The myths remain – a time for PR and evaluation industries to act

PR Week US recently published its Marketing Management Survey.  It’s a fascinating insight into the values clients put on the different marketing disciplines. What is interesting is that although PR is not the discipline most at risk when it comes to possible budget cuts (advertising is), clients (65.9% of the sample) would nevertheless consider chopping PR spend because of they could not measure PR efforts or quantify PR ROI.

Let’s nail the myth! PR can be measured. What we have to honestly conclude is that the PR and the evaluation industry between them have so far not managed to educate the majority client and agency marketplace.

If ever there was a rallying cry for PR CEO’s, the evaluation industry and the industry trade bodies, this is it. You have clients who believe in PR, but who based on the US sample would cut budgets nevertheless if push came to shove. What it needs is an industry wide push to explain and demonstrate to consultancy management teams – and clients - that PR can be measured. What it will need, however, is a receptiveness amongst management teams that there is a need to educate the client that a separate measurement budget should be allocated. This, for me has always been the stumbling block to mass acceptance of the power and value of evaluation, because all too often the only way to bring in an evaluation specialist means that it comes out of the agency’s own fee. Happily there are many client corporate communications teams who are seeing the benefit of having PR tracked and have their PR programmes measured routinely and regularly, as AMEC’s International Business Monitor study showed.

 But what it really needs is a big push: for PR Week in the UK to join with the PRCA and the international Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) to devise a modern-day version of its PR Proof Campaign of a few years ago.

Or better still, a global campaign led by PR Week running in all its international editions, to make sure that in the next Annual Survey, PR is no longer at risk from a perceived lack of measurement transparency.