Have I got news for you?

What is the point of PR?

Now the answer to many of you might be really obvious but I
only ask having met in the course of my professional duties a
 wide variety of young PR professionals over the last few weeks. All nice people but all intent on chasing headlines and coverage to the exclusion of just about everything else and all rightly proud of the creativity demonstrated through the PR campaigns they had planned and executed to deliver these banner headlines.

But surely good PR is more than just coming up with crazier and crazier stunts to chase the headlines and to get your brand or news as close as possible to the front of the newspaper?

And yet if you look at the standard measure of PR success, the Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) measure, maybe the role of PR is just about coverage.

On this basis Hitler’s PR agency and those charged with looking after PR for the Costa cruise ships have done a mighty fine job over the years and recent weeks.

To check I wasn’t going mad I had a look at the Chartered Institute of PR’s definition of PR and this re-assured me and confirmed that I wasn’t losing my senses. To the professional PR body,  public relations  ‘ is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you ....Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics’.

I can buy that.

Sadly I think a lot of PR professionals bewitched by the need to generate banner high headlines for their brand are losing sight of this definition. And the ubiquitous use of AVE as a measure of PR efficiency to prove the ROI of PR is contributing massively to the PR profession and many agencies failing to understand that there is more to PR than just coverage.

In other words while AVE is great for measuring PR efficiency, though there are other and arguably better measures out there to do that job, it does do a lousy job at measuring effectiveness and how good our PR programmes are at helping build and drive reputation.

And of course if we all start to see PR as an element in building and maintaining brand reputation there is every likelihood that brands and all in the marketing profession charged with helping to manage this reputation across all channels of communication will develop a joined up and more integrated approach to communications.

It is therefore time for the profession and agencies to move away from AVE and the headline grabbing mindset and to initiate a better informed measurement structure to drive the right behaviours.

I have four key measures which ought to be used in a balanced way to measure ongoing efficiency AND effectiveness and which should help move us away from grabbing headlines to the detriment of all else:

·         Favourability-categorised by positive/neutral negative and measured as a Net Favourability Score (NFS). This can be combined with impacts to show Net Favourability Impact Score calculated by (positive mentions x impacts-negative mentions x impacts). This would be my key measure of effectiveness

·         Key message penetration-percentage of coverage containing key messages

·         Amplification-number of times your message is passed on, an especially useful measure for PR coverage in social media.

·         AVE,  or even better cost per 1000 impacts-the prime measure of efficiency and should only be used  if effectiveness measured.

If we as marketers, PR professional or the agencies supporting our marketing programmes agree that this is the way forward, PR may have a point after all.

And if we do this we won’t just have news for you but the right news for you.