The whitespace in PR coverage tracking and why intelligent reporting matters
Talking Points highlights the topics, trends, and technology, defining the media and communications sectors.
The whitespace in PR coverage tracking and why intelligent reporting matters
As the end of the year looms, communications professionals around the globe are dreading year-end coverage and results reporting for clients. Communicating the value of PR in quantitative results has never been easy, yet in a world of widespread layoffs and budget cuts, it’s more important than ever to showcase tangible value and advocate for your team’s 2025 resources.
Proving the business value of earned media and showing thought leadership growth over time can be tricky. Traditional measurement methods are outdated and limited, unable to communicate nuance and give a complete picture of our work, which can make winning the internal battle for resources challenging.
🔎 Finding the Whitespace
There’s a whitespace between what platforms like Cision and MuckRack provide and the level of detail and personalized data analysis clients crave. Legacy tools often miss stories, spit out metrics that include junk sites, and tout coverage that isn’t truly earned. It’s lacking the details that actually reflect our day-to-day work. And let’s be honest, no one has time to get there entirely by hand.
That got us thinking: how can we better illustrate our business impact and use data to give communicators a permanent seat at the table? The answer was to build it ourselves.
We spent the last year building a smarter and more sophisticated measurement platform, the Coverage Analysis & Tracking Solution (CATS), to address these issues head-on.
Rather than generating basic numbers like story count or sentiment, we’ve found that it’s far more valuable to focus on providing deeper and more strategic coverage analysis that meets each client’s individual needs. Segmenting data out by individual product placements, executive quote inclusions, where you stand vs. competitors, or even by coverage related to a past crisis, can better showcase PR’s impact on specific areas of the business, which is often more relevant and digestible for key internal stakeholders.
Here are the key things we’ve learned throughout this process that can (hopefully) help protect your team’s budget heading into the new year.
📈 Tailoring Analysis for Specific Stakeholders
Results are often packaged up as a one-size-fits-all report, but what’s relevant for your CFO is starkly different from your CMO. Marketers may be thinking about increasing brand awareness with key target audiences, while finance leaders will want to know how media hits are impacting sales. It’s crucial to tailor your results and how you present them for each individual or team, such as building share of voice pie charts or geographical maps for creatives while focusing on standard graphs and numerical data (i.e. AVE, UVMs) for analytical thinkers.
👀 Look Beyond Basic Metrics
Especially when communicating to a non-PR audience, it’s important to source data beyond standard metrics like UVMs and AVE that don’t always paint the full picture. With CATS, we attach tags to each piece of coverage, enabling us to categorize earned media based on the executives mentioned, a specific announcement or segment of the business, whether it’s a full feature story or passing mention, related to a previous crisis, and more. This creates countless opportunities to glean deeper insights on and segment out your data, rather than pulling metrics for the overall story count that doesn’t always do our work justice.
⏰Coverage Tracking is an Always-On Job
Nothing’s worse than a scramble to catch up on a month's worth of coverage in one day to make a report deadline… we’ve all been there. Reporting is a 365-day job, and procrastinating will only make your life harder. Chipping away at tracking little by little throughout the year helps us get ahead, but it also comes in very handy when clients or other stakeholders have an on-the-fly data ask.
Comms people have avoided numbers for too long, and trust us, we’ve been just as guilty of it. Yet in today’s tumultuous environment – especially in the tech industry – the teams that are seen as non-trivial to the bottom line are the first to go. We’re strong believers that data will help us be better communicators and safeguard our role as a whole.
Interested in learning more about CATS and how we can uplevel your team’s coverage tracking and data analysis? Send us a note at contact@jsapartners.co.
McDonald’s carefully walks political tightrope following Trump visit
Former president Donald Trump took the internet by storm earlier this month when his campaign trail made an unconventional stop inside a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
Trump traded in his navy suit for an apron last week where he served pre-screened customers hot french fries and answered reporters’ questions, all through the drive-thru window.
McDonald’s has been an unusual centerpiece of this year’s election – from Trump’s well-documented love of fast food to Harris’ references of her college job working under the Golden Arches.
However, Trump’s repeated claims denying Harris actually worked at the restaurant added some extra grease to the deep fryer in this particular photo-op. The stunt went completely viral between that narrative consistently reemerging throughout the election and the meme-worthiness of a billionaire serving french fries in French cuffs. Over the next several days, Trump’s campaign stop took over social media feeds and generated a swell of news coverage on both the left and right side of the political media spectrum.
Some may say McDonald’s has been a major beneficiary of the stunt (anyone else craving a McDouble after all this?), but the campaign stop inadvertently landed the fast food brand in the middle of a fiery election to the extent that it forced their hand to say something.
McDonald’s responded in the coming days with a statement that carefully walked the political tightrope without, for the most part, offending either side – notwithstanding an initial McFlurry of one-star Yelp reviews. Here’s the TLDR on how they did it:
Avoided taking a political stance: In a political climate as decisive as this one, picking a side would mean alienating half of your customers, especially for a brand as universal as McDonald’s. The company clearly asserted it “does not endorse candidates for elected office," adding that "we are not red or blue – we are golden."
Clearly outlined their involvement: A saving grace that likely helped quiet the waters was that McDonald’s wasn’t directly involved in coordinating Trump’s visit; rather, one of its franchisees had inquired about the former president’s desire to stop at the PA location. The company confirmed this, and says when the request landed on its desks, they approached it through its lens that "we open our doors to everyone.”
Reaffirming core values: A follow-up on that last point is that McDonald’s didn’t just smooth things over with its statement, the company used the moment to reaffirm the brand’s core values. Whether that was “fostering local communities” or sharing the (interesting) statistic that one in eight Americans have, at some point in their lives, worked at a McDonald’s.
McDonald’s statement hit all the right notes – sincere, clear, and turning the moment into an opportunity. No rest for the corp comms teams however as they now must manage an E. coli outbreak linked to Quarter Pounders. Tough week.
What cascading layoffs in games media means for comms pros
Any publicist working in esports and gaming will agree: it’s been a rough few years.
Cascading layoffs across games media has upended many of our (and our client’s) favorite mainstays – from SBJ Esports to Washington Post’s Launcher and more. Things haven’t eased up either.
In the last several weeks, Gamurs (the group behind sites like Dot Esports, Destructoid, Twinfinite, and dozens of others) made another round of layoffs and more recently, GG Recon shuttered its site and let go of its writers.
This means publishers, esports organizations, and other stakeholders are losing part of their marketing mix and need to get creative to get in front of consumers. Here’s how we’re navigating a shrinking media landscape without sacrificing campaign awareness.
Tapping influencers: While gaming’s media arm is shrinking, the industry’s appetite for curators, influencers, and tastemakers is growing. Some of the largest–and arguably most impactful–distribution channels in gaming are online creators like Jake Lucky or Mark Cai.
Supporting independent writers: Layoffs (across all sectors) are increasingly pushing skilled writers to go independent with their own sites or newsletters. Continue to maintain your relationship by keeping them in the loop on relevant news, providing equal access to spokespeople, and help them build their next project (it’s a win-win for everyone involved).
Make it turnkey: Consolidated newsrooms mean more work is being spread across less people. We’re being mindful of bandwidth constraints by offering longer lead times on news and accommodating busy schedules with alternate access opportunities like remote interviews and virtual press rooms for live events.
The landscape may look different than it did several years ago, but the demand for gaming content and its consumption continues to rise to record heights, it’s just a matter of finding the right channels and executing correctly.
What we’re working on ☕
[TechCrunch]: “Character.AI welcomed Erin Teague, a seasoned YouTube executive, as the company's new Chief Product Officer.”
[Bleeding Cool]: “Red Bull Gaming Reveals Apex Legends Duos Competition”
[Esports Insider]: “ESL FACEIT Group details $22m contribution for Counter-Strike ecosystem in 2025 and 2026”
[Esports.gg]: “E-District to be played at the ALGS Championship in Japan”
[Polygon]: “Matt Inman, the creative mind behind The Oatmeal and Co-Creator of Exploding Kittens, Inc., has a new game – Horrible Therapist.”
[Police1]: “Flock Safety Enters Law Enforcement Drone Market with Acquisition of Aerodome”