• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 4, 2005

At a time when Madison Avenue is beginning to embrace traditional public relations practices as part of a broader approach to "communications planning," major players in the PR field are realigning themselves to play a broader role in marketing, including applications some might normally associate with advertising, media planning and buying.

One of those players, Medialink Worldwide, a leading producer and distributor of video news releases and corporate video footage used by marketers to place their messages, products and brands on television news outlets, has already been quietly expanding into other areas, including branded entertainment, on Monday announced it was selling its research and measurement operations in order to accelerate those efforts.

Those operations, known as Delahaye, were sold to Bacon's Information, a leading provider of media research, distribution and monitoring systems for the PR industry, which itself has been expanding more broadly into the world of "business intelligence."

The moves are significant for both companies, and potentially for the advertisers and agencies they align with, as the traditional silos separating the worlds of advertising, PR and other forms of marketing communications continue to break down.

"Advertisers are looking for new opportunities," asserted Laurence Moskowitz, chairman, president and CEO of Medialink. "We've got capabilities that are perhaps more valuable than ever as TiVos and DVRs make advertising less and less effective and as viewer fatigue becomes more of a factor."

Already the leading distributor of corporate video content to TV news outlets, Moskowitz said Medialink has begun an aggressive campaign to develop similar video news content for entertainment outlets, including some major cable networks. To do this, Medialink has taken on some of the traditional functions of a media agency, planning and buying time on cable outlets to place a variety of newscast-like content unique to their editorial environments.

Recent deals include buys on Rainbow's AMC, Fuse and WE networks that have included customized PR content designed to blend in with each network's own programming and to appeal to the target audience of each channel. For AMC, for example, Medialink developed a "Movie Breaks" programming vignette that incorporates plugs for General Motors' cars and trucks into snippets about the types of cars used in making movies.

A more generic feature, dubbed "Thirty Second Update," is modeled after breaking news alerts and is designed to run in any entertainment environment, but Medialink customizes the content and the anchor to fit into a channel's lineup and to appeal to its audience skew. If it's a female-skewing channel like WE, the "anchor" is a woman. For young men-oriented Fuse, Medialink uses a young male anchor.

"Obviously, what advertisers seek is target reach and frequency. And the one thing that advertising has that public relations traditionally didn't was predictability. By fusing our traditional services with ad placement and buying activity, we can now provide advertisers with the narrative rather than the bombastic."

The sale of Delahaye to Bacon's generates $9 million in proceeds that Moskowitz says Medialink plans to reinvest in developing new forms of "brand marketing communications." The publicly held company also recently completed a deal to raise $5 million to specifically develop Teletrax, a new digital "watermarking" system for tracking video content across television platforms worldwide. That service is currently utilized by TV rights holders to track the use of their programming, though U.S. syndication firms have been using it to ensure carriage of the advertising and promotion units by local TV stations. Medialink has been trying to enter the increasingly crowded field of advertising monitoring and verification, which is already dominated by companies like VNU, TNS, Audio Audit and Verance.

Bacon's, meanwhile, plans to accelerate the growth of Delahaye as the dominant player in PR measurement and evaluation. Bacon's already maintains some of the largest news clipping services in the world, and has an immense database of journalist contact information.

While the Delahaye deal primarily is designed to solidify Bacon's position in the public relations industry, Delahaye has been aggressively developing research that positions PR in a broader marketing context, including some the first and most sophisticated applications of marketing mix modeling techniques incorporating PR with advertising and other forms of marketing to measure actual sales and other ROI results.

Delahaye has also developed a variety of indices and measurements for benchmarking the volume and value of media impressions generated by public relations campaigns, something people on Madison Avenue have been referring to "PR GRPs," a PR equivalent of the TV ad industry's gross rating point, the standard measure of a TV ad impression.

While Carat's MMA marketing mix modeling unit subscribes to the data, no major ad agency or media shop is known to be utilizing such data yet in their communications planning, though many say it is the kind of research they aspire to incorporate or develop.

"It's often the public relations people who bring us into the marketing mix," acknowledges Mark Weiner, president of Delahaye. "But we're finding our way in and we're happy about that."