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by Charles Orton-Jones - Thursday, 13th December 2007

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For our Britain’s Digital Elite awards, Real Business partnered with Microsoft to scour the land looking for firms who are using technology to gain a competitive edge over their rivals and become masters of execution.

We spent months looking for companies who stand out – not because of what they do, but the way that they do it. Four judges – including two entrepreneurs who made their names using technology to shake up industries – sifted through the deluge of entries in ten different categories.

Winner of our Marketplace Analysis category: Thomson Intermedia

If you’ve ever advertised in a newspaper then Thomson Intermedia will know who you are. Founded by husband and wife team Steve and Sarah Jane Thomson with Mintel colleague Paul Gladman in 1997, the firm’s technology pores over just about every advertising medium imaginable.

It scans radio and television stations, extracting information about the ads, monitors direct mail drops, cinema ads, internet banners and even Google sponsored links. By comparing this information with known ratecard fees, Thomson can estimate ad spend by individual companies, calculate campaign costs and estimate reach.

In just ten years, Thomson has become a core source of information for the entire advertising industry. The firm’s 300 clients access data through a web portal where they can see up-to-the minute metrics. The monitoring service orders the information so clients can create their own tailor-made homepage with all known information on rivals displayed on a single page. Not for nothing do the UK’s biggest media agencies turn to Thomson before they spend a penny on media space.

Thomson also offers a media monitoring service, collating every mention of your company throughout the media. If you’ve been slagged off in the Northampton
Chronicle & Echo, you’ll get to hear about it within hours.

Collecting the information isn’t easy. The newspaper operation alone requires the scanning of thousands of regional newspapers, in addition to the nationals. Radio
ads are captured using proprietary technology and integrated with market data from
a JET feed.

The internet capture operation is perhaps the most ambitious. Thomson’s crawlers travel through cyberspace noting all shockwaves and flash banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, banners, buttons, sponsored links and search engines’ content-sensitive ads. Thomson gathers detailed page impression estimates from a panel of 15,000 UK-based internet users to arrive at page impression and expenditure totals for each ad campaign.

Thomson’s technology is developed in-house by its 240 employees, and the payoffs from this operation are as handsome as the technology behind it. Turnover has risen from £11.1m in 2006 to £20m this year, with £3.1m in operating profits. The technology is currently licensed to partners in Germany, Brazil, Greece and Cyprus, and the firm is actively looking for new partners in larger markets.

To read more on how Microsoft's technology can help you cut out the competition and to see the rest of the winners, visit our Focus-On Britain's Digital Elite.

Tags: radio ads, print media, online media, technology in business, britains digital elite, marketplace analysis, marketing, television stations, media monitoring service, page impression, internet banners, cinema ads, thomson intermedia, media space,