Celebrating R100 million worth of coverage

"So far this year we have had 5700 media releases published. That's more than 30 a day on a five-day week, or more than 22 per day every day of the week. The value of this coverage, measured in terms of advertising value equivalency, i.e. what our clients would have paid had they bought this space as advertising in those publications, is over R100 million," he adds.

According to Mann, Meropa measures coverage at a straight advertising rate without any so-called PR credibility factor being added. "It is common in our industry for practitioners to multiply their coverage by a factor of three or more - as editorial coverage has greater credibility than equivalent advertising - but we resist doing that."

"We also know that we greatly under-read the coverage we have gained. Whilst most publications/titles see it as their responsibility to tell advertisers when their ads have been flighted, this is not the case with editorial coverage. Because it is flighted "free" and because of the institutionalised tension between journalists and PR media handlers; it is often hard to track coverage. We guess that we hugely under-estimate coverage gained," he reckons.

Mann says that Meropa is ruthless about counting only its own coverage. "We often see that PR companies will claim the whole of an article when their client has received but a passing mention. We only claim the part of the article that directly refers to our client," he explains.

He attributes Meropa's strong year-on-year growth to "excellent media relations professionals, rigorous systems that are designed to deliver breakthrough media coverage and great, newsworthy clients".