DMR: What is the value in archiving?

Pete Grillo: It’s so painfully obvious that it’s hard to explain in a way – which sounds funny. The web is like the greatest store of information the world has ever seen in one place – or some grand praise of that nature. But it’s always changing and things keep disappearing. There’s a real uneasiness of things disappearing and so people get that sort of get that implicitly: There’s a recipe I like; I can save it. There’s my airline ticket receipt; I can save it.

Who would really value being able to archive what was said on the web and keep it with a disinterested third party and pay money for that? The obvious markets are legal, government, and third markets I call corporate legal, also the market we were going after in our initial product, which is media tracking. 

DMR: For brand tracking?

Pete Grillo: Brand tracking, right. Our flagship product is positive press. That market we sort of bunched in – incorrectly, I’ll say – PR, media tracking, marketing as being sort of one market. They’re really not. PR is what’s hot today, what’s happening right now. It’s been a harder story to sell the value of archiving there, because I really want to know what’s happening now.  

One of the elements of media tracking is sentiment analysis and engagement. So a sort of logical mind says that you can do that right now with a lot of products. But wouldn’t you like to do that for the last 60, 90 or 180 days? Wouldn’t you like to see how your sentiment has changed? Gone up or gone down, and then align that with perhaps announcements you’ve made? You made an announcement and it tanked. But how bad did it tank? How bad did it negatively affect you?

DMR: Who is typically buying that service?

Pete Grillo: PR companies are usually interested in what is happening right now. We’re seeing more interest is in marketing, ad agency sort of companies. Latest news is that we’re doing business with Wieden + Kennedy. W+K is an ad agency, but they’re a media conglomerate. They’re seeing value in our services and they talk about why: It saves them time to be able to have this information and deliver it to their customers. There are also all kinds of things that lawyers get involved with. Liability, defamation of character, or just lawsuits where they want to record everything they can. There’s the moment of time when they are about to file litigation when we go out and capture everything we can. They wish they could just start archiving their site automatically and have that as evidence.

Next page