Interview: Greg Radner, Global Head of PR Services, Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters Public Relations Services[1] Thomson Reuters is jumping into the PR market with a new product, Thomson One PR, which will launch January 1st. The company views the new offering as a full PR work-flow suite, including press release distribution, webcasting, online press rooms, contact management, media monitoring and message analytics. PRNewser spoke this morning with Greg Radner, Global Head of PR Services at Thomson Reuters. Radner told us he believes the market for PR services is in the $1.5 to $2 billion range and he expects it to grow 9% in 2010. What opportunity do you see for Thomson Reuters in this market? We already in the investor relations (IR) space with about 6,000 clients. Over last few years, working with clients in the IR capacity, their PR counterparts have been asking, "can you help out with PR too?" We already have a couple hundred clients that have done webcasting or online press rooms with us. It made us take a pause and say, "Hey, is this a space we should make a focused effort around?" We took a few years to look at the market, and is it growing. It's a very attractive market. Right now, it's somewhere in the $1.5 billion to $2 billion annual range for spending on PR services - wires, monitoring, etc. It's growing and in 2010, will grow 9%. We like businesses like this that are global in nature, growing, but also going through a lot of change. Change opens up opportunities. We bring a lot of assets today - whether it's online press rooms, webcasts, even some of our research tools today are of interest to PR professionals. What we've done is go out and compile a full suite for PR professionals. Everything is web-based. Are you selling to agencies and brands? What is the breakdown? We are very focused on selling direct to the companies, and leveraging those 6,000 relationships we have. We have more work to do as to what is our offering is for agencies. Who do you see as your competitive set? There are too many to mention. Unique differentiators for us is that we're going to pull all of this functionality into one suite. We are taking a best of breed approach. In certain cases we bought things, such as press release capabilities from Hugin. We think they are best of breed so we bought them. With dna13, we think they're best of breed in media monitoring so we partnered with them. We embedded their app into our platform. In analytics we partnered with Crimson Hexagon. There are tons of competitors across all areas of this work-flow. How long has the product been in development? We initially took about a year to look at this space. I probably met with everyone on the competitive list. We've been in development for the last year in terms of building out the full suite, working with partners testing things in the marketplace. What is the pricing structure? We can't comment on that at this time. Do you anticipate launching with clients? We are in discussions about launching with clients. It's a bit to early to talk specifics on that.

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Interview: Greg Radner, Global Head of PR Services, Thomson Reuters

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