South Africa, Feb. 2 -- Goodbye vanity metrics

For years, media monitoring meant counting mentions and charting spikes. Of course, that basic visibility still matters.

You need to know who is talking about you, where, and in what context. But the brands that are moving ahead are taking media monitoring a step further.

They are the ones who will want to segment coverage by audience, format, geography, influence, and sentiment to get a genuinely holistic view of how narratives form and move.

This is where the industry's slow farewell to vanity metrics becomes real.

Globally, there is a shift from impressions and clip counts toward metrics that link directly to business outcomes, such as assisted conversions, share of voice in strategic...