When it comes to effective communication of messages, it really seems that less is more.  We have just compiled some research that clearly demonstrates that the fewer key messages an organisation has, the better their delivery tends to be.

Although one to three key messages is ideal, the recommendation is to keep the number of tracked messages to six or less.

We brought together data from more than 200 organisations to see if there was a correlation between the number of messages that were tracked and how successfully those messages were conveyed in the media.  While we were expecting some kind of pattern, we were surprised about how definitive the relationship was.  Organisations with six or fewer messages were more than twice as likely to see those messages delivered as those with more.  For those organisations with even fewer messages (one to three) it was even more profound – message delivery was on average three times more effective than those with more.

By running a regression analysis across this data we can model a response curve to show how the effectiveness drops off with the increasing number of messages.  It can immediately be seen that this is not a linear relationship – the effectiveness drops off quite sharply after the first few messages.  Each additional message serves to negatively affect the overall delivery, with the greatest ‘damage’ occurring when there are relatively few messages to begin with.

Gareth’s recent poll on this subject so far shows that PR professionals broadly agree with these findings – 95% voted for between one and six as the optimum number of message deliveries with 58% voting for between one and three.

So if we all know that less is more, how come many of us don’t practice what we preach when it comes to defining our own message set.  Indeed the average number of messages in this study was nine with many organisations measuring more than 30!

One explanation is that it is very tempting to add more messages thinking that we are ‘widening the net’ and will capture more.  However this serves not only to dilute our existing messages, as we have seen it will actually adversely affect their delivery.

Another reason is to do with the size of the organisation.  It could be argued that larger organisations have multiple business areas, products, services and audiences and therefore have a need for more messages.  This is borne out by the data which shows a definite correlation between size of organisation in terms of cutting volumes and number of messages.  In fact, most of the organisations with more than 30 messages were generating more than 500 cuttings a month.

Although I understand the logic that by targeting a particular audience you can then tailor the messages to those people.  However we must bear in mind that it is not easy to isolate an audience in this way.  For example a business audience will also read consumer media, potential employees may well read product reviews and consumers will not be immune to your financial results.  Once we understand it in this way we can see the danger of multifarious messages.

Given that people are bombarded by media communication via an increasing number of channels, focussing on fewer messages makes sense.  Audiences have a short attention span but a journalist's is often shorter.  A small number of messages will not only generate a strong brand image but will also increase the likelihood of being published in the first place .  If you are still unsure, try playing this “word association” game:

Everyone’s going online, newspaper circulation figures and ad-rates are declining and many people are predicting the realisation of Ghostbuster Egon Spengler’s famous quote, “Print is dead!”

And yet something doesn’t seem right.  I remember many years ago buying a PDA that could download my favourite sections of the BBC news site.  “Wow, this is the future!” I thought to myself, “No more newpapers, I can get everything I need from this”.  But, today am I reading news on my iPhone – no I am not.  A quick look around on my commuter train this morning showed the majority of people reading a newspaper with the rest reading books or staring out of the window.  A couple of people were using PDAs but only to check e-mail (and yes I did get a few funny looks for peering over their shoulders!).  So it would seem that print is very much alive on my train at least.  One explanation is the success of free newspapers – by far the majority of papers being read this morning were the London Metro.

Local versions of the Metro are available in urban centres in 23 countries with a total readership of about 23 million.  In London, Metro is joined by other free papers such as London Lite, TheLondonPaper and City AM.  The circulation of these papers has been increasing with many experiencing record levels this summer.  Some people have argued that this is compensated by a corresponding decline in paid-for newpapers.  Indeed as we can see below, the Evening Standard has suffered a fall in circulation while the London free press has grown.  However the combined readership of these titles is more than four times the initial circulation of the Evening Standard which implies that more people are reading print media in London.

Free press is popular because it doesn’t cost anything either in money or in time since the paper is there at the station for you to pick up or as with London Lite or LondonPaper it is literally thrust into your hand.  As MIT professor Dan Ariely explains, we instinctively irrationally overreact to free offers even if it means that quality will be compromised. 

So we had a meeting with the FT the other week only to be informed that we are to be charged a significant amount of money for the privilege of measuring any articles from their newspaper and website.  This is just for analysis mind, not for supplying content to our clients.  Although it feels like we are being picked on, the FT is attempting to do the same with all media analysis companies as well as press cutting agencies, news aggregators and all of our clients.  Given this will be done on a ‘number of users’ basis, it is likely that a big corporate could be charged tens of thousands of pounds for their FT license.

Titles such as the FT and Wall Street Journal have tried to offer subscription-only content a number of times with limited success.  However, going after the corporates themselves rather than the consumer represents a significant shift in strategy.  It could be a potentially large revenue stream for the FT but it also poses a massive risk.  Not surprisingly, many organisations are up in arms about it and there is a likelihood that it will drive users away from the FT's website.

Given that most revenue for online newspapers comes from advertising which in turn is related to website traffic, this may not be smart thinking.  Indeed a quick look at Alexa.com shows an 18% fall in site traffic since the FT started rolling out their content licensing in April.  Our contact at the FT said that they weren’t interested in raw numbers because it’s the ‘quality of readers that counts: while our content is read by CEO’s, companies will want to advertise with us’.  I am not sure that this view is necessarily true.  FT ad rates are already twice the national newspaper average (£50 compared to £25 per thousand views, source: Mediatel).  If website traffic falls, then ad rates will have to increase by a similar margin just to maintain the same revenue.  At some stage it becomes unsustainable and a marketer will be driven to use other channels even if their target audience is the CEO.

I hear that the FT wants a “fair and transparent means” of delivering content but all this reminds me about the PR industry’s arguments with the NLA over copywrite licensing.  The newspaper owners are trying to protect ‘their’ content but we all have to understand where the content comes from.  We are seeing more and more evidence of how important the PR industry is in supplying content to journalists, who are under increasing pressure to get their articles published under ever tighter deadlines.  Cost cutting and the growth of online means that there are fewer journalists writing more stories.  Nick Jones in Flat Earth News observes where you used to have a journalist writing one story a day, today they will have to write ten – hence the frequent practice of using content from newswires and press releases.  Indeed researchers at the university of Cardiff showed that about 80% of home news content in broadsheet newspapers had originated from agency or PR copy.

What happens if other media owners follow suit and start charging significantly for access to content to the very people who helped supply it in the first place.  Isn’t there the danger that the whole news production line could grind to a halt?

Over the years, marketeers have found more and more sophisticated ways of targeting individuals out of a broad base of customers.

In the excellent book ‘Super Crunchers’, Yale Professor Ian Ayres shows how advances in technology and statistical techniques have allowed organisations to number-crunch massive data sets to identify trends, to target customers in ever more clever ways and even to predict their behaviour.

For example, back in 2000 some Amazon customers noticed that they were being charged different amounts for the same products.  The company was accused of ‘price targeting’, an economic technique to leverage more money from certain types of people based on their shopping habits.  It was thought that established customers would be likely to pay more than new ones and were being targeting accordingly.  This was denied by the company who claimed that they were doing “random” price tests.  However a 2005 study from the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylavia showed a number of similar cases of internet price targeting.  The same study showed that 87% of people strongly object to this practice, so it is clearly a contentious issue.

Google’s entire business model is based on keeping people coming to its site because it is the best place to search the internet.  Remember how quickly we all switched from Yahoo! or AltaVista simply because Google was simpler and quicker.  As such it spends a huge amount of money on improving the relevance of its searches.  Since 2005 it has included ‘personalised search’ technology which remembers where you have searched in the past and uses this to rank the search results by ‘predicting’ which ones are more relevant to you.  So Steve Jobs will get different results when he searches for ‘Apple’ than an orchard owner would. 

Online news providers are using similar technologies to target the news to their readers.  In 2005 MSNBC.com launched a personalised news section which would contain headlines selected according to the types of stories you read most often.  Findory, launched in 2004, was a similar concept expanded to be a personalised online newspaper.  Unfortunately it was not successful and folded in 2007

More recently sites such as DailyMe and Feedly are offering personalised news and with the latter integrated with social networking (including Twitter) so that your friends and contacts can recommend stories to you.  Sites such as Digg.com provide news stories recommended by potentially millions of people.  iGoogle and MyYahoo allow you to customise your home page with relevant RSS feeds and there are numerous 3^rd party RSS readers and aggregators.

All of these innovations are leading news to be consumed in a different way and so many of the metrics that have traditionally worked in mainstream media now fall down.  Kristin posted earlier this week about the massive discrepancies between online readership data from the various auditing bodies.  Ultimately what does it mean if we have got the number of visitors for the Guardian.co.uk if a load of people are reading Guardian stories without visiting the website (or indeed buying the newspaper)?   As measurement guru Katie Paine points out its “yet another reason why we should be focussing not just on eyeballs but on outcomes”.

And that is the final irony - the same technological advances that have brought the new media environment can help us to measure it.  Advances in databases and data collection as well as the statistical advances in econometrics have enabled us to be able to link PR efforts with business outcomes be they, sales, customer behaviour or website traffic and to be able to disaggregate other factors such as contemporaneous marketing activity, seasonal effects, pricing and competitor activity.  We can build systems that allow us to analyse coverage more or less in 'real time' and can create online portals and e-mail alerts to feed tailored measurement dashboards to the stakeholders that need them.  How does that suit you, sir?!

I posted recently about the tendancy for media to give a distorted picture of reality, using examples such as the global warming debate and the MMR vaccine controversy.  I briefly mentioned Chris Anderson’s explanation that media owners are trying to sell stories to us and that we tend to react more to dramatic stories rather than abstract facts.  I am currently reading an excellent book called ‘Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear’ by Dan Gardner which expands on these points and argues that our brains are simply not adapted to cope with the modern media envirmoment.

To put this in context, imagine the whole of human history (roughly 250,000 years) condensed into a single day, starting at midnight.  We spend the vast majority of the day as nomadic hunter gatherers, moving around in small bands of people searching for food.  It is not until 11pm that we even settle down, discover farming and stay in one place.  We develop the earliest forms of writing soon after and by 11:30 we are beginning to congregate into the first towns.  All of the modern communication technologies that we take for granted from printed newspapers, photographs, telecommunications, radio, TV and the internet are all condensed into the last two minutes.

Dan Garder highlights how our hunter gatherer brains often make mistakes in the modern world, particularly with our attitude to risk.  Here are some key points:

Heart rules the Head

We like to think of ourselves as rational thinkers.  However much of our decision making and attitude to risk comes from the unconcious emotional parts of our brains.  For example many people are afraid of snakes.  For someone living on the African savanah this makes sense since snakes live there too and they can kill you.  This fear seems to be hard wired into us since people living in Greenland are also scared of snakes even though most will never come near one.  Experiments by Antonio Damasio on brain damaged patients showed that in people with damage to the emotional centres of the brain have more difficulty in making decisions.  Malcom Gladwell in his book ‘Blink’ shows the importance of gut feel in decision making while Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman highlights in his book ‘How Customer’s Think’ how much of a cutomer’s thoughts and attitudes to a product are governed by their emotions.  This has profound implications for audience based research, since most rearch is conducted using rational questions which rarely tap into what the person really thinks.

Experience teaches a harsh school but fools will learn no other:

Our perceptions of risk can be dramatically molded by our experiences.  On an emotional level, our brains often have difficulty distinguishing between actual experiences and things we experience through the mass media.  Most people know that fact that flying on a plane is safer than driving.  However this didn’t stop many people deciding to drive rather than fly in the wake of 9/11, having been exposed to those dramatic images.  By analysing traffic data in the years before and after 2001, Gerd Gigerenzer a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, was able to calculate that more than 1,500 people were killed as a result of the decision to drive rather than fly.  This is more than half the total death toll of history's worst terrorist activity.

If its natural its good for you:

Perceived risk is also exaggerated by whether it has natural or man-made causes.  For example many people think that the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack is greater than the risk of being killed by an asteroid when in fact it is the other way around.  However much more money is spent on anti-terror activities than searching for errant asteroids.  Before the 2004 tsunami, many scientists were calling for an early warning system without much recognition.  As memory of the 230,000 lives killed by the flooding fades, they find themselves facing a similar situation.  Many people feel cuatious about the man-made radiation from nuclear power and yet are very happy to subject themselves to the same ‘natural’ radiation from the sun on their holidays – or course many more people get skin cancer than suffer ill effects from a nuclear power plant.  People are worried about being blown up or murdered but they seem to be happy to live on earthquake fault-lines (California) or on the slopes of active volcanoes (Canary Islands).

If it bleeds it leads:

Speaking of crime, there is often a ‘man-bites-dog’ mentality to the news agenda with unusual stories appearing more often than common ones.  This of course is dangerous because is clouds our view about what is normal.  The media raises the visability of violent crime, particularly towards the elderly and children.  This is despite the fact that violent crime is statistically very unusual and typical victims are young men.  Since a lack of crime does not make good news, many people think that crime if increasing.  In the 2006 British Crime Survey showed that ’63 per cent of people thought that crime in the country as a whole had increased’ depite an actual 44% decline between 1995 and 2005.  Reporting what is interesting rather than what is normal can be seen in other areas such as health.  In 2007 a survey of British women by Oxford University researchers asked ‘at what age a woman is most likely to get breast cancer’.  Most people gave answers much younger that the correct one which was ’80 or older’.  Why was this?  Media analysis from the University of Washington showed that in magazine’s between 1993 and 1997 that 84% of stories of breast cancer sufferers featured people under 50.  A younger sufferer seems more tragic and resonates more, features more in media coverage and hence distorts our perceptions.

GroupThink!

If we have a preconception about something this will act as a filter to the news we read.  Psycologists call this confirmation bias and its something we are all guilty of.  Once a belief is in place, we screen what we see and hear in a biased way that ensures our beliefs are ‘proven’ correct.  An interesting illustration of this can be seen in a subtle twist to the famous ‘Pepsi challenge’.  The Baylor College of Medicine repeated the blind taste test under laboritory conditions with MRI scans to show brain activity.  The results were similar to the adverts with more people preferring the taste of Pepsi.  However when the experiment was repeated with the subjects knowing which brand they were tasting the results were reversed – a preconception of Coke tasting nicer overrode what the tastebuds were saying. 

There is a similar phenomenon called ‘group polarization’.  When people who share beliefs get together in groups they become more convinced that their beliefs are right and they beome more extreme in their views.  Because we feel a strong need to conform the belief can grow rapidly once a critical mass is reached.   

Put all of this together and it can easily be seen how the media can help paint a false picture of reality.  We respond to emotional, personal stories more than impersonal numbers.  As Stalin famously said “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”.  Our hunter-gatherer brains are not programmed to understand modern population numbers and the statistics that go with it.  There will always be some people in the world being murdered, abducted and blown up by terrorists and with modern media this will be fed through to the comfort of you living room or your comuter screen in vivid colour and sound.  

People will have preconceptions about things, and will seek out likeminded people only to have these beliefs stregthened.  Strong-willed groups will use media relations and lobbying to get their message across, and can use misleading statistics (which our brains can’t understand) to do so.  There are ever more media outlets and ever fewer journalists to act as a sanity check.  And so the message is more likely to filter into the media and into the minds of the population.  Like a guitar amp feeding back, the whole system reinforces itself.  What is does mean is that PR people are in a stronger position than ever before to affect how people view the world, but as Spiderman said: “with great power comes great responsibility”!

I was skipping through the more obscure regions of Sky TV last night when I happened to come across ‘Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press’. 

Part of BBC4’s medieval season, this documentary featured the ubiquitous Stephen Fry as he examined the history behind the ‘first media entrepreneur’ Johann Gutenberg, inventer of the printing press.

As the story unravelled, I was struck with the huge parallels between the impact of this invention and what is happening now with the online social media explosion.

In the early 15^th century books had to be hand-written and were therefore rare and incredibly expensive.  Only the wealthiest institutions such as the church and the universities could afford them.  For example in 1424, Cambridge University library owned just 122 books – each of which had a value equal to a farm or vineyard.  These organisations had a virtual monopoly, acting as gatekeepers to knowledge and information.  Because of this they wielded significant social and political power.

Within five years of Gutenberg’s invention the number of printed manuscripts grew to more than 20 million.  By enabling mass production of printed material, Gutenberg had opened the possibility of both book ownership and publishing to the wider community.

Fast forward to today and we can see a similar mechanism acting on the internet.  As the barriers to publishing are removed we have experienced a dramatic shift in who controls mass communication, with the democratisation of the media and the rise of ‘citizen journalist’.

Gutenberg’s invention kick started the renaissance but it also arguably heralded a dark and bloody period of European history.  The religious wars of Protestant and Catholic giving a label to the underlying political conflict of who has control of the written word of God -  the church in Rome or the wider population and their printed bibles.

Since we are in the middle of the current upheaval we will have to wait until we really know what the impact will be.  Maybe Rupert Murdoch was right when he said: 

 “It is dangerous to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring …to build and destroy - not just companies, but whole countries.”  

Finally Stephen Fry ended the program with this:  

“I could think of a world without cars and computers but I couldn’t think of a world without the printed word”

The ultimate irony is that the online revolution is serving to diminish printed media.  As newspaper circulations continue to decline many people are predicting the end of print as we know it.  Mind you, looking at how many copies of Metro there were on the train this morning, maybe Stephen Fry is right after all.

One PR industry preoccupation that doesn’t want to go away is the old return on investment chestnut.  While it is easy talk the importance of ROI up, it is very different matter for the measurement guys like us to sit down and actually quantify this stuff.

One problem is the lack of clear understanding of what it actually means.  To quote Colin Farrington, former director general of the CIPR:

“Ask ten PRs to define ROI and you’ll get ten different answers”.  

However there are opportunities for the industry to prove the effectiveness of media relations and hence demonstrate ‘real’ ROI.

For example we are doing more and more work with Econometric specialists to build marketing mix models.  These are complex statistical models that take data feeds from different marketing channels: Advertising, PR, Online, Direct Mail and so on mixed with other important variables where appropriate such as seasonality, pricing and competitor activity.  These variables are then fed into a computer based regression analysis to calculate their individual contribution to an end result such as sales or website traffic.  By knowing what sales resulted from each marketing channel and building in their relative cost it is then relatively easy to calculate and compare ROI figures.  In doing this we have been able to demonstrate that PR is genuinely more cost effective than other disciplines for a number of clients. 

The econometric stuff also throws up some other interesting phenomena.  For example in the advertising world there is the well known concept of ‘AdStock’.  This is needed to explain the time lag between seeing an ad and then responding by buying the widget.  The resulting model is that once an ad has been aired, the effect of that ad (or ‘adstock’) then decays exponentially over the coming days and weeks.  This works in a similar way to radio-active decay: advertising ‘half-lives’ can be calculated to explain how long it takes for the effect of an advert to reduce by 50%.  By introducing PR measurement into the models we can also demonstrate a similar ‘PRStock’.   In a recent study with a client the PR half-life came out at five weeks which is within the typical figures that advertising throws up (usually two to five weeks).

I have just read on Andy Lark’s blog about a study by two Hewlett-Packard researchers who have shown how the number of ‘diggs’ about a particular news story on digg.com also decays exponentially over time with the half-life depending on the popularity and novelty of the story.  The half-life in this situation is a rather shorter 69 minutes!  I agree with Andy’s point that the implication is that the ‘legs’ of a story can be dictated by how much it infiltrates social media with the resulting online ‘conversations’.

We have also done a recent study covering how a story decays in mainstream media.  The following shows the percentage of coverage that appeared on each day following a major product or campaign launch (the data was amalgamated from a number of different examples).  Apart from a few pieces appearing before the embargoed launch date and some blips relating to some follow up activity, again it shows the old exponential decay.  In this case the half-life is a little more than a day.