A plea for simple but effective measurement

Chances are, you don’t really know any of these people but have formed strong opinions about them. And that’s all been made possible through the lens of the media.

The media has a crucial role to play in our interpretation of the world, and its importance has rapidly gained in importance. It has been argued that “the media has changed more in the last five years than the previous five hundred.”

These changes even accelerated during the pandemic. According to the Reuters Institute of Journalism, 2021 was a year of profound and rapid digital change.

So how do you adapt and evolve in such a volatile environment?

With this blog, I would like to advocate for simple but effective measurement.

November is AMEC Measurement Month. We have seen a spate of webinars, fireside chats and fascinating presentations by world-renowned expert communicators.

So I would like to highlight two important considerations to help us focus on what really matters when we talk about measurement and evaluation:

The value of reputation is increasing but PR budgets are at risk

The past few decades have seen an increasing interest in the value of reputation. Recent studies confirmed this ongoing trend with global executives now attributing more than half (63%) of their company’s market value to their company’s overall reputation.

Meanwhile, PR budgets have traditionally received less compared to advertising or owned media budgets. This could likely be due to the absence of data in the communicator’s strategy to effectively help explain how PR efforts contribute to an organisation’s goals.

This gap between PR budgets and trust towards earned media remains paradoxical as research showed that consumers are more inclined to be influenced by earned media than by owned and paid media.

With Covid-19 sending shock waves around world, PR budgets have become under even more scrutiny and showing effectiveness is no longer an option but a necessity.

Ultimately, if you can’t prove it, you lose it!

Data is not the issue. It’s how much data there is that’s the issue

If you look at who was running the world back in the 1990s, so not that long ago, the largest public companies by market capitalisation included General Electric, Shell, Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil. They were energy or FMCG companies.

Who runs the world now? Data companies do: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. Business models are now centered around the use of data.

Looking at how the PR industry navigated that change is interesting. Practitioners used to have to manually cut and clip individual pieces of print content to show how well (or not!) a campaign did. The “thud factor”, the heavy sound newspapers would make on your desk in the morning, was a indicator of success. These were the early days, and only a few of us can say they remember it.

Communicators went from measuring a few print and online articles to being inundated with earned media data. I really liked this quote from this AMEC panel discussion I moderated earlier this month: “Every person and their dog has a dashboard.” It’s so true!

Today’s challenge is simple: it’s easy to get pulled in every direction. I’ve lost count of how many KPIs actually exist today.