With over 1,000 stores across the UK and Ireland, faced the challenge of managing PR activities on national and regional levels as well as across different offerings and brands.
By partnering with CARMA, Specsavers streamlined media monitoring, gained insightful data, and improved stakeholder reporting. We spoke to Marc Breton, Senior PR & Social Manager about how CARMA’s media intelligence tools empowered them to enhance efficiency and demonstrate the impact of Specsavers’ PR efforts effectively.
I’m a Senior PR & Social Manager at Specsavers and I’ve been with the company for 16 years. We work with multiple agencies - one for social media and one for national PR, and we have a network of regional PR agencies to support over 1,000 stores across the UK and Ireland. This combination of national and regional activity makes our media monitoring and categorisation quite complex.
The biggest challenge is resource really. It is mainly me looking at this data, so it’s important that it’s as quick to pull and as accurate as possible. CARMA’s Power Dashboards, for instance, make it easier and faster for me to access the necessary data. Additionally, because of the way we categorise our stores and activities, it’s critical to have the right filtering tools to look at national versus regional data, or to look at different business units like optics and audiology separately.
CARMA’s filtering tools are particularly useful. We can segment data by region, business unit, and competitors, which is crucial given that Specsavers spans both optics and audiology. The tagging system and user tiers make it easy to look at different aspects of our coverage and compare them to our competitors.
One thing I really like is the audience data for the online titles, because we often say we get so many millions of people that we’ve reached but all our campaigns are to a different target audience. For example, our presbyopia activity would be targeting an audience that is typically 40 plus. It's one thing saying that our presbyopia campaign has reached 15 million people, but with your audience target data, then I can say, well, out of those 15 million, we've actually reached 8 million in the right demographics, for example.
As you know there’s several people out there in the market. But one of the main reasons would be that some of your competitors are too automated with no human analysis. Even though automation is getting better with AI etc, I don’t think it’s quite there yet and so we still wanted the human analysis behind the data, as opposed to relying solely on automation. CARMA’s platform is intuitive and modern, which also set it apart from competitors. Another big factor was the realistic reach figures. One of CARMA’s competitors, for example, claimed our activity would have reached billions of people, obviously impossible given the UK population. CARMA’s approach is far more grounded and accurate.
I use the platform the most within Specsavers, and some of the other users rely more on the morning reports. Our PR agencies also use it and the fact I don’t get many queries from them, is a good sign it’s all going well.
As part of our tender process, we gave case study questions/examples and I found the CARMA team were really intuitive, coming up with different ideas we hadn’t considered before.
I carryout monthly calls with our regional teams to go over the results, focusing not just on the volume of coverage but also on the quality, such as favourability scores. For the senior leadership team, I share regular reports, often comparing PR activity with reputation tracking to show its impact. CARMA’s reports have been valuable in providing insights that align with our business metrics, especially when it comes to showing the correlation between coverage and reputation scores.
Yes, I would definitely recommend CARMA. The reasons I like what you do is that CARMA offers realistic data, intuitive tools, and excellent customer service. Your team is responsive and proactive in finding solutions to any issues we’ve encountered. The platform is not only user-friendly but also provides the depth of data we need to make informed decisions, from audience targeting to competitor analysis.
One area we’re still working on is better demonstrating the impact of our PR activities, especially with initiatives like our CSR campaigns. It’s important to show long-term resonance rather than just short-term peaks in engagement. CARMA’s tools have already made a difference, and we’re looking forward to seeing how we can further leverage them, particularly with reputation tracking.
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