Since Context’s founding in 1992,  digital has reshaped the media landscape, and with this shift we have seen new opportunities to derive deeper insights into how influencers and stakeholders perceive and interact with brands. This has allowed us to better measure brand reputations and ultimately measure the business impact of these perceptions.

We believe that there is much additional opportunity to leverage analytics and data-driven consulting in the planning and measurement of earned media campaigns, and that joining forces with Project Metal will help us get there faster. Project Metal is developing a series of services that combine analytics and measurement; search optimization; and digital design and build capabilities. Its services will be entirely complementary to those of the existing NextFifteen brands.

For existing Context Analytics clients it will be business as usual – we are the same team in the same locations, continuing to build on the work we deliver every day. But stay tuned for new insights and solutions to help make more informed marketing decisions.

For more information, see this PR Week story.

There are many reasons I say this:

• 99% of all the content created by PR professionals now appears online
• There is an entire industry growing up around creating tools to mine the huge volumes of data this generates
• The data that can be derived from earned media is potentially more valuable than the data from paid media campaigns because of the inherent rise in the value of earned media.

The limitations to date have been that the focus of data gathering in the PR industry has been to listen and monitor. This is hugely valuable in its own right but it doesn’t directly translate into business value. As Context Analytics becomes a part of Project Metal (article here) the most exciting thing for me is looking at how we move beyond listening and monitoring to measuring the impact of earned media on a business. This is now possible and it is an area where Context Analytics has been doing some pioneering work.

By combining media measurement, web analytics, audience data and search analytics we can now demonstrate which type of articles in which digital media destinations generate the lowest cost per customer acquisition. As mentioned in this piece of research from Alterian, earned media outreach can genuinely compete for marketing spend against direct marketing dollars or Google adwords dollars. Now that truly is a crossroads for the PR industry.