the extent to which this is resonating. Based on our decades of experience as specialists in the investment and property fields, we always consider our clients’ competitive position and perception in terms of the key ideas that are developing in their particular area of the market right now.

This also enables metrics which we track for clients which combine qualitative judgement with statistics and trends. For example, we determine how prominently our clients are placed in a piece of coverage, how dominant your brand is within every instance, and therefore the ‘quality’ of that individual piece of media exposure. That could range from being the sole focus of the entire article to being only very briefly name-checked, and critically, it requires an expert to properly read every article. This in turn allows a statistical analysis of the quality of every article that mentions that business.

Finally, sentiment is an overused phrase in any marketing analysis – and in our view, often over-automated too. Even today’s state-of-the-art algorithms tend to rely too much on the broad ‘positivity’ of certain words or phrases in an article. So that’s not what we use. Instead, we assess based on our reading of your media coverage whether the meaning of an article expresses your key messages.

Combining data and human insight is the best way to assess the success of our work for clients and allows us to continually evolve and enhance communications programmes to ensure continuous improvements. It’s how we have always operated at JPES, and in a world where automation keeps improving, it’s how we intend to roll out every future improvement to our suite of insights available for clients.