CorpComms Magazine

How long is a piece of string? That may be a joke but it is also a rhetorical question designed to parallel the unanswerable nature of another query. Ask it in a public relations environment, however, and a debate about how to measure the said twine is set to unravel. For decades, fierce argument has surrounded the issue of how to measure the financial value of PR and the issue has become more contentious amidst tighter corporate budgets and an increasing need to prove that clients are getting bang for their buck. That sounds fair enough but how does one go about valuing an activity where the inputs are simple in terms of budgets, time and manpower but the results are hard-to-quantify outputs such as enhanced or damaged reputations?

The answer for the past two decades has been Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) - crude calculations that compare column inches achieved by PR to the cost of buying the same space for an advert. They are not a metric that many in PR admit to liking but a motion that 'AVEs do not measure the value of PR and do not inform future activity' was still by far the most controversial issue at the second European Summit on Measurement in Barcelona last month.

The leaders of five global PR and measurement and evaluation bodies and 200 delegates from 33 countries at the summit finally voted in favour of that declaration and six less contentious ones, resulting in what the Association for the Measurement and Evaluations and Communications (AMEC) calls the first global standard of PR measurement. The seven declarations are not exactly rocket science, however. Number one asserts that 'goal-setting and measurement are fundamental aspects of any PR programme' while number two adds that collecting newspaper cuttings is not enough, with both quantity and quality needing to be taken into consideration.

'I'm giving up on PR,' was the response of Sean376's Social Media Musings, a blog by an anonymous 25-year-old male working in social media and public relations, which denounced the Barcelona Principles as 'meaningless PR bull of the highest order'.

'We're told that this is The first step towards creating a worldwide agreement on how the impact of PR can be measured,' he added. 'Here's a thought. Why not skip this first set of principles and use the three-day jolly in Barcelona to get on with it?' The measurement industry takes a different view of course. 'Anyone from the measurement industry is always going to say you need to measure PR, if only to keep us all in a job,' admits Jerry Ward, managing director of digital monitoring and analysis company Press Data.

'But one of the reasons why you do need to measure PR along with a company's finances and its strategy is that you have to justify at board level what money has been spent in terms of value created. 'If PR cannot do that and other company functions can and do then it becomes a question of why have PR, rather than why measure PR.'

A roadmap for the PR industry

There is widespread support for the Barcelona declaration elsewhere in the measurement community. Marcus Gault, managing director of Insight, the measurement division of media intelligence agency Precise, believes that this is the first time that the global PR industry is putting together a 'sensible framework of measurement'. Anne Curtis, managing director of Media Measurement, views the adoption of the Barcelona principles as 'a defining moment in establishing a roadmap' for the PR industry'.

And Richard Bagnall, managing director of international PR measurement consultancy Metrica says that while the move forward equates to 'baby steps', it is in the right direction. Sandra Macleod, chief executive of reputation analysis and media measurement firm Echo Research, believes businesses are taking the measure of PR more seriously and that there is a need for the measurement and PR industries to re-skill and invest in staff training and development. There is also widespread support amongst general PR agencies, though Adrian Brady, chief executive of PR agency Eulogy!, cautions that the best measurement will always set specific targets, such as in brand awareness or reputational value, and plot achievements against objectives.

Claire Walker, chief executive of PR agency Firefly Communications, adds that PR can be undervalued as it is sometimes difficult to pin specific improvements in perception against PR initiatives. 'I don't think that one size fits all at all,' she says.

Some senior figures in public relations are not convinced. In financial PR, for example, Patrick Donovan, managing director of Citigate Dewe Rogerson, and Michael Sandler, chairman of Hudson Sandler, argue that the metrics of good and bad PR are already clear enough.

'I think it is self-evident and that we don't have any great need to evaluate it externally,' says Sandler. 'You are constantly evaluating it in terms of your clients' share prices.' For Donovan, meanwhile, a measure like AVE is 'not relevant at all'. When advising on a stock market flotation or a hostile bid situation, for example, he says the job of public relations is to influence mindsets and to change perceptions and success or failure should be viewed in terms of the objectives. 'How do you measure the value of something like what's happening to BP?' he asks. 'Would the issue be worse without public relations consultants working for the company? Surely, the best measure has to be that you are satisfying the client.'

The attitude of corporate clients may be part of the problem, however. PR and measurement people admit that the reason that AVEs have stuck around for so long is that companies like them for two reasons.

Firstly, they express the value of PR in purely financial terms with a sterling or dollar cost that can be put on a spreadsheet and compared to other prices. And AVEs are normally supplied for free, coming as part of any standard media monitoring package. More tailored and bespoke measurement comes at an additional cost. 'Some of the alternative methods to AVEs can be extremely costly and very hard to deliver,' complains the corporate communications director of a major UK media company, speaking on condition of her anonymity.

A challenging future

The retort of the measurement industry to all this is that the old cliché that 'if you can't measure it, you can't manage it' still applies'.

'Without measurement, organisations are not able to properly justify any PR spend,' says Curtis, citing PR departments of FTSE100 companies who confided that they would not exist if they could not use Media Measurement's metrics to demonstrate their value in tough market conditions. One American customer even attributed a ten-fold increase in his PR budget over six years to data providing specific returns on investment for individual communications activities.

There is another threat to public relations that could be far greater than old fashioned departmental budget battles, however.

While all this fretting about how to measure the impact of PR is going on, traditional PR is under threat from burgeoning new online worlds, which in contrast already have highly-developed and very visible metrics, such as page views and mouse clicks, linked to demographic data on customer profiles.

Internet search groups led by Google are making inroads into the territory of traditional PR, using web optimisation techniques to get their messages across directly to people typing certain key words into web browsers.

'If we don't start to modernise and take these companies seriously, we are going to be bypassed as an industry,' says Stephen Waddington, managing director of PR agency Speed Communications. 'There is absolutely a threat. The PR industry has to grow up fast and recognise the threat is here because the next wave is coming.'

The proponents of Barcelona, however, believe that this is exactly what they are doing. No one is suggesting that one measure will be the solution, stresses Philip Lynch, director of evaluation at global media monitoring and analysis agency Kantar Media Intelligence. The challenge instead, he says, is to gather a number of metrics, including some that are able to ascribe to PR actual values in pounds and pence in a more accurate way than AVEs. Something based on the 'cost-per-thousand' metric widely used in marketing could satisfy that part of the equation, he argues.

Whichever way it is done, nobody should doubt that brainpower is now being applied to the problem. Who knows? One day it may even make that piece of string a little longer.

Well principled

The 'Barcelona Declaration of Research Principles' to achieve a global standard for the measurement of communications programmes was created at the Second European Summit on Measurement.

The 'Barcelona Declaration of Research Principles' are:

1. Goal setting and measurement are fundamental aspects of any PR programmes
2. Media measurement requires quantity and quality - cuttings in themselves are not enough
3. Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) do not measure the value of PR and do not inform future activity
4. Social media can and should be measured
5. Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media results
6. Business results can and should be measured where possible
7. Transparency and the ability to replicate are paramount to sound measurement

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