Former Isentia CEO Croll Launches Media Intel Platform

John Croll, former CEO of media monitoring firm Isentia, has teamed up with ex-colleague Michael Bade to launch a media intelligence platform called Truescope. The firm aims to inform clients about breaking news across all media types and identify issues, fake news and trends in real time.

Croll (pictured left) led Isentia, then known as Media Monitors, through its sale in 2010 to Quadrant Private Equity, and its subsequent rebrand as Sentia Media and then iSentia / Isentia - he left in 2018. Under his leadership the firm spread from an Australian base across Asia Pacific with buys in China, SE Asia and in Australia itself; and announced an IPO in 2014.

Bade is a former long-time product development specialist at Isentia, and the two have now built Truescope, which uses cloud-based tech and bespoke machine learning to analyse social and mainstream media stories. According to the pair, the platform's capabilities combine big data across media types and languages into a single searchable database. With each media item, machine learning and natural language processing are used to extract sentiment to help discover potential effects on brand reputation and enable businesses to measure awareness and communications effectiveness. The platform is now live in Singapore and is expected to be operational for clients in Australia by August.

Croll says the business has the 'right idea, team and the talent' in place to be able to deliver something meaningful for the industry. 'We think our approach to people, product and scalability is revolutionary in this. We're ready to build bridges between new technologies and the communications industry so our clients can immediately understand the value Truescope brings and see how different we are to what has come before us' Croll adds.

Web site: www.truescope.com .