PR Rosetta Stone dashboard
A longstanding challenge in public relations has been proving the real business value of media coverage, called earned media. That is the focus of a new tool developed by Portsmouth-based BridgeView Marketing.
The boutique agency, founded by Michael Emerton and Dale Allaire, is marking roughly two decades in business with the launch of the PR Rosetta Stone, an AI-enabled reporting platform designed to move beyond traditional metrics like impressions and advertising value equivalency (AVE).
“For years, I’ve asked why there’s no real visibility into what PR actually delivers,” Emerton says. “Software in every other part of business has dashboards and analytics. PR didn’t.”
BridgeView, which specializes in technology, cybersecurity, energy and construction clients, has operated in a results-driven, business-to-business environment where clients expect measurable returns. But industry-standard metrics often fell short.
AVE attempts to assign value to earned media by comparing it to the cost of advertising space. “You’d end up telling a client you generated millions of dollars in value,” Emerton says. “But it’s not even close to reality.” Instead, BridgeView’s PR Rosetta Stone links media placements directly to outcomes such as website traffic, referral sources, backlink authority and on-site engagements. The platform evaluates the relative value of media outlets based on audience size, social reach and search authority.
“What matters is not what an ad would have cost,” Emerton says. “It’s how many people are actually seeing that content, how they engage with it, and whether it drives meaningful activity.”
The system allows BridgeView to correlate spikes in web traffic and user behavior with specific media placements—something that previously required hours of manual analysis. “Now we can show, with a high degree of confidence, that a PR event drove people to a site, how long they stayed, what they looked at, and whether they took action,” he says.
The platform was developed using emerging AI techniques, including what Emerton describes as “vibe coding,” iteratively building software with the assistance of large language models. The result is a reporting tool that continues to evolve as new data layers and AI capabilities are added. BridgeView is not selling the product as a standalone service. Instead, it is integrated into client engagements. “Clients are asking, ‘What did this actually do for me?’” he says. “Now we can finally answer that.” For more information, visit bridgeviewmarketing.com.
