Blattel Communications’ Sourcing Bureau scours the wires and business and industry news outlets for relevant and immediate opportunities to connect our client sources to provide quotes on breaking or ongoing news.
Connecting Sources to the Media
The Sourcing Bureau is an innovation built to fuel client team collaboration and develop deep media relationships. Reporters turn to the agency for timely and insightful commentary on trending news stories. Through the Sourcing Bureau, Blattel Communications is often able to offer multiple sources, differentiated by geographic markets and industry focus – helping the media better understand sector movements and breaking news to write great stories. Much of the Sourcing Bureau’s work occurs in the background, as we explore issues in depth with media outlets. Once a clear match arises, we bring the opportunity to comment to the appropriate professionals, ensuring best use of our clients’ time and resources.
We also subscribe to, and actively participate in, multiple online channels where journalists post article topics for which they seek sources. In addition, we have ongoing contact and communication with influencers at significant media outlets. Through a combination of these activities, we regularly find opportunities for our clients to participate in breaking news commentary as third-party experts on important industry trends and issues.
Measuring Media Success
The Sourcing Bureau uses various tools for measuring and reporting media activity. We have developed dashboards showing how paid, earned, shared and owned media activity stacks up in terms of impact (readership/UVPM) and relative to similar client competitors. This helps professional services clients have a greater understanding of the effort-to-reward ratio and moves analysis and evaluation beyond “clip counting,” which we believe is a misleading indicator of success. For us, being seen in the right places provides significantly greater value than being seen in a large quantity of places your prospects will never see.
Our use of tracking and measurement tools can also offer firms insight into how well their individual practice or industry groups are performing against organizational goals. An evolving process, buttressed by a leading, third-party media relations database platform, clients using these dashboards continue to help Blattel fine-tune reporting and identify relevant metrics. While other agencies often offer little-to-no insight on process or reporting on key performance indicators, our integrated approach speaks to Blattel’s unique value proposition of placing a premium on collaboration with our clients.