SWMS tends not to cover the business initiatives of its subscribers, but the Marker Collective has embarked on something revealing. The parent org of Archetype, Nectar and OutCast last month launched a coverage measurement tool called Delve. It’s for internal use, but according to Marker Collective CEO Helena Maus, it’s also being marketed to “advisors, companies and other agencies.”
Delve aggregates articles and analyzes them for sentiment and how well key messages came through. It does a lot of things. Mostly it is designed to take the grunt work out of coverage tracking, freeing teams to concentrate on “where do we go from here?”
As yet there is no bespoke sales team focused on selling Delve to others; Marker Collective chief product officer Andrew Wyatt is bootstrapper-in-chief at the moment. “It’s honestly really fun when you can get direct feedback from a prospective customer and then talk about it same day in your product prioritization meeting,” Andrew wrote in an email.
Delve customers can track up to 2,500 articles each month for $4K. For $7K, customers get up to 15 consulting hours to help interpret findings and suggest ways forward. At $12K per month, customers get 40 hours of consulting and can track up to 7,000 articles.
Marker Collective has calculated that Delve customers might not have the time — or the inclination — to learn a new tool and get the most from it. Hence the consulting component.
This integrated approach of tools plus consulting — or software plus services — might be a winner in an age where the C-suite is pressuring short-staffed in-house comms teams for data, not opinion. Will Delve be used by other PR agencies? Maybe. The Prowly blog lists more than 30 media monitoring products already out there, and many agencies have their own internally-developed tools. Then again, according to GPT-4o, there are tens of thousands of PR agencies around the world.
What’s clear is that software scales well and service does not. It will be interesting to watch how well Marker Collective can future-proof itself with those ones and zeroes.