MediaHQ looks to partnerships to grow contacts service worldwide

MediaHQ, a Dublin-based media contacts database and press distribution service, is aiming to expand into five new global markets within the next three years, its founder and chief executive has said.

Jack Murray told the Business Post that his company was aiming to grow its operations around the world through partnerships with major media monitoring companies that are increasingly seeking access to its database of journalists and other media figures.

“There’s a couple of really large players in the media intelligence industry who are looking to offer all the services,” he explained. “Large media monitoring companies are coming to us now, saying: ‘We’re feeling the competitive pressure – could we partner with you to build a contacts database, or could we get access to your contacts database?’

“These companies already have relationships with clients who are the end users of these databases, but they’re wanting to partner with us. I see us doing partnerships to drive our growth in the years ahead.”

Murray, a veteran of the media industry, has for years been connecting PR executives with contacts in the media industry with a view to getting their stories out there. In recent years, however, that activity has grown significantly after developing research software that can quickly give clients access to a database of contacts in various territories.

“Our target customers are in-house PR and communications teams, and we work with some of the best and the biggest around the world,” he said. The company counts Trócaire, Intel, Unicef and Ireland’s Houses of the Oireachtas among its clients.

“The easiest way I explain it to people when someone says, ‘What do you do?’, is to tell them to remember the pandemic, and you’d hear on the news that there are 6,000 new cases of Covid-19 today,” said Murray.

“Well, earlier that day, someone in the Department of Health press office logged into MediaHQ, either built a media list or found one that they’d saved in our system, pasted in the press release and hit ‘send’. It landed in hundreds and hundreds of journalists’ inboxes around the country.”

As the media landscape has shifted, Murray’s company has increasingly been growing out a database of contacts who operate outside the traditional outlets, with a particular focus on social media influencers.

“I don’t think social media will replace it,” he said of traditional media. “But it does have a strong place. It’s down to: if I have a story I need to connect with my audience, and I work really hard at honing that story, then I need to get it to absolutely everyone in the audience who is relevant. And that could be a radio producer, it could be a news correspondent, or it could be someone on TikTok.”

The company has already moved into the British market, which has grown its database by an order of 12, Murray said.

But MediaHQ doesn’t want its expansion to end with a British presence, he said. “Our ambition is big, and it’s global. Our ambition is to be the biggest media and audience contacts provider in the world – the biggest and the best.”

This Making it Work article is produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland