Most PR agencies in India include Media Monitoring as a part of their PR activities. The cost of the PR exercise quoted includes the cost of the media monitoring and is not charged as a separate service. However while media monitoring is done in-house, most PR agencies also outsource the Monitoring services to specialised Service Providers. This is done in order to try and capture the maximum coverage that appears across geographies. This is a standard practice and is not an issue.
The issue at stake is that with most clients wanting free PR service or wanting them at a cost which is like free :), how can agencies survive. This is even more true if you want to engage competent Monitoring agencies. With Media Monitoring which used to be 10-15% of the cost, spiraling to 20-25% of the normal retainers charged by most agencies, isn't it time that we started billing our clients separately for the media monitoring?
Internationally it is a norm to charge extra for monitoring, it is high time that we adopted international norms, since most clients expect us to deliver to global standards.
Advertising is perceived to be the big brother of Public Relation. Till the time people heading the corp comm department understand the difference between the two different mediums of communication, I don't see any hope for this poor cousin of advertising
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