Hi all,
This week brought me the opportunity to sit in on a meeting with the new marketing manager of one of our biggest clients – a multi-national pharmaceutical company.
The purpose of the meeting was to provide the new marketing manager with an overview of all the great PR work we had done for the client over the last several years.
During the meeting, the client raised the question of evaluation. How were we measuring our PR successes?
The client saw it as essential that we were able to demonstrate to him a tangible return on investment.
During this conversation the client asserted that he wanted an evaluation measure that could have the same impact in boardroom meetings and conversations with key B2B customers as advertising value equivalencies. While he was a believer in the value of investing in PR he wanted to be able to say we ‘achieved $X in PR outcomes this year’.
This conversation got the wheels in my mind turning – there is no question that the development of effective and universal PR measurements is a hot topic in PR circles at the moment. However, the Public Relations Institute of Australia has condemned the use of AVEs as innacurate and misleading (as have many other international PR bodies – see http://www.pria.com.au/resources/asset_id/166/cid/262/parent/0/t/resources/title/pr-industry-calls-for-marketing-to-reject-unethical-measurement for PRIA’s latest position statement). But in consultancy, where the client is always right, how can you turn down a request for evaluation through AVEs?
More importantly, how can you measure the value of other communications activities – PR is much more than just media relations. How can we place a monetary value on the relationships we build with key opinion leaders or the extensive issues preparedness plans we put in place?
Unfortunately this blog entry raises far more questions than it answers. As future PR practitioners we have a huge task ahead of us to develop measurements and methods that truly reflect the added value PR can bring to an organisation, and to justify the diversion of resources away from traditional marketing and advertising activities and into public relations.
2 comments:
Hi Sinead!
You've brought up such a valid question, and one that many clients want the answer to no doubt! I suppose your client has to answer to a Board of Directors who value the return on their Public Relations investments in dollars and cents as opposed to Corporate Social Responsibility and relationship building.
I feel that those who aren't in the industry have a very limited understanding of what Public Relations actually concerns. I completely agree with your comment in regards to Advertising Value Equivalencies (AVE's). Advertising creates awareness, yet public relations builds reputation. AVE's shouldn't be used as an evaluative metric tool, as it doesn't into factors such as consider bad publicity. It attempts to calculate the cost of coverage if it were at an advertisement, but how is it possible to measure value or credibility?
Media tracking is also a fantastic evaluation tool for measuring the success of PR initiatives, assuming that the coverage is positive of course! Web click throughs, Facebook/Twitter traffic are other good measures of success, which I feel are more relevant than Advertising Value Equivalencies.
I’m conducting my placement at a consultancy called the Sponsorship and as the name would suggest, they are specialists in the field of Sponsorship Management and Income Generation. One of our clients is also particular in terms of measurement. They liaise with my mentor once a week to track the progress of their current Google Advertising campaign. They use Google Adwords and Google Analytics to ascertain information such as how many visitors visited the website and the time they spent on each page etc.
I suppose clients always want to see the return on their investment in some way shape or form!
Anyway…I hope you enjoy the rest of your placement!
- Laura
Ooops sorry.. tr, not Sinead!
Post a Comment