• by Larissa Faw , October 6, 2020

MDC Partners says it has a solution to help brands and organizations refine earned media strategies before going to market with a pitch -- hopefully to enable teams to intelligently develop strategies both around positive news and emerging issues and threats.

PRophet, which the company claims is the first-ever AI-driven platform for the PR community, uses proprietary technology to sample millions of reporters’ stories spanning thousands of print media outlets by deploying a proprietary combination of natural-language processing (NLP) and machine-learning (ML) technologies.

The platform is designed to bring new value to every layer in the public relations ecosystem -- including generating greater intelligence for internal strategy, working in tandem with traditional media databases to perform more efficiently and creating more relevant and successful pitches.   

The software was born out of MDC’s "Ventures Inside" program and was created by Aaron Kwittken, founder of KWT Global, and MDC and Stagwell chief Mark Penn. 

The PRophet platform will be owned by Ahteed, a newly established MDC Ventures company. It will be operated and managed by Kwittken, reporting to Penn.

The platform was devised during a competition within MDC Partners designed to draw out innovative ideas for internal, client, or consumer-facing Martech products.

The platform is available to all brands on a subscription basis. The cost is $60,000 per year for unlimited access.

For now, MDC is limiting its usage to brands, but says it will consider expanding its availability to other agencies and holding companies in the future.