On Wednesday, public relations software company Cision announced the acquisition of digital PR platform TrendKite for a whopping $225 Million.
TrendKite uses artificial intelligence and analytics to monitor and measure communication efforts. Cision users will now have access to TrendKite’s platform, to track marketing communication campaigns and determine their impact on things like brand reputation and website traffic.
Per the official announcement, TrendKite will continue as an application in the short term but will get integrated into the Cision Communications Cloud in the long term. Once Trendkite’s technology is integrated into the Cision Communications Cloud platform, marketing communications teams will have an added level of targeting, measurement and analysis capabilities for earned media campaigns.
“Recent research conducted by Cision with PR Week found that 77 percent of CMOs and CCOs believe they can improve comms measurement and business objective attribution relative to the status quo. Combining Cision and TrendKite will address this important objective for industry professionals worldwide,” said Cision CEO Kevin Akeroyd in the announcement.
“Coupled with the Cision Influencer Graph, which understands the connections between an influencer, the content they create, and the audiences they reach, Cision will offer more insights for brands to effectively reach their target audience through earned media outreach,” says Cision about TrendKite’s social influencer management feature.
TrendKite was founded in 2013 by Matt Allison and A.J. Bruno. The company’s current CEO Erik Huddleston will become President of Cision following the acquisition.
“We’re planning on keeping everything and investing more in it, be that locations or people,” Akeroyd said in an interview.
The CEO said the company had undertaken “over a dozen acquisitions during the last four years,” and that while further M&A would continue to be part of the mid- and long-term strategy, the firm is now focused on integrating its recent purchases.“When you’re literally dealing with millions, if not tens of millions of hits every hour, how do you go about content identification, relevance, sentiment, and things like that?” Akeroyd said. “There’s a real acceleration to be able to make that entire process faster and way more efficient.”
