I saw this article in The Times at the end of December revealing that advertising in print is twice as effective as TV. It got me thinking about the relevance of this to PR. According to the article, for every £1 spent on print advertising, £5 in revenue is returned.

I’d be interested to find out how this was calculated: this kind of information is invaluable to PRs when evaluating the effectiveness of their efforts.

Here at Metrica we’ve found that more and more clients are looking at ways to show the wider marketing disciplines the effect of PR on sales. We’ve been able to provide data which has then been run alongside other marketing outputs, directly proving the ratio of influencers on sales, giving a hugely valuable ROI.

Taking this report at face value, it looks as though PRs should focus all their attention on print (a strange conclusion given the decline of print sales) to improve PR’s effect on sales.

Joel Dawson, head of online marketing at Boots says in The Times article that “Print is very good for targeting specific audiences and getting eyeballs on key products”.

However, PR efforts on TV appear in the programme the vieweris watching rather than the ad breaks, which the viewer can increasingly turn off or ignore using their PVRs (Sky Plus / Tivo for example). This, many would argue, is why TV advertising is becoming less and less effective.

So perhaps taking the conclusions in this report and trying to match them with PR is inadvisable. I would argue that an individualistic approach – each campaign directed to the appropriate audience for that campaign– is the way forward. And, while you’re at it, feed your output into marketing modeling to prove the effectiveness of your work.