(L-R): Kevin Casoli, Country Director, IRIS Luxembourg; Ludivine Plessy, Founder and Director, Keep Contact; Catherine Plessy, Development Director, Keep Contact; Marc Vandeveken, Delivery Manager, IRIS Luxembourg;

Media and public relations agency Keep Contact has reached a new phase in its development by acquiring a new digital tool: Watson Explorer; with this smart technology, Keep Contact opens up new information processing and monitoring horizons; the agency chose document and data management specialist IRIS Luxembourg to support this company project.

Independent media and public relations agency Keep Contact has been operating in Luxembourg for 10 years, deploying a wide range of high value-added services in its various sectors: media relations, public relations, digital communication, design and creation of content, training (Keep Academy), surveys and mystery clients, photography, video and traditional media (monitoring the press and advertisements). It also operates in France and Belgium. A true innovator, the agency was the first in the Grand Duchy to develop true media relations strategies. It was also a pioneer in the field of monitoring, as a very early investor in high-performance digital monitoring and analysis tools.

"Our press reviews reach an unrivalled level of excellence"

Today, Keep Contact reaffirms this striving for excellence that benefits its clients, as the world's first communication specialist company to adopt Watson Explorer technology, developed by IBM. Watson Explorer is able to look at a huge body of data, select the pre-defined content (key words, themes, etc.) and perform an initial analysis. Watson Explorer integrates these operations to then raise its own level of knowledge, improving the relevance even more. "Media monitoring is asserting itself as a driver of competitiveness. Using Watson Explorer, Keep Contact takes on a new dimension in the field of monitoring and analysis. Thanks to this cognitive tool, our press reviews have achieved unrivalled levels of richness, relevance, and added value in terms of their content," pointed out Ludivine Plessy, founder and CEO of Keep Contact.

"The quality of the information: the key to success"

For 30 years, IRIS has made information processing a major area of development and innovation in order to provide people and/or companies with a technology that remains easy to use despite ever-growing volumes of data.

"Everything started in the late 80s in Belgium, with the development of optical character recognition (OCR) technologies. The success of these developments quickly propelled the company into the ranks of the world leaders in the field. After that, it was natural for the teams to keep developing their expertise in the areas of document management and information management. This is the context in which the CANON Group acquired IRIS in order to bolster its development strategy with a Business Information Services (BIS) division. Today, its combination of various fields of expertise allows IRIS to support its customers through their digital transformation via a spectrum of fields ranging from regulatory compliance (such as GDPR), structuring fields, to other, more "business"-oriented areas, such as the search for differentiators or even disruptors in the field of artificial intelligence (IA)." explained Kevin Casoli, Country Director of IRIS Luxembourg.

"Added value for the benefit of customers"

To implement this tool, the agency hired a professional specialising in document and data management: IRIS Luxembourg, a part of the CANON Group. "These professionals not only provide expertise; they also understand our businesses. That was an essential consideration for us," added Catherine Plessy. IRIS Luxembourg and Keep Contact worked together closely for six months to configure Watson Explorer for the agency's specific media watch requirements. One of the priorities was to implement the ScanNews platform, which has been operational since last June. Using key words, this business application is able to process huge databases (such as the daily newspapers) for the purpose of extracting the most relevant information as pre-selected by Watson. This results in considerable time savings for the agency. It means that their teams can devote more of their time to processing this information so that it generates added value for the client's benefit.

"Already looking to the future"

A few growth areas have already been identified and activated, in the field of media watch and monitoring. Thanks to artificial intelligence, Watson Explorer will soon be able to produce automatic summaries and cut out text and photographs, for example, without human intervention. In terms of advertising watch, it already knows how to recognise images, but developments currently in progress will double its expertise in this area. On another note, it integrates relevant solutions related to high-potential technologies such as Speech-to-Text.

"This offers many different prospects. Along with IRIS Luxembourg, we are tracking these developments very closely, and we are conducting a discussion about creating a global project, a real project for the company's future, allowing us to seize future opportunities and further optimise the quality of our services and enrich our range of services. Watson Explorer is already configured to accept these innovations, which will bolster our digital strategy. And the whole team is ready to fully embrace them for the benefit of our clients," concluded Ludivine Plessy.