Cision has launched its Cision Communication Cloud, which integrates a number of the services now offered by the company after a busy two-year period of acquisition.
In a bid to become the go-to software provider for earned media, Cision acquired Canada Newswire and PR Newswire from UBM earlier this year. This followed the purchase of a number of other PR software service providers — Viralheat, Gorkana Group, Visible Technologies and Vocus.
Cision Communication Cloud unifies each of those acquisition’s offerings under a single banner and with a new interface. It promises better media monitoring, targeting and data analysis than each of its component pieces offered individually.
“We’re doing for comms and earned [media] what Adobe, Salesforce and IBM are doing for paid [media],” said Kevin Akeroyd, Cision CEO (pictured), told Marketing.
“We’ve seen the transformation that these data-driven tech platforms have had on these lines of business in paid [media] and ecommerce. History is going to repeat itself… The amount of data that resides [in CNW and PR Newswire] is one of the most amazing things in this acquisition.”
Where media and creative firms have been able to use data to A/B test different versions of a given execution, Akeroyd said it’s “crazy” that so many earned media efforts come down to a single text-based press release going out to thousands of influencers and media outlets.
“We can’t be in a world where communications professionals can’t harness data and target audiences,” he said. “Soccer mom bloggers versus Wall Street women, for example; the end users are so different, as are the influencers or journalists who reach them. You really have to be able to do a level of segmentation.”
Cision is still open to more acquisitions in 2018 and beyond, particularly in the influencer and consumer content spheres, Akeroyd said.
