Why PR evaluation needs objectives to succeed

When you set out to achieve anything, you evaluate results. But evaluation in the PR industry still remains a thorny issue.

Ogilvy PR Worldwide is to roll out new global standards for measurement after its Australian arm pledged to ditch AVEs. Other agencies are following suit.

For reference, AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent) is the price of a piece of media coverage if you paid for that space through advertising. It has a bad reputation as too many PR practitioners use it to measure the value of PR when it only measures the cost of media space.

Occasionally it can be a useful crude measurement of coverage and will still get used by big organisations and big agencies. But PR is much deeper than media coverage.

I think the main issue is that too many practitioners fail to understand PR evaluation as a discipline and how the evaluation process is defined at the start of a programme or campaign.

The Barcelona Principles of PR measurement and evaluation, agreed in 2010, decided that AVEs are not the value of public relations, but this for me was stating the obvious. I was surprised a trip to Barca was needed to reach such conclusions.

PR and comms should always support business objectives. If PR companies get their hands on – and understand – business goals, it should be a clear process setting objectives. Strategies and tactics are then created to get the results and we should therefore have a clear understanding of what we are evaluating.

At Freshfield we are working with clients to meet a range of their business objectives. We can deliver some and help deliver others. Some strategic (outcome-led) and some tactical (output-led).

We have our own evaluation framework and, dare I say it, one of the metrics we sometimes use is AVE. Not as a sole evaluation model, but merely a basic measurement of media results. This is used along with a number of other tools. However, it is all linked back to the original objectives set out at the start of the programme.

I have heard many a good marketing director say ‘we just want to get certain messages covered in the press’. The evaluation metrics are quite clear. It’s not wrong. It’s relevant to their business.

Evaluating the effectiveness of PR all boils down to the conversations you have at the start of a programme. What are the objectives and what does success look like? It needs to be agreed and over-communicated throughout the programme.

There are probably over 50 ways to evaluate PR so we must be flexible. Plus not every client has (or wants to share) a business plan, nor do they commit to specific objective setting.

To improve evaluation, we need to educate ourselves and our clients. We do need to have an industry evaluation framework, but clear strategy and objective setting should be at the heart of it.

The PRCA and CIPR both should show more leadership on this issue, otherwise the PR industry will continue to struggle to justify itself as an indispensable discipline and that has PR ramifications for us all.