CorpComms Magazine

Most communications directors have experienced the indignity of being forced to justify their existence despite overseeing even the most carefully constructed PR campaigns and/or steering the company away from occasional disaster.

 All communications departments are under pressure to qualify what they do in terms of financial impact for their organisation. And the good news is that technology being developed by media evaluation providers hold out the prospect of making this task easier.

James Davies, managing director of media evaluation company Impact Evaluation, describes the ability to link PR to sales as 'the Holy Grail. Advertisers are now expected to demonstrate the success of any campaign in terms of increased sales, and in PR we've got to start doing the same.'

'Expenditure on public relations has increased and boards of directors want to see a return on what they are spending,' agrees Nigel Middlemiss, knowledge director of Echo Research, an international specialist in reputation analysis, media measurement and stakeholder research.

An independent opinion

This is particularly true in the case of Unbiased.co.uk - formerly known as IFA Promotion - which was set up by the financial services industry to promote the use of independent financial advice.

Unbiased.co.uk aims to promote the benefits to consumers of consulting an independent financial adviser (IFA), and offers a facility to find local advisers. It is paid for entirely by 28 sponsor companies, all of them large financial services companies that, understandably, will become reluctant to continue funding the site if it is ineffective.

Measuring the website's usefulness is, therefore, almost entirely about connecting the dots between Unbiased's PR and the sales generated following the introductions it makes. Accordingly, Lansons Communications, Unbiased's PR agency, has devised a system to do just this.

During each of Unbiased's public awareness campaigns, a standard assessment is carried out by media evaluation group Panarc International. Drawing on circulation and viewing figures, this looks at how many people have seen the coverage, its value to them - whether it was good, bad or indifferent - and whether the key message has reached its destination. Independent strategy consultancy Oliver Wyman then carries out market research on the users of Unbiased's facility to find an IFA.

'We have around 600,000 searches each year, and around half the users go on to see an IFA,' says Andy Smith, associate director at Lansons. 'Oliver Wyman surveys a random group of these to find out whether they buy financial products through the IFA. If you ring the hotline rather than use the online search, you are asked the same questions.'

The result is an accurate picture of how many sales have been made as a direct result of the PR campaign, and what that business is worth to the sponsors. Last year, Unbiased's Get Saving campaign resulted in almost 42,000 searches in its first month. Just over half of these resulted in a visit to an IFA, with each person buying an average of one and a half financial products. This translated into £3.7 mn-worth of new business, of which £2 mn went to Unbiased's sponsors.

'This is the result people should be aspiring to - it is a very robust evaluation,' says Smith. 'Unbiased rather lends itself to this sort of analysis. It could be very expensive for other types of business to carry out, but ultimately it pays for itself.'

Trailblazers

 The Unbiased model is an example of a bespoke service, but many media evaluation companies are starting to develop ways of quantifying PR effort in terms of return for the company. And, as usual, the Americans are leading the way.

Dow Jones, which owns Factiva, says it has the technology to correlate the value of a client's media coverage with a business metric of the firm's choice. For example, a chief executive might want to plot monthly sales against monthly mentions of the company. Alternatively, he or she may wish to view the company's equity price versus share of media coverage compared with the firm's competitors. It is also possible to plot what happens to sales after a promotional campaign.

'The accuracy of this depends on different companies and industries, and on what's important for the company to get across in the media,' explains Alan Scott, chief marketing officer at Dow Jones. 'You can certainly correlate what is being said about a brand with sales of that brand, for example.'

This sort of analysis is still in its infancy in the UK. Many clients remain unwilling to share sales data with media evaluation providers, according to Jeremy Thompson, managing director of Durrants. 'Linking PR activity to sales or share price shouldn't be difficult and would make a lot of sense,' he says. 'But I understand why clients might be reluctant to share sales data with us, particularly when we might also be working for their competitors.'

Another difficulty with assessing the value of PR effort in terms of return after, for example, a promotional campaign is that frequently a marketing push and advertising push will be going on at the same time. These have to be stripped out from the equation before an accurate picture of the value of the communications work can be gleaned.

It is not impossible but it is difficult, which is why some media evaluation firms prefer to look at other ways of valuing the role of the communications team. Cision, for example, uses an 'impact scoring' system that enables clients to understand how useful their PR efforts have been.

This involves using the company's proprietary software to assess every shred of a client's media coverage - print, broadcast, blogs, websites - and build up a picture of how it has been perceived by key readers.

The basics of this are looking at the prominence of an article, the prominence of the company in the article, the overall tone, and how much space has been dedicated to a client compared with its competitors.

This information can be used in various ways. Land Securities, the property company, receives monthly reports from Durrants assessing aspects including the favourability of its key messages and its 'share of voice' compared with competitors. Specsavers, the high street opticians, opts for monthly and quarterly reports analysing the success of its campaigns, the level of coverage generated in relation to the charities it supports, and the tone of coverage in relation to its own services.

 One of the most important functions of media evaluation is assessing how well a firm's 'key messages' come across. Cision uses software as well as human analysis. 'Rarely do you get word-for-word repetition of key messages but you might be able to say, In half of your coverage, you got two of your three messages across clearly,' explains Giselle Bodie, consultancy services director at Cision.

It is also possible to build up a picture of how each person is likely to see your coverage using an impact score, and multiply that by the number of outlets using, for example, circulation or viewing figures to get the net effect. A company can then see for itself how sales are affected in the immediate aftermath.

Target practice

The downside of the scoring system, however, says Smith, is that while it is easy to garner how a company is perceived from its press coverage, it is more difficult to know how target audiences will react. He cites the example of Abbey's new mortgage enabling people to borrow five times their salary, which hit the front pages of the national newspapers earlier this year. Although the tone of the pieces was negative, Smith says Abbey's phones 'were ringing off the hook.'

Media evaluation services can also be used to reduce wasteful communications. 'If you can minimise waste, that is quantifiable,' says Middlemiss. 'Media evaluation tools can certainly enable you to ensure you are using the correct channels to send messages to the right groups.'

One way to do this is to use media evaluation tools as a two-way street: gaining an idea of how a company and brand is perceived in the market place, and then honing the messages to send back a better image. Similarly, spotting problems earlier than possible without the media evaluation tools in place can mean responding to and solving them faster - another quantifiable saving. For example, a music company inadvertently causing problems for customers by adding anti-piracy software to its CDs might find out about this more quickly if it is monitoring discussion boards on the internet.

'This way, communications professionals can bring more insight into the company,' says Scott. 'It can be extremely hard to quantify, but if they uncover a potential liability, it may be possible to calculate the cost of fixing it early compared with how much it could have cost the firm later on.'

While the Holy Grail of linking PR efforts directly to company revenue may be some time off, it's clear demands for media evaluation services are becoming ever more sophisticated. Filling in the blanks between the communications team and a company's sales figures may be closer than you think.

share me: del.icio.us | digg | reddit | Tweet