APO Group unveils world-first print monitoring for press releases distribution in Africa

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, February 6, 2018/ — Upon successful completion of a three-month testing period, APO Group today unveiled its print monitoring workflow system for press releases distributed across Africa. For the last couple of years, APO Innovation Lab has worked towards developing an advanced automation tool that pinpoints where customers’ press releases have been picked up in newspapers and magazines across the 54 African countries, whether they are in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic or local languages such as Afrikaans, Zulu and Swahili. During the test, more than 400 print publications were monitored, and 1000 print clippings collected.

This significant breakthrough opens up new possibilities for organizations. They will now be able to gauge their message penetration in print media and gain valuable insights on how the national, regional, local and pan-African press responds to their communication efforts.

In the space of two years, APO Innovation Lab, APO Group’s Research and Development arm, succeeded in designing a highly sophisticated analysis engine that uncovers press releases’ mentions in all African news sources, regardless of the language. Furthermore, to ensure accuracy and relevance, all editorial coverage is scrutinized by seasoned analysts.

The new technology has been developed at the request of customers and partners, who expressed the need for a multi-market press release’ monitoring solution that measures the extent of their print media coverage in all 54 African markets. Until now, no such solution existed.

Over the years, APO Group has earned the trust of many Public Relations agencies including the most prestigious ones such as Edelman, Hill+Knowlton Strategies, Fleishman Hillard, Ogilvy, APCO Worldwide, Havas MSL, Baird’s CMC who, to meet the needs of their clients, use APO Group services. In 2017, 56 PR agencies collaborated with the consultancy compared to 42 in 2016. A number that keeps increasing year-on-year.

“APO Group has a strong track record of providing a support system to communication practitioners and PR agencies which regularly call on our expertise in media relations for Africa. As no such tool was available on the market, we decided to take on the challenge of developing a pioneering technology internally,” said Nicolas Pompigne-Mognard, Founder & CEO of APO Group. “This innovation is the fruit of relentless work by our Lab team. Given the diversity and the number of markets we serve, perusing all print publications and generating an almost inexhaustible number of press cuttings was far from easy and required considerable ingenuity. After testing the technology thoroughly, we were thrilled with the results which far exceeded our expectations.”

Press release’s print monitoring, coupled with online monitoring and social media analytics, beefs up organizations’ capabilities to assess their return-on-investment more accurately. With the complete press release’s media monitoring solution, they can now access a powerful decision-making tool that gives them a holistic understanding of their campaigns’ performance and a clearer vision of how efficiently they support their business strategies.

For every press release distributed either through Africa Wire® or MENA Wire® technology, APO Group will provide its customers with a full press release’s media monitoring report including rich data and precise metrics on online news penetration, international reach (screenshots of Bloomberg Terminal, Factiva, LexisNexis, SyndiGate…), social media, and print media coverage.

“To my knowledge, APO Group will be the first company to provide print monitoring as part of its press release distribution service globally. Now that we have the technological and human capacity to monitor print media, we will challenge the limits of the possible to keep bringing a wealth of data to our customers. We set ourselves the objective of monitoring 600 Africa and Middle East related-media outlets worldwide and double the number of press cuttings by the end of 2018. This is just the beginning of our commitment to enhancing our press releases ‘media monitoring reports”, added Nicolas Pompigne-Mognard.

Since APO Group was founded, innovation has always played a crucial role in delivering service excellence. The consultancy allocates 6,5% of its total budget to the APO Innovation Lab, whose mission is to invent and test emerging technologies in response to corporate communications challenges. The addition of print monitoring in press releases ‘media monitoring reports underscores APO Group’s commitment to supporting organizations whether they are private companies, public and governmental institutions or PR agencies in achieving superior editorial coverage.