CorpComms Magazine

Once upon a time, PR was all about long lunches, mingling with the right people in the executive boxes at Lord's or Wimbledon, and occasionally phoning a well-placed journalist for a quiet whisper in his or her ear.

The skills of PR were not measurable in any tangible way, but were an opaque and mysterious art form - about timing, confidence and contacts - that required little justification or explanation. Companies had no way of knowing what, if anything, they were getting for their money, or whether their highly paid PR executives were doing the slightest thing to enhance their image and reputation.

How times have changed. Within just over a decade, PR has undergone a once-unthinkable transformation, from the vaguest and most impenetrable of occupations to an activity monitored and analysed using rigorous criteria by independent third-party agencies. Success and failure is now so quantifiable that the profession, far from being an art, is - in some respects - on its way to becoming a science.

The extent to which media monitoring and evaluation has become mainstream in the PR industry will be graphically illustrated in summer 2009 when up to 120 delegates from around the world gather for a two-day conference at an as-yet-undecided venue in Italy, Spain or Portugal.

'This will be the first ever European summit on measurement and we will get people from all over the world,' says Barry Leggetter, executive director at the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC), which is organising the conference along with the US-based Institute for Public Relations.

'Even in China this is taking off as an industry, and we now have our first member from there, a Chinese company from Shanghai. I wouldn't suggest for a moment that the PR industry should describe itself as a science, but I believe there is more science in modern-day communications than ever before. This is because PR people have to understand the dynamics of modern media in a way that wasn't applicable 20 years ago.'

Evaluation evolution

The emergence of a steadily maturing media monitoring and evaluation sector over the past 10-15 years has been due to new technology, a desire to quantify and keep tabs on every aspect of company budgets, and the growing importance of corporate reputation as an issue of concern in the boardroom. Previously, the only measure most communication departments had for assessing how they were doing was the daily or weekly delivery of press cuttings.

'It sounds awful, but in the old days we used to get bags of cuttings from a cuttings agency and, when you could be bothered, you would flick through them,' recalls Scott Brownlee, head of PR at Toyota GB. 'Now the evaluation we get is hugely beneficial. It gives us a way of making real what the PR department is doing. Car companies are very number-driven entities - it's all about how many cars you have sold, how many you have in stock - and that is the language of the company day to day. In the past it was very difficult, but now we can actually put some relative value on what we do.

'Once a month we get a batch of reports that gives us an analysis of both the brands in our stable - Toyota and Lexus - and of how we are doing compared with all the other brands in the markets. The analysis is also split for tone, from 'very positive' right through to 'very negative'.'

Brownlee's experience - he uses Millward Brown Precis, part of the WPP Group - is broadly representative of the impact the monitoring and evaluation industry has had on PR. With the help of increasingly sophisticated software systems able to trawl vast cuttings databases at high speed, companies are able to measure not just the column inches they are getting but the 'reach' of each article or broadcast, and its overall impact. This includes where an article is placed in a publication, where it is positioned on a page, its physical size, and whether a photograph is used.

Over time, trends and conclusions can be extrapolated, including whether the company receives more negative than favourable publicity; how it performs during campaigns or launches; which journalists and publications write about it most, and how they view it; whether it is receiving a better press than its rivals; and whether it is getting across certain key messages, from the latest corporate governance initiatives to new products or market areas.

Growing importance

Even with an economic downturn looming, it seems there is no sense of gloom in the media evaluation industry. In fact, given that firms will have to be even more aware of their wider perception if markets are squeezed, the opposite is probably true.

'I've been here for 10 and a half years, and media evaluation has become much more core in that time,' notes Howard Brand, director for financial and professional services at Echo Research, the reputation analysis, media measurement and stakeholder research company. 'Strategic value is seen in what we are doing for our clients; the value of corporate reputation has risen right up the agenda and now sits firmly in the chief executive's lap and at the boardroom table.'

Although some PRs still complain about cost, the vast majority now accept that media evaluation provides insight into what they do and allows them to assess their performance using an independent outsider. At the very least it gives them an advertising value equivalent, a benchmark for the coverage they receive. It may be a crude and widely derided measure, but it's still one that is requested by a great number of clients.

According to Jon Bunn, group PR director at Prudential, media evaluation 'gives you empirical statistics rather than just relying on your gut feeling, and that allows you to present to the executives and say, This is how we are seen, rather than, This is how I feel we are seen.'

Expanded range

The growth of the media evaluation industry has seen AMEC's membership more than double over the past few years to 46 companies, all of which have a turnover of at least £150,000 a year and must have their methodologies approved by a special AMEC panel.

The sector has also found itself gripped by merger and acquisition activity as companies seek to meet the increasingly global needs of clients and to provide a 'one-stop shop' for monitoring and evaluation services. As part of this trend, Durrants, which began life as a traditional press cuttings business in the 1880s, now offers a media monitoring service, analysis of that content and a database of 30,000 journalists in the UK and some 450,000 around the world.

'We provide the first truly integrated one-stop shop in the UK market,' says Jeremy Thompson, Durrants' managing director. 'The idea is to provide a PR or communications dashboard where you can write a press release, set up the media you want to target with that release and put in place the monitoring and analysis of that process. You can see the process all the way through from press release to outcome.'

Others are also seeking to offer a wider range of products, including Cision (formerly Romeike), which now provides integrated services for the entire communication process. 'Media evaluation has limits because it really only measures output,' explains Giselle Bodie, services director at Cision. 'What it doesn't tell you is what happened next - what did people do as a result? Did they buy more of the product? Did they vote in a particular way? For that you need broader market research to carry out surveys and to ask people, You read this publication, you saw these articles - then what did you do?'

'What the media may be saying is one thing, but increasingly our clients want to know what their staff, financial analysts or other stakeholder groups are thinking,' adds Brand. 'By surveying those particular groups, we are providing a 360-degree view of how our clients are perceived by all of their stakeholders.'

The human touch

But not all PRs are convinced this new generation of media evaluation giants, capable of providing everything from market research to media monitoring, is a good thing. 'I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket because, quite frankly, there isn't one basket out there that's good enough,' comments Louise Wylie, director of media relations at Arts Council England.

Although she believes media monitoring and evaluation is every bit as valid in the public sector as the corporate world, Wylie is not convinced the one-stop-shop companies represent good value for money. 'The danger is that a lot of those systems are quite new and haven't undergone much testing before they are launched,' she explains.

Wylie, a former senior press officer at United Utilities, believes the growth of the internet is a particular challenge. While automated software systems are being introduced across the board by media evaluation firms, most accept that such programmes, while saving vast amounts of grunt work by spotting key words or phrases, should never be more than part of the solution because they cannot pick up irony and subtle changes of tone.

However, the rise of Web 2.0 means there is now so much material - up to 60 mn blogs worldwide, with tens of thousands of updates every hour - that systems have to be automated to a far larger degree in order to cope.

'The internet is so vast that you have to rely on mechanical systems a lot more to pick up the cuttings in the first place, and you have so much more material that then needs analysing,' says Wylie. 'I accept that part of it has to be automated, but for me there's no substitute for having a proper analyst look at the information and say, Is this really relevant?'

Thompson echoes this opinion. 'With the expansion of new media, there is a real sense of lack of control of message,' he says. 'A lot of customers are asking us about how they should approach, monitor and respond to new media and social media. We are looking at new approaches to new media, particularly with social networking websites, so if there is chatter building about a particular brand or issue we want to be able to alert our customers to such matters before they become an event.

'With 'citizen journalism' there is now an opportunity for individuals with a gripe against a product or company to gain critical mass and turn that gripe into a story. Large companies can either stick their heads in the sand and pretend it is not happening, or they can embrace it. We see new media and social media as real opportunities because they give these organisations a chance to engage directly with their consumers - but the starting point is knowing what's going on.'

Online opportunities

Brownlee agrees, but is more sceptical. 'The internet is the next step forward for us,' he says. 'Various companies are saying they can monitor it to some extent but we keep looking and, as yet, the products out there are too imprecise to give us anything useful. It's difficult to know how influential these websites are. A lot of this stuff is just making visible the sort of water-cooler conversation that was always going on but you weren't hearing.'

Richard Ingles, sales director at Millward Brown Precis, believes software systems can already cope with the volume of information on the web. Although he concedes that computers are nowhere near as effective as humans at detecting sentiment, he notes that advances are being made through the use of word-association techniques and searches for the clustering of positive or negative words.

The right balance between computer and human is not that far away, it seems. Louise Cooke, associate director at TNS Media Intelligence, which recently launched a tool that allows clients to trawl blogs and social media sites, insists it is possible to build in human checks.

'Our product uses an automated system but also has human verification built into it,' she explains. 'It can be very difficult for a computer to get its head around sarcasm or youth-speak, so we have actual humans going over it to check it is correct. This is a real growth area for us.'

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