Metrica Numbers data has been put to excellent use in this week's PR Week where it has been used to open The AVE Debate.

Although at Metrica we continue to provide AVE figures for our clients it is always with the recommendation to use it as one of a dashboard of (more relevant) metrics for a rounded picture.

Indeed, as this year's Metrica Numbers shows, PR is doing a fantastic job in the face of challenging economical times yet the AVE data would suggest otherwise.

The sooner AVEs are discredited and abandoned the better for the PR industry at large - it is an inherently flawed and archaic measure which has no place in modern PR.

Here's hoping PR Week's provision of a forum for the debate will sound the death knoll for AVE.

Metrica Numbers is the PR industry’s only regular, independent benchmarking report. By isolating media analysis data from 2008, and also providing an evaluation of trends over the last ten years, the report informs the industry about general trends and provides top-line planning support. In particular it can help organisations and PR agencies to formulate meaningful performance targets which take into account changing sector and environmental factors.

Here are some excerpts from the executive summary:

There have been two major environmental factors to take into account writing this year’s report – the economy and social media. That there has been major economical change in the last 12 months is a fact which cannot be overlooked when assessing PR performance over 2008. More positively, 2008 has also been the year in which we have seen social media begin to become more established as an accountable PR channel. 

• These two factors considered, comparing the benchmarking data for 2008 against that from 2007 reveals some interesting trends. Perhaps most significantly to those organisations which are still forced to use it, particularly for performance targets, the average monthly AVE is down from £3.7 to £2.2 million. See ‘Trend Spotting 2008’ for further details.
• Of more than three million press articles analysed over the last decade, the vast majority are positive and that trend continues. 
• This empirical evidence continues to fly in the face of general anecdotal feeling that the media tends to promote more ‘sensationalist’ coverage which by its nature is more likely to be negative.
• Broadcast coverage has been declining over the last two years while business press has shown consistent and strong growth over the past ten.
• 2008 saw the proportion of online coverage more than double, from 11% in 2007 25%. Many may jump to the conclusion that this increase has been driven by social media which is true, but only in part. While social media has indeed become firmly planted on the media landscape over the last 12 months it accounted for just three percent of analysed media coverage (figure 1a and 1b).
• However, that is not to say social media is not making an impact. It is Metrica’s experience and opinion that this low proportion of social media within online as a media type actually reflects the issues and debate regarding monitoring social media. That in turn is inhibiting the inclusion of social media in media evaluation and PR measurement programmes. For more about this please see ‘Trend Spotting 2008’. 

Key trends this year are:

Regional for the people: Despite its continuing downwards trend, regional media was the strongest channel for six out of 11 sectors reaffirming its continued role on the media landscape.  

Digital migration: There’s no doubting that the data from 2008 provides a notable marker in media history – that being the biggest surge yet in the growth of online media. The main generator of coverage for three sectors, the channel to which recession hit titles are turning and no doubt to be supported further in next year’s report, digital media is the one to watch in 2009 

Haste and paste: Continuing evidence of high message delivery and spokespeople mentions suggests the continuation of a copy and paste publishing trend in online media. In addition, the figures suggest this is now also becoming more established in the increasingly resource stretched regionals.  

AVE deficit: As advertising budgets have declined over the course of 2008 so advertising rates have fallen and the value of adverts declined in turn. For the many organisations still forced to use AVEs as a measure of their PR success this means it has been a very bad year as the targets they were set become unobtainable. On the plus side it has provided the perfect case in point for why the PR industry should not employ AVEs to measure its performance.  

Credit crunch: Despite fears over the economy in the latter half of 2007, favourability bucked a ten year tend and improved compared to 2006. In 2008 though the decline in favourability is back with the last quarter of the year, unsurprisingly, the worst performing.  

National trust: Reassurance as to the integrity of national newspapers may once again be taken from figures suggesting their editorial is least malleable by PRs. They are more likely than ever to feature unfavourable coverage and most unlikely to deliver key messages or quote spokespeople. 

[To get your copy please click here]

A few of us from Metrica attended Seth Godin's session in London on Tuesday afternoon and I'm delighted to report it was an afternoon well spent... I was totally engaged for the whole three hours, listening intently to everything he said because it made a whole lot of sense. He cut through the clutter of his subject matter with impressive deftness and brought clarity to a whole bunch of frustrations I am sure many of us working in PR and marketing share day to day. 

Here are some (but not too many because you should look him up yourself!) of my key takeaways: 

• Spreading ideas and fostering an understanding of them is key to building demand for associated products and services
• Be the leader, be inspirational - thought leadership and education are key
• A business/product/service needs a story and to live that story – know what yours is and how to tell it effectively

In a nutshell it’s getting buy in to the big idea by telling its story that wins in a 21^st century market place, and as such PR must surely now be coming into its own as ‘the’ strategic communication tool of our time. 

See also Chris Reed's take on Seth’s seminar.

We’ve been debating this morning if we need to extend our boardroom to create more wall space to put the ten awards we collected at last night’s AMEC Awards... As one presenter joked: “I hope you’ve got a bus to take all these home in…!” 

It is a huge testament to the talent, skill, passion, dedication and diligence of our team here at Metrica that we were short listed in seven out of the eight categories, twice in two categories, and walked away with ten awards in total. 

Case studies of the winning work are available for those interested – please just drop me a line.  

We would also like to congratulate all our peers who collected awards last night. The standard of both entries and judging was reportedly very high, which is great news for the industry, proving the high standards we aspire and work to.  

Here’s to another year of exciting growth and development as we head into 2009. 

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.

Metrica has just released the latest update to UKPulse, the successor of ConsumerPulse, our PR planning tool that enables users to build and interrogate customised target audiences.  In these days of an ever expanding media universe, we have focussed particular attention on helping our clients to understand the UK's complete media consumption - the internet, social media, referral sites, networks, user generated content as well as all forms of the more traditional media.  It's thrown up some fascinating insights which seemed surprising at first. 

Given the ongoing hype around social media one might be forgiven for assuming its status and credibility were much higher… but our survey of 13,000 UK adults shows different.  While 29% of respondents felt they could trust an online customer review site only 5% said that they trusted blogs and not even 1% of respondents trust online forums.

So then I took a look at mainstream media to see how this had changed from last year's research… and more surprises!  According to our poll (carried out in conjunction with YouGov) trust in UK television stations is up a massive 24 percentage points, with 70% of UK adults polled saying they believe what they see and hear from key channels.  And national radio also performs well in the results achieving an increase of 12 percentage points in the year (from 49% to 61%).

Even the (often maligned) national newspapers managed a significant 17 percentage point increase from 2007, although this still leaves them lagging behind national TV and radio with only 43% of UK adults claiming to trust them. Trust in regional press meanwhile remains fairly static with only a one percentage point increase for regional newspapers (to 50%) and four percentage points for regional radio (also now at 50%).  The more or less static perception of regional press is what I would have expected given its previous high scores, reflecting its content and readership.

The national and social media results though I would suggest require some debate and further research to fully understand. If asked to hazard a guess at what could be behind the results, my personal opinion is that the consumers of media, having so much more content to choose from, have become more savvy about their options.   When choosing your news channel, the objectivity of the source is the key.  Generalising massively here, I would say that while social media is often authentic, it is less likely than traditional media to be objective.  Many blogs tend to focus on  'opinion' rather than 'reporting'.  And there's the issue - how much do any of us trust the opinion of someone whom we know nothing or very little about?  

Of course, this is all very broad and sweeping.  Some bloggers develop incredible relationships with their readers resulting in them enjoying very high trust ratings.  And I have no doubt that the trust ratings of different types of blogs will vary significantly.  So, for example, a journalist's blog like Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine or a well respected business blog like Richard Edelman's 6am are likely to have very high trust ratings from their readers whereas a gaming enthusiast from small town nowheresville is likely to have much lower scores. The survey questions into media trust in UKPulse do not go to this level of granularity.

Talking of well respected bloggers, we sent some of these stats to Roy Greenslade at The Guardian.  He posted about them just this morning.  We really hope that this stirs some debate and opinions - already we are pleased to see that Adrian Monck, head of journalism and publishing at London's City University and author of "Can You Trust The Media?" (a great read!) has got involved in the debate on Roy's blog.  We would love to hear your thoughts, and what questions you feel should now be asked.  It's an area that Metrica will return to in due course and which clearly merits further research too.