How can you best track a brand's part in an ongoing story?

Different organisations need to monitor media coverage for different reasons. Often, they just want to check brand mentions in order to assess awareness. But effectiveness of PR messages as measured by take-up is also frequently important as is monitoring the success of their brands versus competitors.

Various companies commissioned TNS Media Intelligence to track coverage during the unfolding swine flu pandemic story. One wanted to get an indication of who to target with future messaging so the monitoring had to focus on the key third party spokespeople, the messages they were delivering and the titles they appeared in. Another needed to assess the comparative awareness of its anti-viral product versus its competitors. This was met by recording references to specific drug names.

Media scorecard tool

One of the tools used to brief clients is the media scorecard – a one or two page summary of key data using graphics. It is quick to set up and highly adaptable to changing needs. Having given the go ahead at 5pm, one client received their first scorecard the next morning.

What the scorecard measured

Although it’s concise and simple to understand, Media Scorecards still manage to deliver significant findings. Clients received data on the volume of articles about the flu pandemic, the main titles and the journalists covering the story. The scorecard also identified the key issue. Across the period of monitoring, this remained, unsurprisingly, the threat of pandemic.

The key commentators were identified and the key driver of the coverage – new cases of swine flu in the UK, for example. Charts presented volume trends, as well as volume by publication and issues. Any front page headlines were listed along with commentary that explained the coverage, e.g. “Volume of coverage remained at 15 items today, as media attention remains focused on the row over MPs expenses claims.” Pie charts presented issues as a share of voice measured by volume and also prominence of coverage as measured by the percentage of stories on the front page, pages 2-5 and further down the paper. Analysing collated data Data from the daily scorecards was collated and analysed to generate insights on trends. This revealed that coverage of the main anti-viral treatments used for swine flu, Tamiflu (Roche) and Relenza (GlaxoSmithKline), peaked during the first week and a half of the outbreak, with 258 items mentioning one or both of the treatments (82 per cent of the total volume of treatment mentions to date). Of these two treatments, Tamiflu has proved to be consistently more prominent in coverage - appearing in 233 items to date (74 per cent of all coverage which discussed treatments), compared to just 82 items for Relenza. Alternative scorecard objectives Scorecards can be designed to meet most media monitoring objectives, and enhanced with qualitative evaluation of data. An example is press items being rated for how positive or negative they are in order to track how a brand is perceived. Press releases can also be tracked with breakdowns provided on whether coverage was proactive or reactive. And scorecards can present the advertising equivalent value and return on investment of press coverage.