Measuring up

Forget the tortoise and the hare; one story doing the rounds of London public relations companies recently involved a kangaroo and a tiger.

A kangaroo was apparently seen crossing a south London golf course. The news briefly made national radio, but the plant-eating marsupial was soon knocked off the news agenda by a tiger that escaped from a wildlife park the same day.

The tale goes that the tiger was able to achieve extensive publicity because he had the park’s professional PR team behind him, while there had been only a couple of alleged sightings of the kangaroo and the media soon lost interest in trying to confirm them.

In spite of the obvious success in gaining media coverage, this yarn illustrates how difficult it is to measure the effectiveness of PR because, although considerable time and effort was spent by the park’s press team devising a spur-of-the-moment campaign around the escape and recapture of one of its tigers, it is difficult to assess what effect that alone will have had on increasing visitor numbers.

The Marketing Society claims that the PR industry has grown faster than any other communications sector in recent years, and PR practitioners argue that the flexible and varied nature of the discipline means that it can be considerably more effective than other forms of marketing. Yet, without reliable measurement tools the industry will always struggle to substantiate this claim, which is why the PR business continues to wrestle with the contentious subject of evaluation.

As public and private companies face increasing pressure to become more accountable, so too do the PR agencies that they pay to represent them. In February 1998 business magazine PR Week launched the Proof Campaign in an attempt to encourage client companies to allocate the equivalent of about ten per cent of their PR budgets to planning and evaluation.

Funding evaluation

The PR industry argues that as clients invest significant sums measuring the effectiveness of their advertising they should also be prepared to spend money evaluating PR. Unfortunately, most clients have been reluctant to comply, either because they remain unconvinced of the merits of the measurement tools currently available or they feel that the funding for such research should come from existing PR budgets.

In response, the Institute of Public Relations (IPR) and The Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) published a guide called the PR Research and Evaluation Tool Kit, which practitioners and others – such as journalists, students and analysts – are able to utilise in partnership with clients.

The kit is designed to provide flexible measurement guidelines to take into account the diverse activities described generically as PR and includes case study examples demonstrating the research and evaluation process at work, how PR can be teamed with advertising; and how different research methodologies can complement each other.

IPR head of education and training Alison Theaker says that since the launch, the institute has received many comments on how the tool kit could be improved and an updated version is likely to be published this year. “At the IPR conference in October it emerged that there are plenty of techniques that the industry can use, but it was agreed that PR practitioners and clients need to be educated about the importance of evaluation. The subject of who should pay for any research remains a big stumbling block, however,” she says.

One person who has commented on the tool kit is Roger Haywood, a former IPR president who today is president of Kestrel Communications and chairman of the relatively new Public Relations Standards Council (PRSC) which wants to work closely with the IPR. Yet Haywood says that despite a number of meetings, the IPR has so far resisted the PRSC’s attempts to devise a joint strategy.

“Our aim is to see more PR professionals on the boards of companies. We need to explain to clients that PR is about more than distributing press releases. It should be about shaping policy and advising the board if we feel any action being taken or suggested could harm a company’s reputation.”

The PRSC has produced a Management Strategic Public Relations Checklist which urges large companies in particular to adopt a published PR policy.

The council suggests that businesses appoint an experienced PR professional to direct policy, reporting to the chairman rather than the marketing director.

Mission to explain

The IPR may not have opened its arms to welcome the PRSC but it has been involved in shaping another body called the PRE-fix Group (Planning, Research and Evaluation).

PRE-fix has been created to explain to clients the importance of investing in measuring their PR activity. The PRE-fix committee includes representatives from the IPR and the PRSA and they have agreed to fund a six-month marketing campaign and to underwrite the cost of employing a PR practitioner to run it.

Last October MORI conducted two client focus groups on behalf of PRE-fix to collect views on the effectiveness of PR.

“It emerged that clients are interested in evaluation, but they want simple methods that will not take up too much of their time and which they can use to fight the case for PR when they are meeting those in their company who hold the marketing purse strings. There are still concerns over who should fund evaluation,” says Martin Loat, chairman of PRE-fix and managing director of Propeller Group.

The continuing dispute about funding has not stopped individual agencies from developing their own measurement tools.

Last September, Manning Selvage & Lee unveiled a proprietary tool called ‘I-to-I Tracker’, standing for Impact and Influence. It focuses on the target audience that a campaign is trying to reach, measuring whether the message has been communicated effectively and also whether the PR activity has prompted the desired response.

I to I Tracker was developed by MS&L’s director of planning Claire Spencer, a member of the PRE-fix Group, who previously worked as a planner in advertising. She felt that if PR evaluation was to remain credible it had to move on from assessing media output by calculating column inches and using unreliable methods such as advertising value equivalents (AVEs). I-to-I Tracker quizzes consumers about whether they can recall a PR campaign.

MS&L executive director Fiona Cohen says: “Such a tool helps clients to better understand the role of PR as part of an integrated marketing campaign.”

One MS&L client using I-to-I Tracker is Western Union which has sponsored the Notting Hill Carnival in London for the past two years and concentrated its marketing effort around the event on PR activity rather than advertising. UK marketing manager, Luisa Calcinotto says PR has always been unquantifiable but the company will use I-to-I Tracker as a planning tool for next year’s event.

Hill & Knowlton have launched a similar product called the PRecision tool kit. It has taken the company five years to develop it in conjunction with sister WPP businesses MindShare ATG and Millward Brown.

PRecision monitors how many people are receiving the PR message, the quality of those messages and the prominence, duration and size of any exposure. By marrying this information to traditional tracking methods and strategic planning, the effect of the specific PR activity can be isolated. At the end of a PR campaign an impact analysis is conducted and the effect on the target audience is assessed.

Other agencies refining their own measurement tools include Shandwick International, which has introduced an evaluation software package called MORE (Measurement, Observations, Research and Evaluation). It measures media coverage and whether that coverage was positive, negative or neutral and asks if the message reached the target audience.

Planning tools

Countrywide Porter Novelli claims it was the first consultancy to apply formal planning disciplines to PR and now has seven people in its planning department, using its own planning tool called the Home Run model. “We set the criteria for evaluating success at the planning stage of a campaign and do not let objectives evolve as the programme is implemented. Our PR objectives always relate to wider business plans, ensuring that the focus remains on hard outcomes that the business can see on its bottom line,” says planning director Paul Miller.

Different methods of evaluation and client liaison are being used throughout the industry which means that clients can choose which agencies they work with based on the level of accountability they expect.

US agency Incendio International, for example, launched in the UK last year and operates what chief executive Jane Gideon describes as a transparent agency/client relationship. Using its own website, the company provides an editorial calendar for each client which tells them exactly how their PR account is being managed.

The calendar includes information on which journalists have been contacted, the progress being made on generating coverage and any obstacles the agency has faced. Each month all Incendio employees are also required to distribute to clients status reports, clipping reports and details of everything the agency has done to illustrate how the PR budget is being spent.

“We don’t just measure the number of clippings, we also analyse how editorial perception of a client has changed by studying how the tone of articles changes over a period of months,” says Gideon.

The ultimate redress for a client disappointed that a campaign has not had the required effect is to be able to ask for a rebate on their agency fee; or even to be offered some free consultancy time.

Not surprisingly, most PR agencies would never sign such an agreement, but one company which does operate a guarantee policy is The SPA Way, which includes John Lewis and Waitrose among its clients.

Compensating clients

Deputy managing director Delia Hyde says that at the start of a campaign the agency and client agree a certain level of media coverage to be obtained over a six-month period. If the agency fails to deliver, it works for nothing for the next two months, and if targets are still not reached, rebates are paid to the client.

Waitrose director of selling and marketing Mark Price says the policy keeps the agency on its toes. “It’s easy for people in the media to waffle on about how hard PR is to measure but I think you can measure it. You certainly know if you are not getting the coverage. The guarantee we have provides us with value for money and ensures the agency remains creative,” he says.

The fact that the PR industry is investing so much time and effort in trying to become more accountable should be welcomed. Accurate measuring tools enable agencies to justify their fees, and show clients what impact the activity is having on their bottom line. And, whether you’re a kangaroo or a tiger, that’s what really matters.