The situation
The client is a professional PR and communications agency. Their team tracked media coverage for multiple clients across online publications, print, and social platforms. The process looked like this. Someone finds a piece of coverage. They log it in a spreadsheet. They manually check the publication's authority and reach. They estimate the quality of the placement. Then they compile everything into a Word document and email it to the client.
The result was hours of manual work producing reports that looked the same as every other agency's. No way to score coverage quality objectively. No way for clients to check their own performance without asking. No way to show that a placement in a top-tier trade publication was worth more than three mentions in low-traffic blogs.
Tools like Cision, Meltwater, and Brandwatch exist, but none of them offered everything this agency needed in one product. And at £20,000 to £25,000 a year, the licensing costs were hard to justify for a mid-sized agency that wanted full control over its own data and scoring methodology.
What we built
A complete media intelligence platform that tracks coverage, scores its quality automatically, and presents the results to clients through branded dashboards and professional exports.
The centrepiece is the Coverage Quality Score. Every piece of media coverage gets scored across five factors: publication tier, audience reach, sentiment, domain authority, and social amplification. Each factor carries a configurable weight that can be tuned per client. A B2B technology client might weight domain authority higher. A consumer brand might weight social amplification higher. The agency controls the methodology completely.
When a team member logs a piece of coverage, the platform auto-populates fields from the linked press release, cutting manual data entry by around 60%. Sentiment analysis runs automatically through AWS Comprehend. Publication authority data pulls from Ahrefs. The score calculates itself.
Clients get their own branded dashboard through a shareable link. No login required. They can see total coverage, quality score distribution, sentiment breakdown, top publications, and social amplification at a glance. Every view is logged, so the agency knows exactly when clients check their performance.
Reports export in three formats. PDF with the agency's branding embedded. Word documents clients can edit and forward. Excel spreadsheets for anyone who wants to dig into the raw data. What used to take hours of manual compilation now takes seconds.
The platform supports a pending coverage review queue for items pulled in by the automated scraper, bulk approve and reject workflows, press release tracking with PDF uploads, and a full audit trail that records every change made by every user.
Staff log in with their existing Microsoft 365 accounts through Azure AD. No separate passwords. No onboarding friction. The system includes keyboard shortcuts, a global search, an interactive onboarding tour for new users, and full dark mode support.
The numbers
| Commercial licensing (annual) | Tyree Digital (one-off build) | |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | £20,000 to £25,000 | £9,500 |
| Year 2 | £40,000 to £50,000 | £0 |
| Year 3 | £60,000 to £75,000 | £0 |
The platform pays for itself before the end of year one compared to any commercial alternative. Over three years, the total value created (development saving plus avoided licensing plus freed agency capacity) comes to approximately £156,000 against the £9,500 investment.
The build delivered 55,696 lines of production code across 130 commits. It runs on AWS with automated deployments, scheduled database backups, and structured logging. 15 backend test files and 3 security test suites verify that authentication, input validation, and injection protection all hold up.
What the client owns
The full source code, the database, the proprietary scoring algorithm, the branded design system, and the production infrastructure. Everything sits in the client's own AWS account. 29 documentation files cover deployment, troubleshooting, architecture, and processes. Any developer can pick up the codebase and ship features immediately using the existing CI/CD pipeline.
The Coverage Quality Score algorithm is genuine intellectual property. No commercial tool offers a configurable, per-client weighted quality score that combines domain authority, NLP sentiment, social amplification, and custom tier mappings in a single metric. The agency now has something its competitors cannot buy off the shelf.
What happens next
A monthly subscription covers hosting, maintenance, and ongoing development. The platform already handles the full coverage lifecycle, but there is room to grow. Deeper social media analytics, automated coverage discovery across additional sources, and client-facing trend reports over time are all buildable on the existing foundation without infrastructure changes.