Sadly, maternal review and endorsement are missing from both the Barcelona Principles, and the Valid Metrics Framework. Instead, an increasingly critical factor in measuring the success of PR and marketing communication will be Big Data. In fact, it has very much become the solution du jour for ailing business processes, not just in comms and PR. In today’s Forbes article, Christine Crandell claims that Big Data will help take the guesswork out of managing sales. “Driving better execution in the social economy”, she argues, “comes from deeper, actionable insight into patterns…”.
What is true for the sales function is perhaps even more true for the marketing function. What is of fundamental importance there is a robust understanding of activities (and related spend) relative to target audience reach, attitudinal and behavioural change. Data is getting more and more commoditized, i.e. cheaper. This includes the human sentiment analysis of editorial and social media content. The focus is shifting to client insight that makes a difference. However, those oft-cited patterns are only relevant where they help the client make better decisions.

Relevant patterns can result from super-crunching vast amounts of media analysis data. In more complex models, they can result from synthesizing different data strands to feed into market mix modelling.
Data-driven business performance measurement and management – sounds great. To get us there, what is required is a level of numeracy that will empower all stakeholders to embrace the data evidence and use it alongside their experience and expertise.
The question is not whether PR (or communications in general) is an art or a science. The question is how to bring together the “Two Cultures” that CP Snow had described and criticised in his 1959 Rede Lecture. He argued that a better future will depend on a better understanding between the sciences and the humanities. That is still true.

Practitioners and clients need to learn to be guided by the (correct) numbers, rather than solely rely on their – or their mothers’ – gut feel. Standards in measurement will enhance the industry’s credibility and standing. The initiatives around the Barcelona Principles and the Valid Metrics Framework with their various adaptations across our industry are highly welcome. AMEC’s APAC PR Summit on Measurement will be a further step forward, with Report International’s Mike Daniels, as AMEC Chairman, playing a leading role: his “Goodbye AVEs – Hello Valid Metrics” workshop will help educate practitioners and clients alike in choosing better measurement and better metrics for better business outcomes.

Offering better choices – that will make for a healthy state of measurement.

Thomas

Mike

Thomas

Mike

The ICCO Global Summit is a gathering of senior executives from PR companies across the world. The two day event, held every two years, is designed to provide delegates with top line views of key industry trends in all major regions, and this year, speakers, including the CEOs of some of the largest global agency groups covered topics like gaining and retaining a voice in the C-Suite; talent development; what a PR agency will be like in 5 years; the threat from other marketing functions, especially in the digital space and the opportunities opening up in so-called emerging markets.
Although perhaps somewhat repetitive in relation to the key challenges – especially the challenges from and within emerging markets – the presentations indicated, to this observer at least, just how insecure PR agencies are feeling about their roles. Lord Chadlington, owner of Huntsworth, admitted that if he were a company looking for a PR agency to hire in Asia, he wouldn’t include his own agencies on the short list – lacking expertise/knowledge and value! Tweet traffic rose pretty sharp-ish as he said that…

From a measurement perspective, it was really rather depressing to see any real focus on delivering accountability through analytics and measurement. Only one presentation from amongst around a dozen (by Rob Flaherty of Ketchum – and one of our most valued clients) included any mention of analytics to support the PR profession’s accountability and effectiveness. On the other hand, the two workshops on measurement (specifically focused on ROI) that I ran at the Summit were very well attended indeed. Using the AMEC Valid Metrics grids to illustrate how to calculate financial and non-financial ROI indicators, it was gratifying to see the audience reacting positively and intelligently.

Increasingly, I am convinced that the measurement business’s key priority must be to educate, educate, educate. If PR agencies don’t begin to see measurement as an aid to their business rather than as a threat, no matter how many speeches are given bemoaning the lack of presence in the C-suite, they will be forever doomed to be perceived as those guys who take people out to lunch. The lively debate and close attention from the Summit workshop attendees showed how important some agencies take this issue – shame their CEOs aren’t taking more of a stand to show their commitment to improving the PR industry’s professionalism.

I’m presenting in South Africa next month, and will be very interested to compare the discussions amongst agencies and clients in that environment in contrast to the perhaps rather sterile debate in Portugal.

Mike

My presentation was based on AMEC’s replacement guidelines to AVE, which are known informally as the Valid Metrics model. As part of AMEC’s informal mission to create “educated consumers” – something Report has always championed with its clients – I’m reaching as many PR professionals as possible, both here in the UK and internationally.
One striking result from an informal poll I undertook with both audiences was the consistency of use of AVEs. In both audiences, usage of AVE ran at around 90% (I even conducted this part of the poll with the audience’s eyes shut so they wouldn’t feel embarrassed to admit to using AVEs). Not so surprising (though more than a little depressing). What was really surprising, though, was the percentage of the same sample who thought AVE added any value at all to their professional accountability or as a performance metric. In both cases, the answer was one person…
So, the conundrum, and subsequent challenge for measurement and PR experts alike, is to ensure that we bridge this extraordinary cognitive dissonance that allows for universal usage of a universally derided metric.

The problem, in my view, is founded in PR’s acceptance of the crazy notion that it should be measured just in advertising’s terms. In reality, of course, PR performs a totally different, and multi-faceted set of jobs, many of whose goals are very distant from advertising’s key goals of sales and awareness building. Whilst this mindset pervades PR, AVE will continue to be seen as the only game in town, and will remain a central barrier to the development of professional, business-focused, outcomes oriented measurement that actually measures PR’s goals.

Mike

More information on AMEC’s AVE replacement strategy can be found on the AMEC website

One thing’s for sure, since the vote on the Principles at AMEC’s Summit last year, followed up by the London Measurement Conference in November, there has been more public debate than ever before about communications measurement generally, and about the use of AVE more specifically. The Barcelona Principles are here: http://www.amecorg.com/amec/Barcelona%20Principles%20for%20PR%20Measurement.pdf

Given Report’s stress in its own work on market research rigour, I suppose it’s none too surprising that we’re enthusiastic supporters of the Principles, especially Principle 7, which calls for any media analysis programme to be “transparent and replicable” – a bare minimum for any research methodology that pretends to accuracy and consistency… In the early stages of the formulation of the Principles by a small AMEC working group which I participated in, this was recognised as being the foundation of any pretence to the same acceptance as market research by business and management professionals.

However, unsurprisingly perhaps, the Principle that has gained most visibility is number 5, which unambiguously declares: “AVEs are not the Value of Public Relations”. What has not been so often discussed is that the Principle goes on to discuss the need to replace AVE with other, more valid metrics. David Rockland, Partner and head of global research at KetchumPleon (and a mean Martini drinker), conducted an interview with Gorkana here in the UK, in which he expressed a simple truth about communications measurement: “The reality is however that there is no simple, easy, perfect or single metric to measure PR. It really depends on what you are trying to accomplish with a PR program as to what you in turn measure.” AVE’s have gained traction in the past, not only because they were seen as delivering a supposed monetary score of some kind, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because they can be seen as a form of abstract index – a score which could be applied across all PR activities, irrespective of the outcomes those PR activities were trying to achieve.

Somewhat belatedly, the IPR Commission on Measurement has also formally endorsed the Barcelona Principles, which makes an almost clean sweep of global PR and communications organisations!

In order to try and help PR professionals re-connect PR measurement to meaningful metrics that are actually relevant to the desired business outcomes, AMEC also created a couple of working parties to develop some practical support resources. I had the good fortune to work with a great team drawn from PR agencies and other AMEC members, developing a unique set of grids that plot the three key areas of activity (PR activity, intermediary or output measurement and outcomes measurement) at each key stage of the sales/marketing cycle. These relationships seemed to work most clearly in the form of a grid – one grid for each broad form of PR activity. The grids can be found here: http://www.amecorg.com/amec/Understanding-and-Applying-Valid-Metric-Guidelines.ppt

There is still much more to be done to educate PR professionals (and their management) away from a reliance on the misleading, inaccurate and mostly irrelevant metric that is AVE – this recent debate on a US news site is a great illustration of the mountain the industry has to climb! http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/7787.aspx

Report’s philosophy is firmly rooted in seeking to help our clients demonstrate their achievements by relating metrics to business outcomes, and by creating programmes that deliver high quality data to support business-critical decisions. Every client’s needs are different, and in that respect, reassuringly, this business is still as interesting as it was when I first got involved with it over 20 years ago!

Over the past few weeks, the conference has really been taking shape, with practical workshops on the first day, and major plenary sessions covering case studies and best practice in the subsequent couple of days. Whilst we never really anticipated this Summit having the same influence and reach as the Barcelona Summit in 2010, some recent changes and additions to the programme have made me far more confident that we could well have an event on our hands with the same potential to enhance communications measurement as the Barcelona Principles have done over the past year.

The centrepiece of this year’s conference is a plenary session devoted to setting the key priorities for the measurement community over the next few years. The session, entitled The Measurement Agenda 2020, brings together an international group of highly experienced practitioners, agencies and senior clients to debate the key issues around measurement as they see them and will use a voting system like the one used in Barcelona, to enable the gathered delegates to prioritise the issues.

One of the feeds to the debate is a newly strengthened workshop on Social Media Measurement. Setting standards in social media measurement was one of the key takeaways from Barcelona last year, and although some work has been done by AMEC working groups since then, there is still a total lack of consistency or agreement around even basic metrics such as visits (unique, daily, monthly?) for calculating reach.

The workshop has just added Katie Paine to the team guiding the debate (Tim Marklein from Weber-Shandwick and Richard Bagnall from Metrica). With her expertise and influence, especially in the USA, the workshop has the potential to deliver some real insight and consensus on the key contentious issues facing this most challenging of measurement environments. Even defining the fundamental issues of concern to clients would represent an enormous step forward.

The workshop’s output will feed directly into the Measurement Agenda session, whose own output will hopefully then be taken forward to debate and review at the IPR/PRSA Measurement Summit in the USA in September. With this sort of momentum behind the debate, we might well be in the odd position of having created standards and consistency around social media in less than a couple of years (with not an AVE in sight!), where it has taken over at least 10, if not 15 years, not to quite reach consensus (with lots of AVE’s still in sight!) in “traditional” media. One challenge to be faced in social media, of course, is the increasing presence of advertising and marketing functions with an interest in measuring online communications – as the environment is so fluid right now, we do at least have a chance of gaining corss discipline consensus – but I’m not holding my breath…

It’ll be fascinating to see how the debate develops in Lisbon.