Precise Media
Precise Media, generally known in the market as Precise, was a London-based media monitoring and evaluation company tracking press, broadcast and online coverage for clients. It supplied media monitoring, analysis and insight services to brands, agencies and public-sector organisations, helping them understand how they were represented in news and conversation and what effect their communications had. Founded in 1996, it employed 430 people at the time of its acquisition in 2014, when WPP's Kantar Media bought a majority stake in the business.
Founding and growth
Precise was founded in 1996. Precise Media Monitoring Ltd was incorporated on 10 September 1996, with its registered office in London, and its registered industry classification is news agency activities. From those beginnings in the traditional press-cuttings era, the company grew into what it described by 2012 as the United Kingdom's leading media monitoring and evaluation provider.
By the year ending 30 September 2013, Precise's revenues were £28.9 million, with gross assets of £34.4 million. It was based in London, with its United Kingdom headquarters there, and it also had offices in New York. Its later registered office was at Montacute Yards, 186 Shoreditch High Street in London. That scale placed it among the substantial British businesses in the market for monitoring and evaluating media coverage, a market serving public relations, corporate communications and reputation management.
What media monitoring involves
A media monitoring company tracks press, broadcast and online coverage for clients, so that an organisation can see where it, its brands, its competitors and its issues have been mentioned. An evaluation company goes further, analysing that coverage — its volume, its prominence, its tone and its messages — to assess the impact of public relations campaigns and the state of a client's reputation.
Precise described itself as a business information group that monitors, analyses and draws insight from news, opinions and conversations to help organisations understand the trends and influences that impact on their businesses. Its clients at the time of its acquisition included multinationals, public relations agencies, public-sector bodies and small and medium-sized enterprises. For such clients, monitoring was not an end in itself: it supplied the evidence base for communications decisions, campaign reporting and reputation tracking.
Chorus: the content engine
The technical centre of Precise's operation was Chorus, the company's proprietary content acquisition and analysis engine. In January 2012 Precise announced enhancements to Chorus designed to increase its ability to structure the data it captured. Precise processed on average 20 million content items a month, and the Chorus system enabled it to perform a sophisticated linguistic analysis of that content.
The enhancements integrated a range of cloud-based service additions with the Autonomy intelligent data operations layer, known as IDOL, a key component of Chorus. Those service additions extended Chorus's capabilities to cover entity identification, sentiment analysis and the automated categorisation of content. In other words, the system could recognise the people, companies and subjects mentioned in coverage, assess whether coverage was positive or negative in tone, and sort material into categories automatically, turning an enormous flow of unstructured content into structured data that analysts and clients could use.
Why the technology mattered
Precise's chief information officer, Tony Prime, explained the driver behind the Chorus developments as the rapid growth in the sources of content relevant to those charged with managing corporate and brand reputations. The company captured a comprehensive range of content, from broadcast material through to social media content, and that enormous range of data brought challenges centred on filtering the data and identifying the sources that have influence.
Bringing structure to an ever-increasing stream of content was, in Prime's words, a critical process allowing Precise to deliver relevant and meaningful insights to customers. The developments also represented an important step towards extending the content analysed by Chorus to a wider set of unstructured data. The trajectory is characteristic of the industry in that period: monitoring expanded from printed press cuttings to broadcast transcripts, online news and social conversation, and the competitive advantage moved towards linguistic technology capable of analysing millions of items consistently and quickly.
Acquisition by Kantar Media
On 10 June 2014, it was announced that Kantar Media, WPP's media research and analytics business, had bought a majority stake in Precise. WPP said the acquisition strengthened its global expertise in media reputation tracking and impact analysis for public relations campaigns across the board, bridging mainstream and social media. The acquisition continued WPP's strategy of developing its services in important markets and sectors and strengthening its capabilities in data investment management.
WPP's group chief executive at the time was Martin Sorrell. In the United Kingdom, WPP companies, including associates, collectively generated revenues of nearly $3 billion and employed more than 15,000 people, giving a sense of the scale of the group into which Precise was absorbed. For Kantar Media, buying an established monitoring and evaluation provider with 430 staff and an established client base offered immediate depth in a specialism adjacent to its media research and analytics work.
Clients and services in practice
Precise supplied media monitoring, analysis and insight services to brands, agencies and public-sector organisations. In practical terms, a corporate client could follow its press, broadcast and online coverage, a public relations agency could report the results of campaigns to its own clients, and a public-sector body could track coverage of policies and public debates. Multinationals used such services to maintain a consistent view of reputation across markets, while smaller organisations used them to keep track of coverage they could not monitor unaided.
The combination of monitoring and evaluation distinguished providers such as Precise from simple cuttings services. Monitoring answered the question of what had been said and where; evaluation and insight attempted to answer what it meant — which messages had landed, which outlets and voices were influential, and how sentiment was moving. Precise's investment in sentiment analysis, entity identification and automated categorisation through Chorus was directed precisely at that second, analytical layer.
Place in the British monitoring industry
Precise belonged to a generation of British media intelligence companies that transformed an analogue trade — physically cutting articles from newspapers — into a digital, data-led service. Its foundation in 1996 came just as online news was beginning to expand the volume of monitorable content, and by the early 2010s it was processing tens of millions of items a month across broadcast, press, online and social sources. Its self-description as the United Kingdom's leading media monitoring and evaluation provider, its £28.9 million revenues and its 430 employees all mark it as one of the leading firms in that transition.
The 2014 acquisition also illustrates the consolidation of the industry, as large research and communications groups, in this case WPP through Kantar Media, bought specialist monitoring businesses to bridge mainstream and social media analysis. Precise's identity thereafter became bound up with Kantar Media, whose website became the company's web presence, while the registered company, Precise Media Monitoring Ltd, remained an active London-registered company with its long-standing 1996 incorporation.
Legacy
Precise Media's legacy lies in the professionalisation of media evaluation in Britain. It helped establish the expectation that public relations and corporate communications should be measured not merely by the volume of coverage generated but by its content, tone and impact, analysed at scale with linguistic technology. The Chorus engine, processing on average 20 million content items a month, embodied that shift from cuttings to data. As part of Kantar Media from 2014, Precise's monitoring and evaluation expertise contributed to a global media research business, closing the independent chapter of a company founded in London in 1996.
