Published in The Australian on May 12, 2026.
Australian companies are forking out six-figure fees each year for media intelligence reports that are partially farmed out overseas to low-cost workers and often delivered too late to matter.
That’s according to John Croll, co-founder and chief executive of Truescope, who built a ‘next-generation’ media intelligence platform after two decades running its biggest rival, iSentia.
It has expanded to the US, China and Singapore and is plotting an Australian launch, potentially this year.
Mr Croll says the legacy platforms were designed for a different era. Daily press clipping services retrofitted with humans to produce monthly insight reports that arrive long after the news cycle has moved on.
“Most of that content gets bundled up and sent to someone in a lower-cost economy to do the sentiment analysis,” he said.
“They get paid on volume. They don’t really care about the quality of the report. It tells you nothing.
Truescope ingests content within minutes of publication, broadcast or posting, performs sentiment analysis at sentence level rather than story level, and uses AI to synthesise thousands of items into an executive brief.
But Australia is one of the most expensive content-rights markets in the world for media intelligence platforms, a fact that has delayed Truescope’s local entry.
Rather than enter without licensing agreements – as some rivals have done – Mr Croll says the company has spent years proving its model in Singapore, New Zealand and the US, where it now counts 650 clients and is growing at 30 per cent annually.
“We’ve done a lot of client interviews, or potential client interviews, in Australia. We’re seeing some of the prices (from incumbents) … sort of in that $80,000 to $100,000 range.
“I will say there’s substantial savings for clients, you know, sort of in the order of, let’s say, 20 per cent savings at least that could be available for them, but we probably look at the pendulum a little bit differently from just a cost saving; there’s more value being delivered to the client.
“If I can be the first person informed in the organisation about a breaking story, and you can give me deeper insights about how we’re being portrayed against competitors and that we have opportunities to either take advantage of that or work with the content creator, the journalist … that’s hugely valuable. Clients are saying they’re happy to pay the same or even more if you can make that timely.”
Mr Croll generated a report for Tesla’s communications team to demonstrate the tool. It flagged Ford leadership changes, Chinese electric vehicle developments and Rivian battery coverage within seconds. The same analysis previously required a separate monthly contract.
He said Truescope’s artificial intelligence operates at sentence level – identifying which specific organisation is cast favourably or critically within a single line of copy, rather than scoring an entire article and calling it 'sentiment'. The platform’s prompt library, built specifically for corporate communications workflows, means a crisis manager does not write a query from scratch but selects from 36 pre-built templates that collapse thousands of items into a structured executive report within minutes.
Mr Croll said this is what separated it from a general chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini. He said the AI is only as good as the data underneath it, and the data – broadcast transcripts, paywalled content, Chinese social platforms – is what a free tool cannot reach.
Truescope has partnered with Chinese data services company Uniwyse, giving clients access to WeChat, Weibo, Douyin and Xiaohongshu alongside global monitoring.
Mr Croll said this allows clients to track Chinese-language media sentiment within hours, giving a company’s communications team a read on how Beijing was interpreting the story before it hardened into a narrative.’
“When you get a call from a board member asking how we handle this issue, you can’t be using a free service that’s getting some public content,” Mr Croll said.
“You’re going to get a call from another lead, another person in your exec team, or a board member and such, saying, ‘How are we handling this issue?’. You get to be the most informed person. You got to know what’s happening, who’s driving the story, and how it’s changing.”
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