In checking back over my predictions of a year ago, I give myself a grade of about B+. Washington may not have shown us that listening is more valuable than yelling, but it certainly enabled many people to bury bad stuff. And God knows there was lots of bad stuff. Bots and fake news took center stage, consolidations certainly continued, value was all the range, wages rose, and blockchain hasn’t changed anyone’s measurement life yet. Whether celebrities lost their luster is a matter of opinion, and the impact of weather probably depended on where you lived.
So, all in all, not too bad. But still, my crystal ball was clearly fogged up for some of last year’s prognostication. So I’ve polished it up some. Let’s see if I have clearer foresight for 2019.
1. AI to the rescue
My biggest miss in last year’s predictions was the significance of AI to our industry. As of this time a year ago, I’d seen little evidence of its use in actually solving client’s problems, or to make their lives easier. But today AI is on its way to replacing Boolean as the basis for most measurement programs. Not that Boolean is going away, it’s just that most vendors are now using AI to analyze the volumes of data they’ve been collecting via those Booleans to make their platforms a whole lot smarter.
Today, AI is being used to:
- Filter out bots and other non-human content creators,
- Surface trends and issues that clients hadn’t even thought of but were already showing up in public conversations,
- Identify influencers and executives that have yet to pop up on anyone’s VIP list, and
- Expand sentiment beyond basic (and frequently inaccurate) definitions of positive-negative-neutral to identify emotions.
Years ago, it would have taken many trained humans scanning thousands of news items and other content to draw a conclusion about what were the trends and messages of the day. Now they just show up in a word cloud on your dashboard, mostly thanks to AI.
But let me be clear: AI isn’t going to put all analysts out of work. First of all, you need accurate human coding to train machines on what to look for. But more importantly, AI will reduce the amount of tedious work smart humans have to do. It will increase the brainpower they can put behind actually drawing conclusions and making recommendations on the data in front of them. 2019 will be the year where human coding and machine coding could reach parity in accuracy.
2. It will not be The Year of the Woman in measurement
Actually, the early 1990s were the years of women in measurement. Sandra MacLeod was running Echo and I was running Delahaye—and we were the dominant players in the industry at the time. Women like Pauline Draper and Marianne Eisenmann were taking their seats at the agency tables, and even on the client side there were female measurement champions.
Today, not so much. I recently sat through three days of pitches, and in those three days there were maybe four women even present on the vendor side, and only one who lead the conversation. No matter how many pitches and conferences I sit through, it never ceases to amaze me that 95% of the vendors are men and at least 85% of the clients are women.
As someone who has been running measurement companies for over 30 years, it astounds me that the field is still so dominated by men. I trace this back to when technology began its takeover of measurement; when the tech geeks, mostly men, took over and women went absent in leadership roles. This topic has got me so riled up I just wrote a MeasHERment Manifesto about it.
3. Walls have fallen and impressions are in their death throws
Despite the emphasis on walls these days, in our world of measurement they actually have crumbled. Few companies segment traditional and social media into separate silos any longer, but rather view earned media and paid media as separate functions. Mergers and acquisitions are blending traditional and social media monitoring into a single service, which is long overdue and much more in line with how customers experience news anyway.
Bots, fake followers, and fraudulent SEO placements are an accepted if detested part of our daily life. But because fake is increasingly part of today’s reality, leadership is increasingly skeptical about big meaningless click and engagement numbers. In fact both Glean.Info and Zignal Labs have recently introduced products specifically designed to find and eliminate bots and surface disinformation attacks.
Clients more and more are looking not for how many impressions, but instead what impact those impressions are having on their customers. 2019 will be the year where investments and breakthroughs will be made in determining who actually saw and interacted with a piece of media content. Impressions won’t matter nearly as much as touchpoints, interactions, and conversions. More interesting are the advances that firms like AirPR are making in delivering weighted importance of media based not on impressions, but on authors, readership, and relevancy to the audience.
4. Customization will be the differentiator
As you can read in our technology forecast, there will be no shortage of ways and means to get your media collected and analyzed. And yes, technology will come to almost all vendors in the form of increasing use of AI for advanced data segmentation. But, frankly, every vendor will offer some version of that.
What will differentiate the winners and losers is their ability to tailor metrics, indexes, charts, dashboards, and configurations to the specific demands of the client. The big guys who are spending seven figures for measurement dashboards already get that service. But 2019’s automation and technology will drive that level of customization down to the Small & Medium Business (SMB) level, making things like customized sentiment scores, quality indexes, specific content collection, and message tracking a whole lot more affordable. Those that do it best will be the winners.
5. Correlations and testing will rise to the forefront
Years ago, a potential client asked me why I thought that a particular quality index was valid for his specific business. I said, honestly, that I hadn’t a clue—at least not at that moment for his program. (I had lots of data for my other clients that had implemented integrated dashboards, since the quality indexes I created for them were all based on testing and correlations to actual outcome metrics.)
I explained that the first thing I would do would be to test my proposed index against real world data from his website or CRM or other external data to ensure that the criteria in that index were valid. He nodded in agreement and that was the end of the discussion.
I wish more clients would similarly challenge me. But the reality is that the smartest PR people in the company can sit around a table and speculate as to what constitutes a “good” article, or an “important” article, or an “influential” media outlet, but until you can back up those descriptors with data, it’s all speculation.
With the arrival of better analytics and more integration, clients will be able to demonstrate those positive correlations between what they’ve defined as “quality coverage” and conversions on their website, or engagement with their content. Thus demonstrating that the index has both validity and credibility.
Additionally, in 2018 we’ve begun to see more emphasis on pre- and post-testing of campaign messages. So that when you set up your message tracking there’s a chance that someone might actually pick it up because you’ve tested it in advance and its worked. I’m guessing (okay, hoping) that such techniques become much more common in 2019.
6. Risk and communications measurement is where the money is—and where the market is going
I know this may come as a surprise to many of you, but the goal of most corporate communications programs isn’t to sell more product. The goals established by leadership for corporate comms departments increasingly indicate that their job is to protect the brand(s) and the reputations of the company. The business impact of that protection is a higher, more stable stock price, a richer and more diverse talent pool, and a reputation that increases loyalty and shortens the sales cycle.
Traditionally, brand reputation was measured every other year or so by massive expensive surveys. Today it is being done by short quick pulse studies and deep dives into what people are saying and writing in traditional and social media.
Now I know that most of you readers are thinking “Duh!” But what has changed is the avalanche of corporate brand-damaging stories we’ve seen in the last few years. As a result, corporate risk managers and financial strategy folks are all increasingly interested in the results of media analysis.
They’re finally waking up to the fact that you don’t really know the health of your brand unless you are constantly listening to all your stakeholders. (Again, duh.) That means you must have in place a robust social listening program that alerts you to customer complaints, short seller activities, investor commentary, political opinions, and anything else that impacts your reputation, your ability to attract talent, and your stock price. It also means that that social listening needs to be tightly integrated with traditional media to see if (more likely when) it starts to gain traction in mainstream media and with politicians or the public at large.
Traditionally such robust programs couldn’t be justified within the scope of a traditional PR budget. But when the risk management and finance departments get involved, suddenly it’s easy to justify.
7. Demonstrating business value will become the norm
Metrics like “cost per conversion” or “cost per engagement” will dominate our dashboards in 2018. On the nonprofit side look for “cost per new donor” or “cost per engagement” replacing those anachronistic goals like “increased awareness.”
Proof showed us the way to do this three years ago, and AirPR made the assist with its attribution model. Since then almost everyone else is now incorporating Google Analytics data in their evaluation of their communication efforts to at least show correlation and develop acceptable proxies. With all this good stuff coming down the pike, there simply won’t be much room left on your dashboard for all those meaningless dumb metrics like “media value” and “impressions” and “likes” we’ve been using for so long. (Time to clean out your measurement junk drawer?)
8. Brands will increasingly adopt political tactics
If the Nike/Colin Kaepernick campaign was any indication, brands have learned from political campaigns that riling up your base and intentionally creating controversy sells product or at least increases loyalty.
This will prove a challenge for traditional PR people who look at traditional media measurement charts, since the moment those red negative lines on their listening dashboards go up they reach for their Valium. But negative reactions aren’t necessarily bad for business, so it will require an entirely new approach to monitoring and measurement to figure out what is or is not good for your brand.
What we learned from Nike is that generating the right level of controversy and subsequent negative reaction can spur positive response (i.e., sales) among your base. It’s actually not a new tactic among those who believe that any publicity is good publicity. The question is, how viable and sustainable will it be in 2019? Not sure I have an answer, but I bet Nike and Gillette won’t be the only ones.
9. Real people, not celebrities, will become the most valuable influencers
Forget the Kardashians, the A-listers, and the red-carpet dwellers: your neighbors will be the hot influencers in 2019. After the various scandals to hit celebrities in 2018, brands will pivot to hyper-local and hyper-specific influencers. Real people, wherever they hang out, are the ones with influence. It might be students (e.g., RateMyProfessor.com,) neighbors (www.nextdoor.com) or employees (www.glassdoor.com) but individuals that people can relate to will be the ones with real influence.
Thanks to platforms like Next Door, your neighbors may be deciding the success or failure of a local business or restaurant. Glass Door is already being monitored by many brands given its influence on a company’s ability to attract talent. These types of platforms won’t be the “new” Facebook, but they will provide alternatives for ways to connect with normal people. Thus in 2019 we’ll identify influencers not by the size of their follower base, but by the strength of their relationships.
10. Politics will devour the news hole, so you’ll need to be where the media already is going
The one thing we know is that 2019 will be even more chaotic news-wise than 2018. Between a new Congress and the hearings and investigations that it promises, plus the start of the 2020 presidential election, traditional news media will continue to be preoccupied with politics.
What your stakeholders will be reading or paying attention to is anyone’s guess, but the point is that whatever your news is will constantly be competing with news out of Washington and from any one or more of the various presidential hopefuls.
As a denizen of the First In the Nation Primary state, my observation isn’t just that the presidential runs draws candidates. God knows that’s true; so far in the last few months we’ve seen no less than 17 hopefuls. But as brands and issue-focused non-profits realize, where the hot hopefuls go, so goes the media. So, increasingly, advocacy organizations are setting up shop in early primary states to ensure that they get their message into the inevitable coverage.
11. Take a lesson from politics and the Russians
Research shows one’s religious, social, and political persuasions dictate what people pay attention to and what is likely to persuade them. So communicators need to be hyper sensitive (and knowledgeable) on the social and cultural characteristics of their audiences. If your audience is older white males, there’s little positive value to scheduling your CEO an appearance on Pod Save America. If you’re targeting female millennials of color, then chances are your five-minute positive segment on Fox and Friends will not have a positive impact on your product sales. You may have never darkened the door of a church in your life, but if that is where your stakeholders are gathering and talking, you may have a lot of Bingo Nights and church suppers in your future.
The point is that we know that hyper-targeting based on cultural, political, racial, and gender characteristics works. So communicators ignore these elements at their peril.
12. You will need to make your program recession-proof
Every economist will tell you that some sort of economic recession is in the not-too-distant future, so it’s time to change up your metrics. Whether it will be through showing value or demonstrating solid returns, you’ve got to get prepared. Show your business value, demonstrate that you are protecting your brand from risk, or quantify some other aspect of what you do to demonstrate your business importance.
13. Some things won’t change
PR people didn’t get into PR to do measurement or analyze pivot tables, so I doubt that there will be a sudden embrace of pivot tables by the PR profession. What that means is that a select few—those measurement mavens that combine PR and analytic skills—should be able to demand a 50% premium over the average PR person’s salary. Word to the wise, considering the previous point. ∞
