PR Week, 16^th October 2008: “If the PR industry gets hit hard by this recession it is because we haven't done a good enough job getting our clients to really embrace measurement”, said Tim Dyson, CEO of Next Fifteen, which owns the Bite, Text100 and Lexis brands.  

PR budgets are always under intense scrutiny and, frustratingly, PRs are always having to fight the finance directors attempts to draw tighter the PR purse string. Hearteningly though, over time and particulalry since the dot.com crash, we’ve noticed how our clients have been gaining strength in that fight when equipped with appropriate measurement stats.   

A key benefit of a PR measurement programme is that it helps you communicate the success of your campaigns to your stakeholders in ways that they can understand. Demonstrating, for example, how 'that coverage in the nationals' impacted web sales, or how 'that column in Now magazine' drove its readers to change their drinking habits. 

If PRs want to protect their budgets they should make sure relevant measurement is planned and built in from the start, adhered to during execution of campaigns (to ensure they are working effectively and adjust if not) and show contextual ROI on completion. 

When well considered, measurement need not be a huge expense and can make the difference between a budget you can succeed with and one you’re up against the wall with.      

See here for tips on how to survive the credit crunch.

So, as promised, the results of our poll... with 80 respondents the results are as follows:

So 93% of our voters believe that between one and six messages is the optimum number to work with if you want to deliver them effectively.  The reality though, we all know, is that many of those voters will most likely be juggling more than six messages at anyone time…

Much like the maligned AVE, multiple messages in PR programmes and campaigns are often a symptom of the industry having to satisfy non-communications professionals. Product managers, for example, who insist on several messages for each of their products or a company director who is convinced that every capability of the organisation needs name checking in its own message…  It is an ongoing frustration for the profession that it continually needs to satisfy the demands of, and demonstrate its value to, stakeholders that do not understand PR. 

Fortunately though, as PR measurement becomes more sophisticated and relevant, there is an increasing bank of evidence available to PR professionals that can be drawn on for the extra credibility often required to defend decisions and results.

For a more indepth analysis of the optimum message debate see Paul's recent post and also comment from Custard PR MD, Stuart Campbell, here. 

I’ve long been a believer that the days of advertising as ‘the’ prized and dominant marketing tactic are numbered… and not just because my background is in PR.  It is actually a long held belief born out of the simple fact that I know that I myself am far more likely to engage with a brand (or buy a product or service) based on what a respected third party says about it as opposed to an advert. In fact, I am pretty sure I am ‘advert apathetic’.

As such I was not at all surprised to read this morning that “as many as 73% of web users have left a favourite website because of intrusive or annoying ads” and also that Yahoo’s financial results, announced today, revealed international brand-focused display ad revenues down 8%.  Then there was the timesonline piece reporting that advertising revenues at Associated Newspapers, excluding sales from the Daily Mail and Evening Standard websites, have fallen by five per cent in the three months to June 30.  And it is not alone of course… earlier this month, Trinity Mirror also admitted that advertising at the Daily Mirror and its sister titles had collapsed by between 12 per cent and 14 per cent in May and June.

Admittedly this is not surprising in the UK market given the current economic downturn.  Indeed a new Mintel survey has revealed that UK consumers are increasingly feeling the effects of the credit crunch with fewer people feeling as well off as in previous years – clearly bad news for the advertising industry.  However, it is interesting to note that Associated Newspapers online versions of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard actually reported increases in ad sales.

What really caught my interest from all of this were two key things:

1.)     That we are seeing yet more evidence of a migration from paper to online media consumption
2.)     And that this move represents a clear opportunity for PR to supersede advertising as ‘the’ lead marketing tactic 

Taking my first point, the migration of media consumption from paper to online, this has clearly rung in massive changes for advertisers already. The main change is the ability to target very specific niche audience groups which will increase as MSM (mainstream media) and CGM (consumer generated or social media) continue to flourish in the digital environment. As a result, online adverts will need to be ever more carefully positioned as behavioural targeting of audiences becomes more prominent. In a nut shell what advertising will lose, as we are already seeing, is its BIG numbers – in terms of audience reach figures and ball busting budgets.

This brings me onto my second point regarding the opportunity for PR to become ‘the’ dominant marketing tactic. The nature of digital media means that audience participation and engagement is higher than with traditional paper and broadcast media types. This is clearly more suited to PR (which communicates in a mutually beneficial way with stakeholders) than advertising (which directly informs an audience).

There is a ton of evidence to support this (which I plan to revisit) but I’ll close for now with this thought: as we move towards a totally online media culture, PR (the art of managing conversations) will become the most vital component of the marketing mix.  As a consequence, measuring and understanding the effectiveness of PR and its outcomes will become more important than exhaustive monitoring of all media output and a bursting book of clippings. 

The real value and insight will be ascertained by measurement that is as carefully crafted as the PR it is assessing.

So we've just been having a discussion here about traditional media monitoring and the fact that we are seeing more and more clients move away from it and towards news aggregation models instead.

It prompts the question, in the 'new media' age (where digital coverage seems almost endless when one takes into account CGM and so forth) isn't it time that PROs finally felt able to switch their focus from quantity to quality? i.e. focus on measures which go beyond a bursting clippings book and pay more attention to delivering the correct content, in the right place, at the right time and engaging the right audience often enough?

What is more, this is a very relevant point given the current economic climate... volumes of coverage (and therefore cost) can easily escalate when the monitoring brief takes in everything even though this very often leads to nothing much more but a pile of meaningless gumph (save the top ten percent or so).

Surely it is far more cost effective and insightful to limit monitoring and evaluation to key media and online sources. This can even negate the need for traditional media monitoring as news aggregation feeds replace them and arguably serve more purpose monitoring reputation and PR activity in a digital world working to a 24 hours news agenda.

It all makes a lot of sense to me with the only real issue being educating internal stakeholders that it is not always volume that constitutes successful PR... but then that is another issue...

Any and all thoughts welcome!

This morning I had my attention brought to a feature on the CBS News site entitled The Flak Over Flacks. Delivered by a legal analyst named Andrew Cohen, in the wake of the publication of his book (does one sniff an irony here already?!), the piece makes a hard hitting attack on the integrity of PR people with comments such as “show me a PR person who is ‘accurate’ and ‘truthful’ and I'll show you a PR person who is unemployed” and “PR people are trained to be slickly untruthful or half-truthful”. 

Somewhat incensed by what I read I spent sometime composing a response but, with 97 responses posted already including a letter from the PRSA, the site has disabled the publish function “to enable everyone an opportunity to comment” – err, but if I can’t publish my post I can’t comment…am I missing something?!  

So instead, at least for now, I am posting my response here: 

Andrew – you’re right, there is nothing funny about the revelations that Scott McClellan lied to the American people.  

But let us put this in perspective:  

1.) Every profession (sadly) contains bad practitioners that let the side down, and sometimes those bad practitioners are caught out, exposed and persecuted in such a way as to taint the reputation of their industry. Some professions (including journalism, PR and law), or groups of people (such as celebrities, sports people and royalty), come under rather more scrutiny and suffer even more polarised judgement than others because the ‘public’ upholds them as purveyors of ‘truth’ and models of ‘morality’.  What a breathtaking and precariously high place to sit, and not surprising then that so many fall. 

With specific regards to the PR profession: 

2.) There seems to be a general sense of misunderstanding in your piece as to what PR is and how it works. Like journalists, PRs are bound to a code of ethics and for the most part respect them.  As many of the people who have commented on your article have pointed out, to tell mistruths would only lose one the respect of colleagues, contacts and clients. It is, very simply, not the way to do ‘PR’ business. The skill honed in a PR person is delivering the truth, on behalf of your client, in the best possible way.   

3.) Don’t journalists have a role to play here too? In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies accuses newspapers of tamely accepting stories from public relations initiatives, an accusation backed up by Metrica Numbers, an annual PR industry benchmarking report, which suggests at the emergence of a ‘haste and paste’ publishing trend in today’s media. As Roy Greenslade, in a recent of his Evening Standard columns, conceded: “PR can hardly be blamed for taking advantage of journalists who are happy to be spoon-fed stories.”  

Of all mediums in the world it is the media, in my opinion, that best demonstrates the grey between black (lies) and white (truth) for it is an entity endlessly challenged by objectivity. The experiences of those both creating and consuming the media makes it near impossible for it to be anything but an averagely grey mass, and the sooner we accept that the sooner we can deal with it.

The report consolidates media analysis meta-data from more than three million press articles featuring 700 organisations over the last decade to enable industry trends to be identified. As well as top line findings, it looks at key breakdowns by media type, sector and specific media titles.  

Our hope is that the publication of such a set of data, on a regular basis, will help organisations and PR agencies to formulate meaningful performance targets which take into account changing sector and environmental factors. 

The benchmarking data from 2007 provides clear indication that today’s PROs are succeeding despite an increasingly complex media landscape. For example, on average, per month, organisations in 2007 reached 35% of the UK adult population 11 times. Add to this that only 8% of all coverage was classified unfavourable, just half strongly so, and the presence of a skilled PR industry at work can clearly be seen.  

We also identified a whole bunch of media trends from 2007 which are sparking some debate – see below – and feedback on these would be most welcome: 

Haste and paste: High message delivery and spokespeople mentions suggest the emergence of a copy and paste publishing trend in online media. Online featured the strongest message delivery of any media type with half of coverage delivering key messages, and an average of three message deliveries per article.There is also some indication of a similar trend amongst regional titles.   

Credit crunch: Despite fears over the economy in the latter half of last year, favourability improved in 2007 compared to 2006. That aside, the tough economic conditions did result in the Finance and Retail sectors experiencing relatively unfavourable coverage compared to other sectors in 2007. Indeed, finance experienced by far the most negative press, with 15% of articles being unfavourable. Much of this has resulted from a hostile environment following the global credit crunch and the increasingly difficult economic environment, in particular pressure on interest rates.   

National trust: Data relating to the favourability of coverage suggests a greater level of integrity at play amongst the UK media than cynics would want us to believe. National papers were twice as likely to feature unfavourable coverage than regional print media which, with the latter having an editorial bias towards local communities and businesses, is perhaps to be expected.  Likewise, the proportion of coverage delivering key messages was significantly lower for daily and Sunday newspapers than other media types suggesting they are less willing divert from their own agenda. The Sunday Times, Observer and the Daily Mail published the most negative coverage. Tabloids such as the Sun and Mirror tended to be more favourable than the broadsheets.  

Regional for the people: Despite a downwards trend over the last decade, the regional media type accounted for almost half of analysed media coverage in 2007. It was the strongest channel for eight out of 11 sectors featured and was particularly dominant for charities, government, not for profit and media. Regional coverage was generally very favourable and strong in terms of message delivery – regional press was 23% more likely to convey a key message than the national press.  

Tech no PR: IT, telecoms and internet organisations struggle to see their messages delivered and spokespeople quoted. This highlights the problem that tech PR often faces in translating marketing messages into PR stories that appeal to journalists. More than half of IT sector coverage appeared in the business press reflecting the strong B2B nature of this sector’s activity.    

Feature feasting: As well as being generally more positive, general interest magazines have strong message delivery with half of all articles delivering at least one key message – on average each article conveys almost three key messages. Not rocket science, but a noticeable trend and worth bearing in mind with regards to the quality over quantity debate.    

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