April 8th, 2010 by Wadds

Durrant’s Jeremy Thompson on the Gorkana deal

Durrants has acquired Gorkana less than five-months after its acquisition of Metrica.

Durrants is a business that under the leadership of managing director Jeremy Thompson has set its sights firmly on modernising the workflow of PR agencies and in-house teams. I caught up with Thompson this morning to ask him about the deal.

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that the deal is worth £20m. How did you arrive at a valuation and what’s the structure of the deal?
We are not sure where The Telegraph got its numbers from but we are not disclosing the consideration. What we will say is that the combined group of Durrants, Metrica and Gorkana will have revenues in excess of £40m and over 5,000 customers. The founders, Alex Northcott and Michael Webster, are staying with the business to help us build the ultimate support service for PR professionals.

What’s your relationship with Exponent?
Exponent Private Equity is our primary investor. They backed a Management Buy out of Durrants in 2006, and have supported us through the latest round of acquisitions including Metrica and Gorkana. They are very supportive of our strategy to grow and transform the business and have helped us make it happen.

What’s the strategy for Durrants with Gorkana and Metrica on board?
Our strategy is to build a unique proposition which combines the 3 market leaders in three key steps of the PR workflow – planning, monitoring and evaluation. We have the pieces, now we plan to put them together and transform the sector. Watch this space.

Have you any more acquisitions planned?
We have now got the pieces we have long identified as being the leaders in this sector. We now need to focus on putting them together to build the killer application. That is going to occupy us for the foreseeable future. So no more planned for now.

How soon can we get an enterprise deal for Durrants, Gorkana and Metrica products and services?
We’re not going to rush to integrate. The key is stability, and to build something really special for the long term. We are very happy to do enterprise deals from day one though, and have already done a number for Durrants and Metrica combined services. So give us a call.

PR spam is a massive issue for the industry at the moment. What are Gorkana’s plans to tackle this?
Getting PRs to engage with journalists in an intelligent way is at the heart of everything Gorkana does. Gorkana works with the PR industry to target journalists with stories and information they want via regular breakfast briefings, networking events and Gorkana features, such as regional mapping and headline coverage, and to help PRs build more targeted media lists. From a technical point of view Gorkana stops duplicate emails being sent to the same journalists and regularly monitors over-sized media lists.  I know it’s an issue that’s close to the heart of Gorkana’s CEO Alex Northcott and he’s keen to engage with the industry and hear about other ways to tackle spam head on.

Is there anything else you want to share with the PR industry?
There is plenty we want to share over the coming months. We really believe that what we’re doing is going to transform our industry. We’ll keep you posted on the journey. This idea emerged from market research, so it is entirely customer driven. We’ll keep engaging with our customers along the way to make sure we’re getting it right. We want to share, and to hear back.

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November 4th, 2009 by Wadds

Q&A with Durrants’ Jeremy Thompson on the Metrica deal, evaluation, aggregators and the NLA

JeremyThompson05I 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.

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