The Thoughtful Thud Revisited

The Scales of Dependence....

It was brought home to me again this week after a day of PR Awards judging, that when the PR industry (in the UK at least) thinks evaluation, it thinks Advertising Value Equivalents (AVE's). What’s I found worrying from the awards entries is the scale of dependence of PR professionals on AVE’s as their means of measurement.

The acclaimed PRCA Consultancy Management Standard (CMS) puts the onus on the consultancy and the client to “identify and agree …..the most appropriate forms of performance evaluation” such as setting the: key performance indicators, critical success factors, milestones and deliverables.

I would have thought that right now, with some evidence of clients cutting PR programme budgets, understanding more about how your programme (really) performed is going to make you a PR team more valuable because it’s a clear demonstration of client service delivery. In the meantime, the evaluation industry has an education challenge on its hands to get the message across about the tools and techniques available.

Charity begins at home?

Back from talking at a conference to a group of PR Managers from charity and Not for Profit organisations. It was clear that they generate an enormous number of cuttings. However in the main, the organisations represented were still using the “thud factor” of a giant book of cuttings as the indicator of success to their management.

My point to them was that today’s senior management teams are "time poor". They simply do not have the time to go through thick cuttings books. Today's manager wants to know about the key “intelligence threads.” What are the key messages that are being used? Who is speaking for the organisation and how are they rated? How do all the press cuttings currently being generated drive charity fundraising because if there is not a correlation, the PR is not working despite the size of the cuttings book.

The use of AVE’s is a cheap solution to the question: “how did we do?” New evaluation techniques present key metrics in a way that will grab the attention of the busiest Chief Executives. What’s missing at the moment, however, is the will of Heads of Comms to try new thinking.

They will be pleasantly surprised when they do!

Form and Function

Against a trend of falling newspaper sales, the NLA was created to monetize the copyright of newspaper content. I understand that. But now, the FT, you might say, a “beneficiary” under the NLA scheme, has itself introduced a charge, this time for an FT Content Licence.

Yesterday’s convention that news was…..well news and in the public domain seems to have disappeared. The FT Content Licence means that PR consultancies, press cuttings agencies, corporate in-house teams and evaluation companies are each liable to a new licence charge for access to and use of FT content via FT.com and recognized third party channels.

So from the broad-ranging NLA copying content scheme in the NLA we have moved to what could be, potentially, a series of individual media channel licenses which gives authorized access to that channel's content. The future could be a plethora of such schemes.

I prefer the sound of the old Linotype machine! At least I could hear it coming and admire its form and function…..

Challenge to PR Week to run UK "Legends" Tour

Across the Pond to the US for inspiration from four octogenarians who still work every day in the communications business BECAUSE THEY WANT TO! Congratulations to all four - and well done to PR Week for organising a lunch in the US for four founders of the modern day industry: Dan Edelman, Harold Burson, David Finn and Al Golin.

I headed up the London office of Golin/Harris for a time and had the privilege of getting to know Al Golin, an imposing, but modest man interested in you, rather than you knowing who he was. His story of how he cold-called a client called Ray Kroc who had opened a small fast food restaurant called McDonald’s is the stuff of legend, especially as McD’s is still a major client of Golin/Harris today.

Talking of Legends, there’s the making of a very good European Tour here for these four gentlemen. PR Week, bring the Four Pioneers to Europe – they would “play” to packed audiences everywhere.