Interview with Todd Murphy, President of Truescope, a global media monitoring and analysis company, and President of FIBEP, the world’s media intelligence association.
Nice to meet again, Todd. Can you tell us a bit about your new role at Truescope?
I am now the President of Truescope in North America. In January 2023, John Croll and I put our companies together to create a much better service and support different options for existing and new clients in North America. Thanks to our superior media intelligence platform Truescope and my team of professional sales and success individuals, 2023 has been a great year.
My role is essentially the same, but I must say, it is far more fun getting to advance the superior tools of Truescope in the North American market. Showing solutions that make sense has been great for the team spirit as well.
Truescope’s mission is to become the leading news monitoring and PR insights firm in North America. Can you tell us about the company’s great plans and innovative developments ahead?
I’m sure every legacy and newcomer to the media intelligence industry has a similar mission: to be number one. Truescope offers a globally unique opportunity to combine the knowledge and experience of some of the most experienced people in the industry with latest, clean software developments.
Our technology was developed from the ground up, saving us the problems and costs of bolt-on legacy software and tools. This technical advantage was very important to me as I’ve watched several competitors struggle for years to overcome the burden of legacy software.
What distinguishes the company within the media intelligence field?
It’s quite simple: our people and technology are globally unmatched. Our leaders have the most management experience, industry knowledge, and technical abilities to pursue a growth model in the media monitoring and insights industry. The names of everyone from our CEO to our senior vice presidents of sales and success are recognized in the field; they are well known for having high ethical standards and delivering superior service. Moreover, several of our team members have been past clients and have walked in the same shoes as our current clients.
There is an old saying, “Everything matters.” Although hyperbolic, everything still does matter. As a representative of Truescope, I feel that each tool, feature, support call, employee, and prospecting message forms an impression of our company. How your team operates also adds to this impression. Both for individual companies and the industry, ethics, character, diplomacy, and knowledge are still the most compelling characteristics for clients and peers. And finally, a good sense of humour really helps.
Can you give us an example of an excellent client case that made real impact?
One great example of a client case for which we were able to leverage our deeper media content, platform insights, and client support, is Amazon Films. We reimagine their daily tracking and reporting as they release new movies. This client needed a faster solution to find more media mentions, highlight key articles across all media types, and ensure that what they needed is delivered by a specific deadline each business day. With the high costs and high stakes of the streaming media services and film industry, Amazon needed a partner that could meet their standards. It’s been a great relationship.
You’ve also just become the new President of FIBEP, the world’s media intelligence association. What are the plans for FIBEP under your presidency?
It was quite a humbling honor to be asked to lead our media intelligence industry association, FIBEP. I have served on the board of directors for the past couple of years and now I’m looking forward to further strengthening the values of the group for all our members. The two general areas I am focused on this year are ensuring FIBEP is a fully sustainable group administratively, and delivering real value related to copyrights, licensing, and fair-trade issues that impact so many of our members.
Media intelligence companies often face challenges in accessing articles from notable publishers. How can FIBEP assist its members in overcoming this challenge?
I have already begun working on this effort through the expansion of our copyright, licensing and fairtrade commission. All parties involved understand the general issues, but it is my goal to bring these parties together under one big roof, to see how we can create solution templates that can be useful in different countries. Through expanded conversations with content owners, aggregators, clients, and media monitors, I believe we can find better solutions that can increase copyright compliance while bringing the cost of compliance down to a point of affordability.
In simple terms, I would like to see a framework that is affordable enough so that everyone is incentivized to use the license, while offering fair control and renumeration to content owners. Only through a win-win outcome will we reach true global compliance, and the security content owners need. This also means we may have to revisit issues I worked on in the 1990s and early 2000s. For example, exclusive licenses have historically been harmful to the two parties in the agreement, as well as external parties. History has shown us that exclusive licenses harm parties on all sides.
How do you see the communications industry developing in the next 5 years, for instance looking at the role of AI, media tracking, media analysis, and measurement reliability?
We’ve seen several shifts in our industry over the past 40 years. We’ve moved from being a raw data provider echoing what traditional media is showing, to a media insights service helping clients understand what their media might mean. We are quickly moving towards a service that can better outline potential outcomes, offer strategies and tactics for improved outcomes, and speak directly to the C-suite executives in a language they understand. I believe the next shift for our industry will be towards broader business intelligence tools and better client-user integrations.
With the assistance of AI, and our evolving business models, we are moving towards business intelligence services that can deliver a stream of actionable insights to our clients. The focus within our industry is shifting quickly from operations to strategic partnerships, working more closely with clients. At the same time, the efficiency of software helps us develop more strategic offerings at scale, incorporating some great Software-as-a-Service characteristics into what we do.
By Anna Roos van Wijngaarden
Twingly offers News APIs with over 3 million daily news articles from 170,000 active global sources. It gives you access to noise-free news data for timely updates and comparisons. As a complement, please also have a look at our Blogs API, where we monitor 3 million active blogs worldwide.
