PR’s Days Numbered
Few would argue that digital communications reached a “tipping point” . Its popularity, spurred by search advertising and personal media, siphons off an increasing share of attention and resources from traditional media. However, traditional media, and along with it traditional public relations Agencies, will live on, though in a reduced state. In my work with clients, I am sensing changes to traditional PR as well, beyond an expansion into the digital realm, as it is pressed by the online model.
For sure, corporations are shifting resources online to follow the evolving consumption habits of their target audiences; however, the attraction of online communications for corporations derives also from its measurability and, hence, accountability–long lacking in traditional corporation communications. Now, to keep up, traditional PR is coming under intense pressure to match the measurability of digital communications.
Before I share my view of how traditional PR will answer the call to be measureable, let’s take a walk down memory lane first. For much of PR’s history, the profession’s output went unmeasured. Squeamish about what the numbers might show, many professionals preferred to be evaluated on their “glory wall” of media placements. I believe the historical preponderance of former journalists in the PR field led to this approach: just as journalists climbed the career ladder with prominent placements in increasingly prestigious publications, the PR professional claimed success with a story pitch when it landed on page A1 of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. This is how writers, not businesses, evaluate success.
Early attempts to “measure” PR output relied on various forms of evaluating earned media success. Advertising equivalency, now widely discredited, showed CFOs how much a PR placement could theoretically save them from their advertising budgets by calculating the cost of buying the equivalent column inches found in an earned media placement. Ad “displacement” is not how businesses measure the value of their PR investment, and few today really believe advertising equivalency represents anything more than voodoo measurement.
Later, measurement of PR shifted to an accounting of impressions, using media circulation figures to estimate how many read an earned media placement. Unfortunately, circulation and readership of a particular article are not one and the same, nor does reading an article mean the target audience took a desired action, such as purchasing a product or service. Finally, companies started comparing their media coverage against their competitors’ coverage using a breath of media criteria: number of clips, number of impressions, tonality of coverage, message penetration, and so forth. None of this ever truly satisfied businesses.
The measurable promise of digital communications ups the ante on traditional PR, and from what I can tell, PR will be measured in one of two ways in the future:
1) Interactive measurements. In a previous post, I made the case that the interactive medium was PR’s new “stepmother,” replacing advertising. My argument was: if companies cannot figure out how to measure public relations directly, then they will measure it indirectly through the one form of marketing that is easy to measure–the Web. In campaigns for DuPont, for example, we use PR to drive traffic to Web destinations, where deep metrics on customers are then collected to evaluate a campaign’s effectiveness.
2) Econometric modeling. Having just been exposed to this type of measurement, I believe that I have seen the real future of PR measurement, and for that matter, all marketing measurement. Teams of economists using mathematically intensive econometric techniques develop models to show how actual sales are influenced by each marketing element. Econometrics separates the contributions of marketing and non-marketing factors to sales, while evaluating both the effectiveness and efficiency of each marketing discipline.
I have been told by those that ply this trade that many PR professionals slam their doors shut when the economists come knocking. Is it the discomfort with business measures, rather than traditional journalistic measures, of success? Is it the fear of complex statistics and jargon such as decay effect, saturation points and coefficients reminiscent of academic courses most PR professionals bypassed in college? Is it a general uncertainty that PR can be connected to sales when many factors go into that determination?
My advice to all PR professionals: embrace any form of demand generation or sales conversion modeling proposed by clients or employers. We will finally be able to show executives the value of PR. For one Ogilvy client (this information is confidential in the client’s eyes so I need to respect their wishes and not name them), our PR program generated 13 percent of sales while consuming only four percent of the marketing budget. The economists declared PR “the most effective and most efficient” form of marketing evaluated for this client. Fear not then, a sales-measureable future is a bright future for the PR profession.