Influence Won’t Sit Still and the Media List Can’t Keep Up

Tracking the media in Australia has shifted from a neat list of mastheads and broadcasters to a sprawl of podcasts, TikTok, newsletters, forums, anonymous accounts and AI-generated answers.

 

Credit: Ryan Snaadt via Unsplash

 

 

John Croll, who ran then market leader Media Monitors for two decades, including after its name change to Isentia, is bringing his media intelligence company Truescope home to Australia starting Thursday this week (October 1) after running in New Zealand, Singapore and North America.

 

"The old list was finite and known in advance; today's list is closer to a moving target we have to keep rediscovering," Croll told AdNews.

 

The definition of who holds influence has shifted with it.

 

"We define it by demonstrated effect on a conversation, not by follower count or masthead reputation -- someone who can move sentiment, spark pickup elsewhere, or set the frame that bigger outlets later adopt," Croll said.

 

"That's shifted a lot: five years ago it was mostly journalists and a handful of verified commentators; now it includes niche newsletter writers, anonymous accounts with real credibility in a subculture, and increasingly AI systems themselves, which package and re-present information to millions of people without ever 'publishing' in the traditional sense."

 

Mastheads, broadcast and radio are still tracked because of their effect on brands, reputations and issues.

 

Reach and engagement figures do not compare cleanly across channels. Truescope starts with a client's communication objectives and audience, then links coverage back to them.

 

"A single citation in the right forum, read by the right decision-makers, can matter more than a wire story with ten times the reach -- so the comparison that matters isn't reach-to-reach, it's relevance and impact against what the client is actually trying to achieve," Croll said.

 

A brand's presence in AI answers was fast becoming as important as traditional coverage.

 

"When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Overview about a brand, they're getting a synthesised answer, not a list of articles to weigh up themselves, and that answer is shaped by a different set of signals than traditional SEO or PR ever was," Croll said.

 

"We're starting to think about brand visibility inside AI-generated answers the same way the industry used to think about front-page placement, and I expect that will only grow in weight from here."

 

"AI replaced most of the manual reading, tagging and first-pass sentiment scoring that used to require large analyst teams — that was genuinely a headcount-for-headcount substitution," Croll said.

 

"What it made faster, rather than replacing, is insight generation: turning raw coverage into an answer our clients can act on, which used to take analysts days and now happens in near-real time.

 

"The judgment calls -- what actually matters to a client's strategy, how to read a nuanced or ambiguous story -- those still need experienced people; there are just far fewer of them needed per customer than there used to be.

 

"And while we're more efficient, this also delivers more value to clients, since we're now delivering real-time intelligence."

 

Crollis is launching here with 65 staff, using AI for the reading, tagging and sentiment scoring that once needed 1,200 people at Isentia.

 

He said the main lesson from Isentia was that size was not the point.

 

"The biggest one is that scale for its own sake isn't the goal, coverage and accuracy are," he said.

 

"At Isentia we built a large organisation to manually process volume; at Truescope we've deliberately kept the team lean and put the effort into the technology instead."

 

The second lesson was about what clients do with the information.

 

"The other lesson is about client relationships: media intelligence is only useful if it changes what a comms or exec team does next, so we've stayed focused on making our clients the most informed person in the room," he said.

"Traditional monitoring companies delivered 'what happened' … Truescope is focused on delivering 'what does it mean'."

 

Truescope stayed out of Australia for years because of uncertainty over copyright licensing.

 

Croll said the issue had been one of pricing clarity rather than cost.

 

"It was never that we didn't want to be here," he said. "The real barrier was uncertainty in the pricing and licensing structure, which made it hard to give clients, or our own financial model, any certainty.

 

"That's now been resolved: while the licensing is still expensive, the content owners are clear about the rights and the pricing, so we can plan around it properly."

 

Talks with the industry before launch pointed to a lack of investment and innovation in the sector.

 

Croll said most media monitoring major players were foreign-owned, leaving the Australian market to live with platform and service decisions made elsewhere.

 

"Clients are unhappy too, particularly with tricky contract and renewal conditions that feel more like lock-in than partnership," he said.

 

"That's the gap we want to close: we want to earn every renewal through genuinely great service, innovation that delivers real insight and efficiency, and great people behind the product."

Truescope's own AI tools measure current rather than future influence.

 

"We're moving toward a predictive model, but today our AI tools analyse the current performance of influencers and media content and provide insight into the impact a story is having," Croll said.

 

AI-generated content and bot-amplified narratives are treated as part of the picture rather than filtered out.

 

"Even if it is polluting the signal, it's important for our clients to know about it and make their own decisions on the impact of the post," Croll said. "Our job is to find the signals and identify the risk."

 

 

Source: AdNews