Build vs Buy — Public Relations Agencies

What this means for Public Relations Agencies

• Media monitoring still runs on Cision/Meltwater plus a junior-account-executive copy-paste loop — clip reports take 8-12 hours weekly per major client and ship full of irrelevant mentions and missed coverage.
• Sentiment analysis is still being done by a 24-year-old reading articles and color-coding a spreadsheet — the methodology changes every time a new AE rotates onto the account and the trend lines are noise.
• Media list maintenance is broken — reporters move beats every six months, the contact database goes stale, and pitches go to journalists who covered the topic three jobs ago.

Where it pays to act

• AI-driven media monitoring and clip relevance scoring — replacing the JAE copy-paste loop with a system that surfaces the 30 mentions that matter from the 3,000 the keyword search returns.
• Sentiment and narrative tracking — LLM-based topic modeling and sentiment analysis with consistent methodology across accounts and time, finally producing trend lines a CMO can defend in the boardroom.