This week PR Week published an article on how the Central Office of Information (COI) is turning the spotlight on PR evaluation. This is Metrica’s response to the article which has also been sent to the magazine and its website.
Dear Sir,
As MD of Metrica, one of the COI’s 5 roster agencies that you refer to in your article “Central Office of Information turns spotlight on evaluation“, we welcome the debate created by the COI’s recent evaluation supplier comparison. Your article clearly highlights the problems with using differing measurement techniques and the confusion that they can cause. This is an area that we too have been campaigning on for a number of years.
I was a little surprised however by the angle of your article. Particularly so as I was in the audience at AMEC’s recent European PR Measurement Summit at which Neil Martinson presented the information to which you refer.
Neil was at pains to explain that the numbers that he quoted were not to be directly compared to each other but rather were reflections on the different methodologies that different measurement agencies use. We all have different methods of measuring PR which explains why the COI has a roster of a number of agencies – the COI’s clients are able to choose which agency with which methodology is most appropriate to their needs.
So, favourability ratings, impact scores and audience exposure metrics are not done in the same way and are not comparable from one agency to another. For example, the 93 million figure that you quote is clearly not an audience reach figure in terms of actual number of people but will instead be an OTS (opportunity to see) figure preferred by one of the other agencies on the roster. Metrica enables our clients to look at audience exposure in a similar manner as the ad agencies do – we disaggregate reading, viewing and listening habits to provide an actual number of people reached and in the target audience and the frequency of exposure. In this particular case, Metrica quoted a figure of 24.6 million adults reached with an average exposure to the coverage of 3.6 times.
Neil also has explained that the main thrust of the COI’s work here is not a call for a magic bullet but to ensure that the measurement companies standardise some key areas of data collection – like the auditing bodies (e.g. JICREG, RAJAR, ABC etc) from where we all source our data. This is also something that Metrica supports.
In answer to Ali Gee of 3 Monkeys well made points about behavioural change, there is reassuring news. Metrica, and many other AMEC members, also offer additional metrics to go beyond measuring outputs (e.g. standard media analysis metrics like tone and messages) to outcomes – what was the effect on sales, share price, reputation etc. Via econometric modelling we are also able to demonstrate how statistically likely it was that the PR work had been responsible for the changes. Measurement of outcomes was not asked for in the COI’s brief on this occasion to its roster agencies, hence it was not supplied.
The call for an industry magic bullet to PR measurement has been ongoing for the 14 years that I have worked in the evaluation industry. It is fraught with danger and has not happened because the PR world needs to become more sophisticated and transparent as it faces the challenges of measuring its communication to new communities (as opposed to audiences) via social media and online networks, not less sophisticated.
More than ever the most important thing to do is to to focus on making sure that PR metrics are tied to PR and business objectives at the outset of the campaign and to move focus on outcomes rather than outputs. This will take better education and understanding in the industry, something that Neil’s work highlights, AMEC is working hard to provide, and an area that PR Week has a key role to play.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Bagnall
