CorpComms Magazine

Albert Einstein famously said Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. It's a useful quote when struggling to justify your activity but not one that carries much weight when it comes to accounting for spend on marketing and communications.

Almost certainly, whatever your discipline, you will have sets of metrics that are used to measure inputs (costs), outputs (coverage, reach and message delivery), outtakes (change in awareness and opinion) and outcomes (sales, behaviour change and share of market). Almost certainly those metrics are likely to be proprietary to your business or to the companies that are evaluating your activity.

In marketing communications evaluation there are precious few common definitions, standards and data sources. It is almost impossible to compare like with like or be clear that we are talking about the same thing. There are OTS and WOTs, reach and impressions, GRPs /TVRs (or is that a make of car?). 

For COI, where we are responsible for ensuring effective government communications that achieve maximum value for money, this represents major challenges. Our business is primarily about behaviour change and we work with our clients on some of the toughest briefs to crack. For example, the benefits of the campaign to stop people smoking saves lives and saves money on a very, very large scale. And, on all our campaigns, we have a range of tools to measure effectiveness. This includes tracking polls, response rates, costs per impact etc using, where possible, industry standards. 

As the world has become ever more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify cause and effect, cost and benefit. Our own COI news aggregator takes in almost 30,000 news sources, whilst digital has changed the game and content providers are struggling for revenue. 

In this context the latest wave of the Chartered Institute of Marketing 2009 Marketing Trends Survey shows public relations as the most widely used marketing tool and was seen as second to customer relationship management as the best return on investment. So PR practitioners have a lot to gain from understanding why that may be the case through more robust and transparent evaluation.

A WIDE RANGE

Public relations can be a very powerful tool. But how do we measure that? To get some answers we sent an identical brief consisting of 138 items of coverage to five companies for evaluation. To keep it simple we wanted to know how many people consumed the coverage, how much it cost per 1,000 and what the favourability and tone of coverage was. 

It wasn't so much that we got five different results but that the range within each was very large. How many people? Between 46 million and 93 million. Cost per 1,000? Between 57p and £2.21. This was a very successful campaign so there was no negative coverage. However, 17 per cent to 100 per cent was the range of coverage considered positive/very positive while neutral coverage was between zero per cent and 54 per cent. Admittedly, science and mathematics were not my strong points at school, but even I was able to deduce that these were not the results we should have expected.

Within each company's response the logic was impeccable. But each measured in different ways from different sources and used different descriptors.

My own experience in using an enhanced dashboard approach to evaluation over a period of time demonstrated the extraordinary value of public relations. At the Food Standards Agency, our campaign to reduce salt consumption tracked awareness, understanding, media outcomes, media impacts, retail sales of salt and dietary levels. It was possible to measure the effect of the campaign very effectively. What it is not possible to do, and what we are now seeking to achieve, is to benchmark across channels and campaigns effectively.

INDUSTRY CONSULTATION

That is why we are now consulting with the industry and our clients on setting core mandatory COI standards for public relations evaluation. We are seeking to establish the most effective measurements, the best ROI and common standards. This includes using the same data sources, like the National Readership Survey (NRS) and Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB), to measure consumption. We have invited comments on the merits, or otherwise, of advertising value equivalents (AVE), the subjects of a heated Twitter argument at the recent AMEC European Summit on Measurement. 

To understand this better we took eight PR campaigns and measured the AVE and return on investment. Although a far from perfect exercise, the average return was around 11 times the original investment on a range of between 1.7 and 17.5 times. If there are better measures then we would like to understand them.

This is far from an academic exercise. At COI we believe that between five per cent and ten per cent of campaign budgets should be spent on evaluation so as to maximise our learning. Each evaluation should allow the refinement of key performance indicators and benchmark future budgets across channels. It is the elusive 'virtuous' circle.

This is a genuinely open consultation. It is will underpin how we review and specify our PR evaluation framework when we renew it. None of this should prevent the industry continuing to develop added value services and innovate to meet ever changing needs. 

This exercise will, I hope, provoke both debate and insightful contributions that benefit the industry as a whole, improve effectiveness and deliver further value for money for the taxpayer.  

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