The Marketing Manager's Yearbook 2006
PR Evaluation - A Whole Lot More
than Just Clippings
Marc Prema-Ratner, Managing Director,
Z’est Corporate PR
The Oxford English Dictionary describes ‘accountability’ in its most basic form as, a ‘requirement or expectation to justify actions or decisions’. The PR industry has been constantly prodded to do just that - with varying degrees of success and yields. Its practitioners are persistently told of the need to demonstrate how their efforts affect their clients’ bottom line, in order to compete with other elements of the marketing mix, for a slice of that ever-elusive budget. Equally importantly, the PR industry continually seeks to gain more acceptance at board level and to even smell the coffee in the boardroom the industry needs to start proving its effectiveness and demonstrating proper planning techniques. Whilst the need for this justification is clearly spelt out, in reality, the mantra has proved to be much easier said than done.
So, why the obsession? Quite simply because no commercial undertaking should be carried out without assessing its effect on a business, brand or product, regardless of whether this effect involves tangibles or intangibles. The working relationship between the PR agency and client has to be based on understanding, clarity, integrity and good communication. Furthermore, it is strengthened by the fact that both sides understand the expectations and indeed the limitations of the task in hand - giving credit where credit is due and taking action where minimum standards and expectations have not been met.
A two-way process
Of course, no measurement or evaluation exercise should be undertaken without the consent of both parties. It will only work when the process is believed to be a fair assessment by all. The criteria against which the activities in question will be measured are solely dependent on the formulation of a brief and clear documentation of the objectives of the activities.
Any measurement system should be reviewed often and should retain a flexibility to be tailored according to market, brief and needs changes. As marketers we have been ingrained on the 4 Ps of marketing. Well, I have formulated the 5 Ss of measurement.
- Sketch, set and monitor clear cut objectives
- Save money and effort by targeting and testing
- Showcase how you are accountable through independent audits
- Signify the value of and effectiveness of your PR campaigns using tangible and real proof
- Secure future budgets based on evidence of success.
Of course, there remains some scepticism within certain client organisations that there is a concrete and finite way of evaluating the ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ of PR and media relations activity. There are and will always be reasons why this is so, given the fact that PR professionals cannot control what a journalist will write. After all, the golden rule of editorial integrity should never be flouted. There can be far-reaching parameters of influence, which the PR industry could exercise, in order to gain meaningful outcomes from the media, if handled with great care and responsibility. This is probably one of the fundamental steps in the solution to the issue of establishing value of the PR function. Bearing in mind of course, that the PR mix in all its glory, goes far beyond mere column inches, which in itself is a challenge for meaningful analysis and evaluation.
Value, media and coverage
There is an obvious parallel here with choosing the ‘exact’ media to target for a PR campaign. An agency, at the most basic level, will need to select the most appropriate media, based on the target audience’s tastes, using a number of variables to rank their reach. But within this lies one of the greatest challenges facing PR practitioners today - largely because PR is so often measured almost exclusively in terms of just the media coverage generated. And how can you value something as subjective as an opinion in a newspaper? More to the point, how can you demonstrate that any increase in sales was directly as a result of media coverage? After all, reading editorial is usually just one of the factors involved in a consumer’s decision to buy, and PR is usually one of a number of different and simultaneous marketing initiatives.
The problem isn’t simply restricted to measuring the value of media coverage. How, for instance, do you put a value on changing a key opinion leader’s mind about something? This is particularly illustrative in public affairs PR initiatives, where years of dynamic lobbying activity (sometimes with very little overt coverage), generates the desired objective.
Building integrity and conviction
The advertising industry, given its own endemic tribulations, has been one of the most effective components within marketing to demonstrate accountability to its clients. The direct marketing sector, given its response-driven mechanisms and data foundations, has followed suit, one of the factors by which it has commanded a justifiable budget shift in its favour. However it seems the PR industry is still trying to reach above the parapet to make its cause heard. Of course there are a handful of commercial tools and products which claim they do the job - but is this enough? The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. The PR sector needs to demonstrate that it can plan its campaigns in as sophisticated a manner as its advertising and DM colleagues. It needs reliable research data. And at any rate, it is time for its measurement tools to grow up. It needs plausible measures, because pseudo-scientific proprietary scoring systems serve little purpose apart from to justify expensive analysis tools and to lock companies into systems that don’t help the planning process.
You may imagine that I prefer a robust, granular, replicable and transparent process having watched the wriggling smoke and mirrors hype which masquerades as PR evaluation from all too many practitioners and which is endorsed by institutions that should know better. However, it is not that easy to create such capabilities.
PR practitioners may use a multitude of approaches for measurement analysis. From the antiquated method of counting the number of pieces of coverage; circulation and readership analysis; the perennial technique of combining advertising value equivalent with PR weighting; content, message, prominence and tonality analysis; coverage quality to competitive analysis are used individually, or in some combination.
Further complication comes to the fore as the debate rages on, whether PR evaluation is an art and therefore subjective, or scientific and therefore objective. Beauty in this instance definitely lies in the eye of the beholder. The results of PR evaluation would vary depending on who is doing it. Is it your PR agency that has a vested interest in echoing the good news and downplaying poor or negative coverage? Or is it done by a third-party that is brutally factual? Certainly, food for thought.
Accountability needs to have a direct correlation to the bottom line, which effectively translates to it having a tangible link to sales. The checklist leading to this Holy Grail is quite straightforward. Firstly, ‘who did we reach?’ Secondly, ‘how do we compare?’ and thirdly, ‘how does our media exposure and generic PR efforts relate to sales?’ Sounds too easy? Think again.
Indeed, there is no other discipline that can create value momentum. PR is a fundamental process by which worth and wealth are created. This then gives us a real and true return on investment (ROI) which is not necessarily about transaction but about wealth created. Another key factor to be taken into consideration is the continuous proliferation of media channels. Gone are the days when clear-cut distinctions of press and broadcast were the only channels to measure. The challenge is that more and more ephemeral media channels are touted as contributing towards consumers’ overall picture of the world, ranging from blogs, viral messaging and word of mouth (WoM) to ‘buzz’ marketing - or ‘talkability’. Clients naturally want to measure these too, but how to achieve that is another matter.
So, it just isn’t sufficient for the industry to ‘cop out’ by saying that the evaluation models we currently have are as good as they will get, therefore we have to live with it. On the contrary, we have to strive unequivocally for best practice in developing accountable solutions, which have some semblance of client-centric acceptability. The alternative is to accept there are challenges, surmising that the solutions are just too much of an effort to devise.
There isn’t a single ‘magic bullet’ for utopian evaluation, but there is a need for an over-riding concept and I think that the added value provided by PR is a good place to start the process. Whilst we must strive for ever higher standards and seek to evaluate performance, let’s not kid ourselves that this measurement can be done without real consideration of a multitude of facts and players and lessons from other sister industries. Let us however remember that the more we impose standards and norms on any aspect of our trade, the more we could lose sight of what we are really about in the first place.
Marc Prema-Ratner
Biography
Prior to forming Z’est Corporate, Marc Prema-Ratner worked at strategic PR agency Eulogy! He was responsible for the success of a variety of major blue chip accounts whilst at global marketing consultancy CWC. His first venture into commerce was with EMAP.