Time For PR To Stand Up And Be Counted

Sarah Kent, deputy managing director at Haslimann Taylor, writes:

In today’s tough economic climate, demonstrating return on investment on marketing spend has never been more important. Clients in every sector, faced with growing pressure on budgets, are understandably looking for demonstrable value.

For PR, the recession has reignited an age-old debate – how do we effectively measure the value of PR? Can PR really be measured at all? The answer is, of course, yes (otherwise we might as well all give up and go home now), but which of the myriad of evaluation techniques available to us are meaningful, cost-effective and, most importantly, accurately reflect the often long-term benefit of good PR.

The subject of advertising value equivalent remains a bone of contention within the PR industry. Many argue that this calculation is outdated and irrelevant and, with the cost of ad space falling, the figures may simply not look as good as they used to.

AVE certainly has its limitations, mainly because PR is not advertising. The perceived third party endorsement of editorial means it is more influential and PR-generated media coverage can appear in channels where advertising space simply can’t be bought. However, the reality for some clients is that a cost-effective, easy to understand measurement of financial return – however flawed – is still needed in order to make the case for PR internally.

At HT, we do report on AVE for most clients, but always as part of a range of complementary evaluation techniques. The majority of our clients place much greater value on being able to directly link PR activity to footfall and sales, a shift in brand awareness or increased share of voice versus their competitors. The content of editorial in terms of key message delivery and tone, and the relevance of the media in which it appears, is all much more important than how much the space would have cost.

Online PR also opens up a whole host of opportunities to get direct feedback from consumers, whilst tools such Google Analytics provide transparency on the source of website hits. And of course the success of crisis communications will often be measured in terms of lack of media exposure.

So where do we go from here? Some commentators within the PR industry are calling for a common currency for measurement but my view is that we need to focus on just the opposite. There is a danger in introducing complex and convoluted evaluation systems. At the end of the day, PR is not just about generating exposure; it’s about the influence that exposure has on our target audiences. Every campaign or PR programme needs to start with a clear objective and its success judged purely on whether or not that objective was met.