OPINION: Does Asia lag in measuring communications effectiveness?

Almost two years ago, 200 communications professionals meeting in Spain at an AMEC conference approved what has become known as the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles, more commonly called the Barcelona Principles. This was the first global framework for PR measurement.

The Barcelona Principles quickly gained the support of public relations associations from around the world, initially at least because Principle No. 7 declared: "AVEs are not the Value of Public Relations." Since that conference, this key declaration has been endorsed in the US, in Europe, and by some of the leading global associations, such as the Global Alliance and ICCO.

But has Asia tuned into the debate happening in Europe and the US?

To share the latest thinking of leading firms in the region, AMEC is running the First Asia Pacific Summit on Measurement at Hong Kong's Grand Hyatt Hotel on 29 February and 1 March. Speakers including senior communicators from Ford, Facebook, PwC, and Lenovo, as well as regional PR agency heads, will share how they make measurement matter. For details please visit the Summit website.

AMEC (the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), is polite on the issue. However, Asian PR professionals are still utilising AVEs (advertising value equivalents) as a principle measure of success that they use to prove their worth, stating that AVEs give them a financial number as proof of their success—what people call 'the magic number'.

AMEC believes that AVEs are misleading at best and valueless at worst as a measure of success. There are many reasons why AVEs are worthless, but  the chief reason is that PR and advertising perform very different tasks. AVEs are the cost of advertising, not the value of the PR impact. Even if there were a requirement to determine what the space taken by a PR-placed story would have cost to buy, the calculation model should be approached with extreme caution.

Some key questions: What to do about negative coverage, or stories that appear but are not driven by a PR programme? And if, as PR people like to think, PR has greater impact than advertising, and the ad rate should therefore be multiplied by some mysterious 'Impact weighting', what would that score be? Scores in use range from 1.5 to as high as seven or more, with absolutely no basis in research. This approach to measuring PR simply encourages all concerned to develop higher scoring metrics, which bear little or no relation to any real outcome of the PR effort.

What will replace AVEs? Smart measures of coverage visibility and quality, based on determining how much of your target stakeholder group received the messages you wanted to get across.

In an age where savvy companies and organisations are demanding ever more sophisticated performance metrics, PR professionals continuing to use AVEs will, in the end, find their seat at the top table at risk. More significantly, there is a danger that marketing and advertising will take stewardship of PR measurement—leaving communicators in a very weak situation.

In order to provide communicators with a robust and practical replacement for AVEs, AMEC has recently undertaken an intensive exercise to create what are called “Valid Metrics Grids”. These are based on the key premise that the traditional sales funnel generally reflects the various activities of most communicators. Created by a group of highly experienced PR consultancy researchers and measurement vendors, the Valid Metrics have since been endorsed, through an extensive consultation programme, by most of the leading international PR groups and Associations.

The Valid Metrics grids provide an easy-to-use framework for indentifying smart metrics that measure the genuine impact of ongoing and ad-hoc PR activities. The Valid Metrics guidelines are designed to help PR move beyond measuring outputs to measuring outcomes. The AMEC team addressed two main challenges as it evolved the new Valid Metrics methodology:

• The industry has become wedded to the notion that there is a single number to reflect PR performance, and that number has traditionally been AVE, even though it is a fundamentally flawed and meaningless number.  
• PR’s effectiveness is genuinely determined by the impact it has on key audiences, and changes in awareness, perception or behavior (buying, voting, boycotting etc). To demonstrate the value of PR in a manner consistent with the metrics used by other management functions, PR metrics need to be linked to the business objective of the program. AVE and other measures of visibility and reach are essentially tracking the output success of the PR activity (in essence, the efficiency of the activity).

The Valid Metrics grids have been developed with the PR professional in mind. They include a number of variants that reflect some of the diverse PR campaign types encountered in real life, from product launches to advocacy and public affairs right through to long-term reputation- and issues-management programmes.

This new initiative connects PR activity to relevant output metrics (essentially covering visibility, sentiment, and message alignment), and connecting both of these with business outcomes metrics.  These include such measures as consumer awareness and brand perception research, brand tracking data, and other hard indicators such as sales growth, website clickthroughs, and requests for information. The specific outcome measures chosen for any given campaign will reflect the business goals of the programme.

By relating PR activity more directly to business outcomes, the foundation for measuring PR’s effectiveness moves closer in alignment to other performance metrics. PR becomes more closely integrated and aligned with other marketing activities.

But AVEs are just a small (and increasingly less discussed) component of a broad movement to develop communications measurement standards and best practices. Social media, for instance, is now a critical element of PR measurement. The Barcelona Principles reject the view held by some commentators that social media is some special, esoteric form of communication. Just like “traditional” media, social media can be measured in the same way, using robust volume and quality metrics. Social media is just another channel.

However, the development of social-media measurement is challenged by the current lack of definitive common global standards. AMEC’s current focus is on supporting cross-sectoral, global standards initiatives—whose initial goal will be, at a minimum, to create definitions and standards around key areas of social-media measurement, including influence, engagement, visibility, sentiment, and content sourcing.

As the communications industry shapes up to global economic challenges, the need to demonstrate the value of PR activity against meaningful business outcome metrics is increasingly vital. Reliance on outdated and discredited metrics such as AVE, or believing that social media cannot really be measured effectively will simply render PR a low-value activity, with the danger that marketing communications, with its history of accurate and robust metrics will encroach more and more on the communications function.

It is precisely because PR can be so cost-effective in driving organizations’ messages and reputation that its efforts should be measured with robust and research-driven tools and methods. Asian PR professionals should be eager to embrace new thinking in PR programme measurement because it will show senior management the proper value of their work, expressed as a business benefit.

  As a reminder, the Barcelona Principles are:

• Importance of goal setting and measurement
• Measuring the effect on outcomes is preferred to measuring outputs
• The effect on business results can and should be measured where possible
• Media measurement  requires quantity and quality
• Aves are not the value of public relations
• Social media can and should be measured
• Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement.