Time to Quit Pulling the Wool Over Our Own Eyes
For years, we in public relations have faced the question of how to evaluate a program’s success.  Beyond the obvious look to see the effect on sales, our answer has too often been to measure advertising equivalency, count impressions or cite earned circulation.  And that has probably been some of the worst counsel we have given clients.

Measuring media success in terms of advertising equivalency, circulation or numbers of impressions has little validity and, in point of fact, can be wholly misleading.  It assumes that the advertising equivalency, impressions or the circulation we gain for our clients is actually worth something or is even aimed at the right audience.

There are, of course, clients who want to know the value of a placement in advertising terms.  It’s at that point that we need to let them know how meaningless such a measure is.  Most clients I know expect results, not just effort.  The old standards measure effort.

After years of this fruitless measurement, my firm has developed its own measurement instrument, which we call an Impact Rating. This rating measures a news story’s ability to successfully carry a client’s key messages to its intended audiences.  To do so, it measures each story on five or six variables, such as whether the story contains important messages, whether it is accompanied by photos or artwork, whether it is prominently displayed or in the back of the publication, whether it is in targeted publications or newscasts, etc.  Each variable is measured on a scale of one to 10, and then all variables are averaged.

The Impact Rating tells our clients whether they are successfully getting their message out to the audience they need to reach.  It gives them, and us, a way to look at the effectiveness of each media placement and of an entire program.  As such, it measures the meaningfulness of results.

But what about those circulation figures?  While these are all factored into an Impact Rating, they make a good sidebar to the report to support the idea that not only were the stories effective in driving messages, but that they did so with enough reach to be valuable.

What has been missing from many evaluation reports is the concept of a standard of excellence for the work actually accomplished.  Measuring the value of media relations on standards such as advertising equivalency, impressions or circulation is to assume a standard level of excellence in the content, when there may not be any at all.  Would you buy bottled sewage water because you could get it cheaply, or insist on purified bottled water?  Obviously, we all accept a standard of excellence in normal bottled water – an assumption that it is pure and fresh.  But we can’t make the same assumption about media results.

That’s why it’s so important to be honest with ourselves and honest with our clients by getting away from a reliance on standards such as advertising equivalency, impressions or circulation.  These are measurements that might mean something, but might not.  Evaluation needs to be based on the potency of our work, and that’s what an Impact Rating can do.