Easy, fast, affordable media analysis... PRtrak
As winners of multiple Silver Anvils and Gold Quills, we’d seen first-hand the power of tying our work to outcomes for our clients. But we were struggling with the enormous amounts of time it took to compile measurement reports for our clients at our Houston-based PR firm, Jeffrey Communications. We developed a way to make one part of the measurement equation, media analysis, easy, fast and affordable for ourselves… and decided to offer this solution to our peers. That was the birth of PRtrak.

Through unique agreements with the leading media research firms (see Partners link), PRtrak® provided users with fast and simple reports containing calculated audience and media-value data available no where else. As the word spread, hundreds of firms signed-on attracted by the ability to generate simple, but meaningful, reports.

The First Acquisition
In January 2002, our venture was acquired by Philadelphia-based Surveillance Data, Inc. (SDI), an analytical powerhouse that specializes in predictive modeling in illness, weather and allergies for Fortune 100s. SDI had also developed an artificial intelligence, advanced linguistics system that could read and analyze text qualitatively! With this new capability, SDI analyzed millions of news clips at very low costs, and compared the findings with business outcomes for various clients… identifying the link we’ve all been seeking, which is called, “Share of Discussion.”

Share of Discussion is the “quality and quantity of your firm’s non-paid media compared with its competitors.” In 97% of the 160 studies now completed, SDI has seen strong correlations between Share of Discussion and business outcomes such as sales, customer preference, prescription volumes, and more.

SDI began to use PRtrak’s precision database, whose metrics greatly improved the correlations between editorial coverage and business outcomes. So impressed was SDI by the power of these metrics to illuminate the correlations, it acquired PRtrak and continued to develop new interfaces to enable practitioners of even modest budgets to help prove the power of their work.

Today
PRtrak now offers a continuum of measurement options from very affordable, DIY to higher-end Share of Discussion full-service analysis. The new Media Prominence Index, refined by testing on 200,000 clips and compared against outcomes, combines qualitative and quantitative measures to form the best possible metric today for comparative media analysis. This sophisticated new metric is available in even the most affordable do-it-yourself version of PRtrak, continuing the tradition of offering the best in media measurement at affordable prices to the PR industry.

Gary Getto and Angela Jeffrey, APR, vice presidents of the PRtrak division, continue to work on standardizing media measurement metrics across the industry, and on closing the link between outputs and outcomes. They speak regularly on these topics to PR and marketing groups nationwide.

If you’d like to know more, contact Angela Jeffrey, APR, Vice President at 713-956-1516 or sales@vmsinfo.com.