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What is the best way to measure a comms campaign? While the significance of stakeholder engagement and reputation risk management are undisputed and most organisations accept PR and comms as an essential part of the marketing mix, there is still no universally accepted measure of the value of these activities.
This is despite the fact that it’s now three years since the creation of the Barcelona Principles, which were designed to do just that.
Witnessing the effort and reward that goes into campaigns, it’s disheartening for both client and comms team alike to measure only outputs from a campaign, relying on a limited notion of an advertising equivalent value (or AEV) that confines the evaluation of a campaign solely to placement of material in media outlets, failing to capture the impact of the delivery of carefully crafted messages and not accounting for social media formats.
The International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications (AMEC) was established in 1996 to make measurement an integral part of public relations practice, globally. So when BlueChip is asked to use AEVs as the metric to measure success locally as well as to make international comparisons, we feel we’re devaluing our work – and our industry – by saying yes.
Because we know there’s a better way.
With PR and comms often perceived as a way to save money on media spend (have you ever congratulated your PR team with “Three minutes on prime time TV would’ve cost us 100 times the budget we invested into media relations!”?) it’s time to regard pre-campaign research as highly as in other marketing disciples. Just a fraction of the budget invested into ad testing and focus groups goes a really long way in PR and comms.
I’d love to see more clients engage an organisation such as Precis Value, which created the Comms Evaluation Model below and write about success factors in evaluation, at the outset and for the duration of a campaign, to understand the impact of comms activities on business results.
Not all clients have the resources to invest in independent research. But that shouldn’t mean halting evaluation at stage 1 – using AEVs and ‘thud factor’ to assess whether their agency produced a good result.
A comms consultancy should also be able to analyse the outputs to provide clients with more sophisticated forms of media evaluation: quality and quantity of brand discussion month on month, breakdown by article type and sentiment on product features, for example.
For example, if a comparison between earned and paid media is required, AMEC recommends measuring:
- Earned impressions
- Earned cost per thousand (CPM) impressions
- Cost savings due to PR activities (e.g. reduced customer complaints, etc.)
Additionally, there’s the increasingly used metric of Net Promoter Score which asks an agency’s (or other business’s) clients if they’d recommend their brand and speaks volumes about how it is regarded.
With all of these methodologies, it’s vital to use a benchmark. A comms agency thus needs to know how it fared in previous years and understand the industry standard for its sector when developing the Key Performance Indicators against which it will be measured.
So where does AEV stand in all this? We know that earned media is subject to the vagaries of other news events and the political agenda of any given day, so it’s not appropriate to compare AEV year on year, because no day is ever the same. Far better to understand the current situation, establish and agree data-points for measuring whether a program has met the objectives prior to commencement and then regularly review progress against these.
Because if you’re not clear on what a campaign is intended to achieve, why would you bother?
