Tool Sprawl Risk Audit — Public Relations Agencies

Signs of tool sprawl in Public Relations Agencies

• Media monitoring still runs on Cision/Meltwater plus a junior-account-executive copy-paste loop — clip reports take 8-12 hours weekly per major client and ship full of irrelevant mentions and missed coverage.
• Sentiment analysis is still being done by a 24-year-old reading articles and color-coding a spreadsheet — the methodology changes every time a new AE rotates onto the account and the trend lines are noise.
• Media list maintenance is broken — reporters move beats every six months, the contact database goes stale, and pitches go to journalists who covered the topic three jobs ago.
• Pitch personalization is a fiction — the agency claims tailored outreach but actually sends 200 lightly-tweaked variants of the same pitch and wonders why response rates are 1.8%.