Quantifying The Unquantifiable: Modern PR Demands Measurable Metrics is the sort of headline that normally might compel me to click on an article, but by the end of the post, I needed to up my blood pressure meds.
To call PR “ the final frontier of unmeasured marketing,” is simply insulting to all the people, clients and agencies with whom I’ve worked for the past three decades, who have been implementing and using good valid PR metrics that did in fact show that their efforts “meaningfully support our business objectives.”
The notion that “The industry is inching closer to a smarter, standardized measurement for PR,” maligns all the good people at AMEC and the IPR Measurement Commission who have advocated against vanity metrics and promoted measures that show actual value for years.
Clearly the author has been living with the penguins on Heard Island for the past few decades. To state that “we are just now moving towards standards for PR Measurement” – weeks after the Barcelona Principles was updated for the 4th time since its creation15 years ago – is nothing short of infuriating. It has been a decade and a half since the industry came together to reject Advertising Value Equivalency as a valid measurement for PR, so why is it even mentioned? Oh, that’s right, all the dinosaurs haven’t gone extinct yet. I forgot about all the old fossils in marketing that still cling to the notion that you can equate every story in every outlet to some mythical value that would equal what an ad might have cost. Perhaps the problem is that Mr. Shah and the folks at KNB do not yet understand that in most organizations, the objectives for a PR program are very different from those for a paid marketing campaign and therefore require different metrics.
To be fair, I understand that Mr. Shah wrote this post to promote a new product they’re calling PRISM that calculates the “impact” of a media hit. Good idea, and in fact I even suggested my own version of PRISM three years ago: https://painepublishing.com/blog/5-steps-to-develop-a-customized-media-impact-index/. Cision, FullIntel and Sprinklr would probably agree since they all have been using Impact scores for years. Many of my clients receive that “Impact Score” data from their respective vendors. They don’t consider them relevant because they don’t relate to their objectives or don’t apply to their audiences.
The REAL problem with measuring media impact is that it assumes that your actual target audience, is in fact, “impacted” by that media outlet. Given that most people no longer get their news or even pay attention to the media that is doing all this “impacting,” it’s one more example of measuring the wrong things.
No one is going to be impacted by anything unless it:
What matters today is whether you’ve reached your target audience where they actually are, with whatever sources they pay attention to and trust, using language that they actually find credible. That’s why is why I advocate for a more relevant “quality” score that takes into account whether a piece of content contains content that grabs their attention, contains something relevant to their lives and appears somewhere they are looking.
Okay, rant over, blood pressure is back to normal.
