I caught up with Jeremy Thompson this morning, managing director of  Durrants, to talk about media monitoring market, PR evaluation, aggregators and the NLA.

Durrants has been on the acquistion trail. It acquired Metrica last week and the UK print monitoring business of Cision UK in July.

The media monitoring sector is oft regarded as the commodity end of the PR industry and is almost certainly under reported – if Durrants was listed in the annual PR Week League tables it would make a top ten slot.

Under Thompson’s leadership Durrants is a £40 million business that is defining the emerging market segment that is media intelligence.

What is the strategic rational for Durrants’ acquisition of Metrica?
The thinking was to bring together the two leading players in the media monitoring and analysis space and deliver the best of both worlds through one integrated platform. The market is beginning to see the upside of integrated services – there are clear benefits of having access to planning data, content and media analysis, all in on place and seamlessly interlinked. And the demand for measurement is stronger than ever as the media world explodes and the need to demonstrate value grows.

How is the deal structured?
Can’t talk about specifics here but we have bought the business and have incentivised management to come with us for the long haul. We plan to run the two side-by-side for a period and integrate when we’ve planned and are ready to go. We’ll move to one platform, one business.

The deal speaks to the opportunity for formal planning and evaluation of PR. Are PR agencies getting smarter?
I’m sure they’re becoming smarter because they are definitely becoming more accountable. End users are all more interested in whether they have achieved a return on their investment and agencies are looking at smarter ways of doing that. And it is not just about column inches any more, it’s about whether they achieved their objectives, be that increased sales or enhanced reputation.

What is Durrants’ competitive response to aggregators?
Aggregators provide a low cost, low value service. They sit somewhere between Google News and media monitors. They can’t match us on service when it comes to complex searching across multiple channels; nor can they deliver in every format from multiple hard copy press packs to viewable BlackBerry clips. And they don’t monitor all channels from print, through TV and radio, to online and social media. We believe what we do adds real value, but we’ll keep listening to our market and adapt if we need to.

Why is the standard of service in the press clipping industry generally so poor? Many press clipping agencies haven’t modernised. Why is this?
What we do is complex. The briefs we work to are extensive and we always aim to find exactly what the customer wants, no more, no less. And everything we do is bespoke to each individual customer. We have invested more than most but occasionally even we get it wrong. I’d like to think that our customer service is first class, and that we go the extra mile to sort problems when they arise.

Do you think there will be further consolidation in the media monitoring and evaluation market?
I’m not sure how much more scope for consolidation there is right now. And if there is, we won’t be doing it; we have enough on our plate with Cision’s UK print monitoring business and Metrica.

The Newspaper Licensing Association: friend or foe?
We recognise publisher rights and we totally understand that we should pay for the commercial re-use of publisher content. To that end, it is useful to be able to deal with a third party rather than to have to go to each publisher direct (we monitor 5,000 print titles in the UK alone). The NLA had a poor reputation historically, but they have worked hard under their current MD, David Pugh, to rectify that. And I think they have made progress, even if they are still not the PR industry’s favorite organisation. They haven’t handled the PR around their online initiative particularly well, and we’re still frustrated by their unwillingness to challenge Google under the same terms that they treat us. But overall, friend right now.