The Democratization of PR Tech: There’s No Reason to Sacrifice ‘Form for Function’

Editor’s Note: Days after the New Year began, private equity group Symphony Technology Group unveiled a global media monitoring, measurement and workflow management company for PR and communication. It fuses PR and communication vendor Onclusive with UK-based media relations workflow provider PRGloo and Kantar Reputation Intelligence, Europe’s largest media monitoring and analysis firm. The new company, known as Onclusive, will have 1,000 employees in eight countries and support 9,000 organizations in 130 markets.

At our deadline, Manuel Moerbach, former Statista president and CEO of the Americas and APAC, was named Onclusive’s CEO.

Prior to that, we spoke with Onclusive president Sean O’Neal. He said the combination of technology and human expertise still offers the best solutions for PR pros. In addition, he believes PR and media relations technology has progressed to the point where the excuse ‘We can’t afford custom tools and so are unable to measure’ no longer holds. O’Neal’s remarks were edited for clarity and space.]

PRNEWS: We hear a lot about AI eventually removing the human element in analytics. It sounds like your argument is that while tools and technology are vital, the need for humans to interpret data and extract insight remains important.

Onclusive President Sean O'Neal

Sean O’Neal: I don’t see [the human element] going away anytime soon. Onclusive was a pioneer of machine learning, bringing it into the media-monitoring analytics space well over a decade ago…our engineering teams are on the bleeding edge.