The PR firm says, “Generative AI has democratized access to insights, allowing non-technical users to engage with complex data sets through intuitive interfaces and natural language queries”
Edelman is out with a new “enterprise-focused evaluation guide” for the communications industry. The report was first published in September 2024 and is titled “Edelman’s 2024 AI Landscape Report: The Communicator’s Guide to Finding AI Tools You Can Trust.”
The firm, which also publishes the popular “Trust Barometer” gives two reasons for developing and publishing the report:
First, the firm sees AI as “a critical imperative for marcom professionals.”
Second, “finding the right tools for marketing and communications is exceptionally difficult.”
Edelman’s methodology
Before diving in, it’s worth noting Edelman outlined an eight-step methodology in their report. The process included primary and secondary research, including vendor briefings, demos, some hands-on practice, and a survey, “targeting key persona segments, gathering insights into the market perception of the top vendors.”
I wrote to the research team and asked if they could elaborate on the survey demographics. According to an executive who responded in an email:
“[The] survey was conducted of mid-level and senior analytics professionals working in the US who have experience in the category with the tools listed.”
I yearn for a little more detail, but, certainly, by all outward appearances, their methodology looks sound and rigorous.
Edelman’s disclosures
Edelman disclosed in the report that it does use some of these tools in its day-to-day work, “as part of our standard operations.” Indeed, I found this video case study where an Edelman team member is endorsing a product by Quid, which was also ranked best in its class in that section of the report. That doesn’t mean Quid didn’t earn it, but readers should be aware of the relationship.
It is a fairly large firm, so chances are they probably use a lot of tools. For example, in 2019, Edelman partnered with Cision, which I covered in a monthly summary at the time.
For reference, I’ve never taken a dime from any of the vendors I’ve covered. If that changes, I’ll be transparent about it. My disclosure statement can be found on the breadcrumb menu at the top of every page on this site.
Edelman’s inclusion criteria
Edelman looked across a wide array of generative vendors and tools and narrowed the list down from there. The authors write that the team evaluated five different aspects to decide which tools to include in the report.
Inclusion criteria included the following:
- readiness of the tool (i.e. no vaporware);
- data quality;
- ethics;
- “explainability” of the tool or system; and
- financial viability of the vendor.
These filters resulted in a report that covered six large language models (LLMs), 104 vendors covering generative AI use cases across five areas:
- writing (16);
- research (10);
- analysis (17);
- design (31); and
- ideation (30).
The report included the logos of companies it examined, but not the names. So, I should note the math here is mine – by counting logos.
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A focus on the “analytics and social listening” section
For this blog post, I’ll be exclusively focused on the “analytics” section which begins on page 32 of the 40-page report. Why just the analysis section?
It’s the area that I think most directly impacts PR people. These are largely what we’ve traditionally called “media monitoring” tools, though there are a lot of pseudonyms now with overlapping capabilities (i.e. social listening, media intelligence, etc.).
In addition, I’ve covered some of these vendors – see this fairly comprehensive list of PR and comms technology vendors – for the last five years. This comes in the form of monthly news summaries, product briefs and hands-on product reviews – often written late at night and on weekends.
Edelman initially narrowed its list to 17 vendors – listed below in alphabetical order:
- Audiense
- Affinio
- Black Swan Data
- Brandwatch
- Cision
- Infegy
- Khoros
- Meltwater
- Muck Rack
- Onclusive
- Quid
- SignalAI
- Sprinklr
- Sprout Social
- StatSocial
- Talkwalker
- Propel
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Edelman’s short list of generative AI tools for monitoring
Over the course of the evaluation, Edelman refined that list further to just five generative AI “leaders” in the “analytics and social listening category.”
Those companies are:
- Quid
- Meltwater
- Talkwalker
- Signal AI
- Brandwatch
Here are some of the things Edelman had to say about each one – followed by my commentary.
1. Edelman on Quid
Here’s what Edelman had to say about Quid:
“The AI Search feature enables analysts to quickly craft more creative and accurate searches within the dashboard. Ask Quid further elevates this experience by providing specialized AI assistants that deliver real-time, contextually relevant insights from diverse consumer and market datasets, allowing for more precise and informed analysis. Quid’s AI Summaries distill complex data into concise, actionable narratives, helping users rapidly identify key trends and make strategic decisions with confidence.”
Commentary: I’m unfamiliar with Quid so I do not have a perspective to share. I do intend to take a look sometime later. A quick cursory look suggests to me this isn’t the right tool for PR in terms of what it needs to monitor news coverage.
2. Edelman on Meltwater:
Here’s what Edelman had to say about Meltwater:
“Meltwater’s AI Cluster technology organizes and highlights topic-related content, enabling users to quickly identify essential insights and previously unnoticed patterns. Combined with the Microsoft 365 Copilot integration, which promises to deliver real-time brand and competitive intelligence within Teams, these innovations reduce the need for manual analysis, facilitating quicker and more accurate decision-making.”
Commentary: I’ve watched Meltwater pretty closely over the last few years. Along with Cision, they are one of the industry’s traditional incumbents. There’s no doubt Meltwater has technology chops, and it was pouring resources into AI, and not just the generative variety, long before ChatGPT put generative AI in the mainstream. They’ve also done aqui-hires which bolstered their AI ranks with PhDs.
Meltwater, as Edelman noted, is also a partner with Microsoft. This is worth mentioning because Microsoft products have broad adoption in PR – and not just external communications but internal and employee communications too. That matters if you are using any of the many tools Microsoft has for internal comms.
More importantly, Edelman points out that integration into the workflow is crucial to AI adoption. I couldn’t agree more. Bouncing from tool-to-tool gets tedious in a short time. Microsoft, and Meltwater by extension, have an advantage, to putting that integration right into the tools PR uses every day.
Caveats?
In my opinion, Meltwater seems to have become taken with dealmaking and has experienced lots of organizational leadership and ownership changes. These things make me very cautious about the company. It’s given me the sense that Meltwater is looking beyond PR – and forgetting about its first love while it courts all the shiny new things. When it was a formerly publicly traded company, I could see this in how the company described its TAM to investors.
The other aspect of Meltwater is more subjective: it’s earned a reputation for very aggressive salespeople. PR people tend to be people-pleasers and will go to great lengths to avoid a salesperson pinning them down on a call, and, perhaps forcefully, following up. If you can get past all that, I think it’s a very capable monitoring tool.
3. Edelman on Talkwalker
Here’s what Edelman had to say about Talkwalker:
“Talkwalker’s AI-powered dashboards deliver significant value by offering customizable summaries and instant insights directly within your reporting tools. Talkwalker complements its analysis functions with the 1-Click AI Classifier, which automatically segments and categorizes vast amounts of data with ease, allowing businesses to manage and analyze their social data more effectively.”
Commentary: Talkwalker has broad brand recognition in PR circles. This is because they have offered free web alerts – which are like Google Alerts – only I think they are better. However, I’ve excluded them from my writing because they have a much wider appeal than PR – and I focus my writing on tech tools around PR, which is my profession.
4. Edelman on Signal AI
Here’s what Edelman had to say about Signal AI:
“Signal AI is bringing new innovations to marcom by using AI to eliminate the guesswork in topic discovery, allowing teams to uncover critical insights they might otherwise miss. The Topic Analysis feature uses AI to identify emerging trends and competitive movements, providing a nuanced understanding of the connections that matter most to businesses.”
Commentary: Signal AI tells an interesting story about issues management. In a call with the CEO, a lawyer turned entrepreneur, he walked me through the use case of being more proactive about emerging issues. Most businesses are reactive and by the time they respond, they are battling a narrative that’s already been set in the public’s mind.
The company has raised a lot of money and has scored some interesting partnerships with companies like Deloitte that appear to have revenue potential. That puts them in space, like public affairs, regulatory affairs and lobbying, that are tangential or perhaps overlapping with PR.
5. Edelman on Brandwatch
Here’s what Edelman had to say about Brandwatch
“Brandwatch focuses on AI-driven social intelligence, leveraging over a decade of expertise to provide businesses with precise, actionable insights. Its advanced AI tools, like Iris Conversation Insights, empower marcom professionals to swiftly understand and respond to critical trends and conversations, ensuring strategic agility in a dynamic market.”
Commentary: I have not looked at Brandwatch in depth, although it’s been on my to-do list. Brandwatch was acquired by Cision in early 2021 for a reported $450 million. It’s just one of 20 or so M&A transactions the company has executed over the last decade.
Because of those acquisitions, Cision has a lot of overlapping tools. The company has also had lots of executive turnover and ownership changes. Finally, it’s facing a legal battle with its former partner Dow Jones.
As such I’ve held off scoping out the product until we get a sense of where the company is headed. This ought to be a big consideration if you are evaluating Brandwatch too. I’ll always offer Cision – and any vendor I write about – the chance to change my mind.
My gen AI recommendations for buyers of PR software
My recommendation to buyers in the market for monitoring tools is to take things slow and steady. The space is moving fast, you can spend a lot of money quickly, and you don’t want to be tied down to a solution that isn’t quite right. Changing vendors is a painful undertaking – and you risk losing all the data you’ve collected in the process.
- Read, test and experiment with tools;
- Consider assigning team members to research certain tools to delegate the effort;
- Use lunch-and-learns to set up demos and get educated on features and benefits;
- Consider the tools your organization uses widely (i.e Microsoft Office, Google Docs);
- Keep a healthy skepticism of deals, M&A and aspirational product roadmaps;
- Use all this to define your goals for acquiring generative AI;
- Be sure to evaluate the whole vendor, not just what they can do with AI;
- Then set about making a short list, with decision criteria of your own for evaluation; and
- Don’t take anyone’s advice as gospel – not mine and not Edelman’s either – we are all still figuring this stuff out.
For its part, Edelman closed its report with a “what we learned” section. These two sentences stood out to me as sharp analysis:
“Generative AI has democratized access to insights, allowing non-technical users to engage with complex data sets through intuitive interfaces and natural language queries. This shift empowers a broader range of stakeholders to participate in data-driven decision-making, further enhancing enterprise agility and responsiveness in an increasingly competitive market.”
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Any of the vendors mentioned are welcome to reach out to me with candid, no-nonsense straight talk as I may do a follow-up post.
The full report is available for download with registration: Edelman’s 2024 AI Landscape Report: The Communicator’s Guide to Finding AI Tools You Can Trust. It’s worth your perusing and I have some hot takes I posted to Twitter/X as I read through the report last weekend.
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Image credits: Pexels and the report covered here
