By John Croll, CEO and Co-Founder

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This month, Truescope marks four years of age. It was four years ago that co-founder Michael Bade and I came together to design a tech-led media intelligence business that would help communicators see their world more clearly. 

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And while it’s important to remember our beginnings and reflect on how far we’ve come, we recognize there is still much to do, to improve on, and to innovate. But let’s enjoy the moment for a moment, with a recap of some of our biggest and most recent highlights.

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Our go-to-market plans to bring Truescope to Australian communicators remains on the agenda.  Our headquarters are led by Michael with our development team based out of our Wollongong University Innovation Campus premises, so our heritage remains authentically Australian, but our focus is on broadening our strategic global units.

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Today we are not only operating, but competing and winning, in three advanced global markets of Singapore, the United States and New Zealand, where we are servicing more than 600 clients on our intelligent platform. We have completed the integration of the Universal Information Services (UIS, the USA based agency Truescope acquired in January this year) business and clients to our platform.

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Thanks to our tech and our talent, new clients are joining us from our competitors on a weekly basis, telling us they need more clarity of their media performance, rather than complexity. The sophistication and speed of our real-time alerts, dashboards and reports means our clients are not only the first to be informed, they are armed with accurate information that not only looks great, but enables them to make the right decisions.  

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We’re in a cadence of delivering new releases to the platform every month, and the innovation pipeline is near-bursting as we continue to elevate our client experience to levels which exceed their expectations.

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Our strength in content and data is comprehensive, yet, more precise, as we capture millions and search more than one billion pieces of information daily, fully integrated across mainstream and social media outlets around the world, ensuring relevancy is at the forefront of our decision making, and for that of our clients.

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The future looks bright.

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Without casting our minds too far back on the hardship that Covid brought us all, the years 2020 and 2021 will also be remembered as the era that changed the way we see and do business. Late last year I was asked about my predictions for 2023, and while we’re only rounding out Q1, I still believe a ‘new tech-world order’ will help businesses succeed.

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AI will change everything.  

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AI will become a traditional part of a business toolkit. As we all become familiar with ChatGPT, and learn about its potential and its limitations, it was evident early on that business efficiencies and productivity will be far greater by embracing this AI. 

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From writing essays, to suggesting holiday itineraries, GPT, as Microsoft puts it, will be akin to having a co-pilot. According to Bill Gates “As computing power gets cheaper, GPT’s ability to express ideas will increasingly be like having a white-collar worker available to help you with various tasks.”

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Conversely, recently I attended in-person one of two discussions in Australia held by former US President, Barack Obama, where he spoke about leadership, among other insightful and inspiring political, personal and practical perspectives. He reminded us that he was the first President to serve entirely in the digital age, making him at that point the most recorded person in human history and the guinea pig for deepfakes and other “AI mischief”.

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His experience with AI was a reminder of how far technology has come and how far we still have to go with its progress. “To preserve democracies, we are going to have to spend a lot more time figuring out how are we educating our kids to sort out the differences between fact, opinion, falsehood, what looks real but isn’t. We’re going to have to train our brains to catch up to these new technologies.” 

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When it comes to AI and media intelligence, the mandate for comprehensive content will be even more important as our clients need the knowledge to determine what’s real or authentic and what is not. The publishing of fake images, news and media releases is going to compound the challenge for audiences to understand how to identify fact from fiction.

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Deeper global talent pool.

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The pandemic taught us many things, and one learning which reimagined the traditional working environment, is that remote working is here to stay. Once considered ‘flexible working’ the world’s workforce was forced to ‘WFH’ in the early days of 2020, allowing teams to expand across borders and time zones, where only the fittest talent survived. Agencies and organizations today have the benefit of scouring the world for the talent best suited to a vacant position, rather than sourcing from the pool in their backyard. Similarly with talent being more selective about the organizations they work for; businesses must be at the forefront of employee needs and engagement in order to attract and retain stand out people.

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Moving from complexity to simplicity. 

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Historically, data literacy has been positioned as complex, challenging, and at times confronting for those working in the communication industry. As high data literacy levels become the expectation and the norm, complexity and verbosity of data will be replaced with clarity and simplified messaging. Translating complex data into meaningful findings is at the core of the communications and PR craft, and the strength of concise and accurate reporting over word count and convolution will be critical.

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Behind every smart PR is smart tech. 

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Digitization and innovation remain at the forefront of many business strategies today to drive business efficiencies and performance, and technology will continue to play a critical role in enabling communication professionals to make smart decisions, sooner. As AI advances, predictive data is helping practitioners to not only track trends, but sophisticated software can determine how a major multi-channel media story is expected to play out, where it will play out, and when the peak of the heat will be. Embracing smart PR tech and being able to analyze media sentiment and social media conversations only provides a competitive advantage.

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Where to from here?

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As for Truescope, the US expansion and the opportunities of operating in the largest market in the world are vast, to say the least.  With direction from our North America President, Todd Murphy, we have our strategic sights set on not only growth at the current rate of more than 100%+, but ensuring we maintain the outstanding client experience we are recognised for in all key markets. 

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Four years ago, central to the design of Truescope was having smart tech and smart people. Our team will continue to innovate, constantly improving our technology and leading services by adding new features, functionalities and products to help communicators make more informed decisions from their data.  

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Thank you to everyone who has been part of our journey. If you want to learn more about Truescope and our expansion plans, want to come and work for us, or want to know what we can look forward to in 2024, please reach out to me.

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