Specialist
Former C-level executive at Cision Ltd
Agenda
- Cision’s operating environment – demand trends for PR software and earned media
- Competitive dynamics vs Meltwater, Kantar Media (LON: WPP), Intrado's Nasdaq and Google (NADSAQ: GOOGL)
- Distribution segment outlook – displacement risk from social media
- Cision Communications Cloud (C3) product growth outlook – pricing and go-to-market improvements
- Outlook for 2021 and beyond – data privacy risks and downside scenarios
Questions
1.
What key trends or drivers do you think investors should be tracking in Cision’s operating environment?
2.
It seems the coronavirus has had a fairly profound immediate-term impact on paid and owned media. To what extent do you think the pandemic has impacted Cision’s various products?
3.
Would you say Cision is also well-insulated from the data privacy implications that are becoming increasingly focused on in martech? What impacts do GDPR and CCPA have on Cision ID, its database or any of its product offerings?
4.
How should we frame Cision’s TAM? There are multiple products with unique dynamics, but I’ve read estimates of press release software being just over USD 4bn. Then, there’s incremental dollars from paid and owned, and paid is a lofty USD 300bn market. What’s the best way to assess Cision’s total opportunity?
5.
What competition does Cision face across its four core products? It seems Meltwater and Intrado’s Nasdaq business have been among its core competitors. What are Cision’s key strategic advantages?
6.
There’s press around a planned Cision-Meltwater merger, with Meltwater being a pure-play competitor in segments such as influencer databases and media monitoring. How would this merger impact the competitive landscape? Might antitrust concerns be too significant an obstacle for the merger to overcome, especially given the relative duopoly you outlined in influencer databases?
7.
How competitive has pricing in influencer databases and media monitoring been over the last few years?
8.
How should we frame Google Analytics as a competitor to Cision? Will that compete with the media analysis product offering, and what is Google Analytics offering that could erode Cision’s market share?
9.
Does secular growth exist for press releases? There’s plenty to be said around social media as a disintermediating threat. What is your 5-10-year outlook on the core aspects of the press release category?
10.
Do you think press release dynamics differ by end industry vertical? We have Slack and Shopify CEOs being increasingly active on Twitter, for example. Does the tech industry vertical seem more pressured, or less willing to tolerate unit pricing increases?
11.
Which aspects of press releases are being competed on among Business Wire vs Nasdaq vs Cision with PR Newswire? Is it price or add-on services that drives the ability to win business and drive unit growth?
12.
How do customers in this industry typically weight platform plays? Does it matter to customers if Intrado is well-integrated with its own social media monitoring and presence, or is this very much still a point solution-driven industry?
13.
What major changes do you anticipate for Cision’s business strategy and culture following its wholesale management overhaul? This seems to be a fairly big transition for Cision, especially going into 2021.
14.
What will be the key growth drivers for some of Cision’s geographical expansion opportunities, whether APAC or even EMEA? Will much of that be purely driven by new customer wins?
15.
You referenced efforts to grow ARPU and to mitigate churn. To what extent will the significant move towards SaaS-based subscription pricing play a core role in that? Do you think Cision is past any challenges relating to drags on ARPU or temporary high churn?
16.
Do you think it’s viable to be particularly aggressive on pricing to secure a land grab? How significant a deterrent could those switching costs you’re alluding to ultimately end up being? Does that create a nice moat for Cision, should it pursue a lot of market share at the expense of ARPU, to then grow over time?
17.
Can you break down user behaviour and retention for Cision’s database product? To what extent is this needs-based? Might a customer stop paying for the service once they’ve established the direct contact they were pursuing, or is this something that doesn’t make sense to turn off and on?
18.
What challenges might be limiting the go-to-market effectiveness of Cision’s C3 [Cision Communications Cloud] platform? Do you think the customers – or at least the decision-makers within an organisation – are relatively disparate? What is driving the lower-than-expected momentum for selling this as a platform?
19.
Do you think we are inherently many years away from any wholesale shifts in buyer behaviour? It seems that will be a tough challenge to grapple with. Do you anticipate an inflection point in the sales and go-to market efforts, after which it becomes easier to convince customers of a wall-to-wall adoption?
20.
Do you think Cision’s products do work together seamlessly to ultimately create value to the customer? Is there potentially anything to improve upon that? Is it right to assume that needs to come first, before driving greater appreciation for this offering?
21.
Are you concerned that tech debt will become exceptionally profound for Cision as inorganic growth strategies play a role in decisions? TrendKite, for example, seems to be more customer-acquisition and cost cutting-oriented, while Falcon is moving into a different category, to an extent. What are the challenges to maintaining the long-term seamless platform value prop as Cision continues along the M&A path?
22.
Do you think Falcon.io is competitive in social media management software? How crowded should we consider that niche to be, having alluded to Sprinklr, Sprout and Hootsuite? Is there room for all these players to compete over the next five or 10 years? Does this become a winner-takes-most market?
23.
Do you think social media management businesses are scalable, in that they are reliant on the social media giants? Could the data provider fees that Sprout pays to Facebook become economically unviable if these vendors scale too much, or do you think the social media giants have limited leverage in this regard?
24.
What do you think is the ultimate goal for Cision ID? How valuable do you expect this offering to become, and how early on are we in the innings for the attribution challenges?
25.
What are your expectations for ROI relating to demonstrating attribution across earned media in general, compared to owned and paid? Is there a dilution concern on the ROI? Is the media dollar scalable, particularly when we get into enterprise, or will the ROI dilute the more that is spent and earned over time?
26.
Is there any concern that influencers currently don’t know their worth? Do you expect their associated cost aspects for earned media to rise over time, particularly driven by the top percent of influencers?
27.
Which key trends relating to Cision or the broader industry would you encourage us to monitor closely over the next few years?
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