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Financial PR: where the £sign is king, and outcomes come later.

by Rich 5/2/2008 3:56:00 PM

The Friday before a Bank Holiday is often quiet, and today is no exception. So I’ve been filling my time by surfing the web for the latest evaluation news in the financial sector.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the top Google link for “financial media evaluation” (inspired search, I’m sure you’d agree) was an article from 2000 titled “The heresy of MEDIA MEASUREMENT”! Under the rather alarming headline, Wilma K. Mathews of Communication World explained that “Counting clips and calculating (advertising value) equivalences measure your activity, your output. They have no correlation to the changed or desired behavior of the audiences you attempted to reach.” Heady stuff for a pre-dotcom crash PR audience to take in.

Back in the present day, I leaned back on my hoverboard and reflected on how successfully the output vs. outcome message has spread within financial PR. Or has it? PR managers in the financial services sector now understand evaluation well enough to benchmark their PR activity against all manner of sophisticated metrics. Meanwhile, access to on-demand reporting tools such as our very own MyMetrica gives them the means to disseminate the results across their organization in a variety of formats.

Great news, but what hasn’t happened yet is a shift in the mindset of non-PR stakeholders, especially at board level. All too often financial PR professionals find their efforts to provide actionable evaluation data frustrated by demands for something that puts a £ (or $) sign in front of their results. Senior financial executives work with money, after all, and it can be hard to make them value anything else.

So what’s a PR to do? As we see from Mathews’ article, AVE’s were past their sell-by date before the Enron scandal broke. If your board insists on hard currency as a PR metric, you could try cost per thousand people reached either in the population as a whole or, even better, within your target audience. Present the information in a scorecard alongside some more forward-thinking metrics from your evaluation portal and they might just start to see things a different way.

Who knows where we’ll be in eight year’s time!

Tags:

PR measurement | PR planning

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Comments

5/3/2008 8:49:31 PM

Financial PR face the same problems as any other PR pro does when asked to account the results of the PR area. At a time where everything has to be numerically evaluated and economically weighed, we have to learn how to convey our results inte English pounds, Euros, dollars or yens.

Mariana Sarceda

9/4/2008 6:45:07 PM

Thanks for your commment, options trading. I think we're definitely moving into an environment where financial PR activity has to justify itself in hard currency, and results have to be "economically weighed", as mariana put it. I guess it's not surprising when financial institutions are posting record losses that they take a close look at themselves and eliminate anything that doesn't visibly contribute to the bottom line.

It's not all doom and gloom though! We've established that there are definite ROI measures that can be used to show the true value of PR (hitting your target audience right between the eyes) in a currency that is valuable to the board (cost per thousand people reached within that audience, expressed in the currency of your choice.)

What's really encouraging to me when I speak to our financial clients here at Metrica is that, with our help, they are gradually teaching their key stakeholders the value of measures such as customer references, tone of coverage attributed to key influencers, and the strength of the core messages that define their reputation within the media (and the people they are reaching through it).

These measures may not have a dollar sign as a prefix, but they are tangible evidence of the strength of a corporate or financial reputation. And in a nervous market, where strong reputations carry extra weight, I think even the most sceptical bottom-liner can see that reputation is priceless.

Rich Bennett