Don’t sell your customer yellow shoes, no matter how much he demands them

• November 03, 2009

By Francis Moran

For many years here in Ottawa, I was associated with a large marketing communications agency, many of whose account executives knew they could get a rise out of me by describing media relations as “free advertising.”

“It ain’t free, and it ain’t advertising,” I would consistently reply, with not a little vehemence.

My colleagues were, in the main, just poking fun; I believe they knew better. But for far too many people and for far too long, using advertising rates and data to measure the success of a media relations campaign was a broadly accepted practice. Called “advertising equivalent value,” or AVE, the practice consisted of measuring the column inches and seconds of air time of media coverage generated as a result of a media relations campaign and then assigning a value to that coverage based on what it would have cost to buy the same space as an advertising campaign. And, because everyone knows editorial coverage is more authoritative than advertising, many users of this methodology then compounded their malpractice by adding a multiplier. With no coherent rationale or science to support them, many would say editorial coverage was worth twice as much, or five times or 10 times as much, as advertising.

The allure of AVEs is easy to understand. There is undisputed value in getting your message disseminated through the media, and the implied endorsement of editorial coverage is far more influential than the naked sales pitch of an ad. AVEs deliver a single, easy-to-understand dollar figure that purports to calculate an ROI for a media relations campaign and allows straightforward and often compelling comparisons with advertising. In a fight for budget, AVEs were a potent tool that said the a dollar spent on PR would deliver a higher ROI than the same dollar spent on advertising.

Problem is, it’s an utterly bankrupt practice that delivers no meaningful insight whatsoever. It fails at both a strategic and a tactical level, and if its practitioners can’t understand that, they should at least reject it for purely practical reasons.

Here’s what I mean.

Strategically, advertising and media relations are deployed for fundamentally different reasons. Although in an integrated marketing-communications campaign both serve the same objectives, they do so in very different ways. For example, media coverage will rarely convey the call to action that is at the very heart of most effective advertising. On the other hand, it can usually communicate more nuanced, sophisticated and detailed messaging than can an ad.

Tactically, advertising enjoys the advantage of pinpoint targeting; you have absolute control over what is said, where it is said and how often it is said. Further, your advertising messaging will stand alone, unpolluted by opposing points of view. Media relations offers no such control. Although media relations messaging can be focused and efforts most certainly can be targeted at selected media and journalists, you surrender control over what is done with that messaging. Journalists might bite on your pitch or they might not. Even if they do, they will decide which bits of your messaging they will transmit for you. Where and when that happens is entirely outside your control. And reporters will often go to extraordinary lengths to source opposing or, at least, alternative messaging to create the editorial balance they were taught in journalism school must be integral to every story.

This strategic and tactical analysis is beyond the ability of many non-marketing executives to grasp, and I forgive them for it. (Any marketing executive who fails to grasp this, however, ought to be relieved of her or his responsibilities.) But even if they can’t wrap their heads around the strategic rationale against AVEs, executives ought to reject them on purely practical grounds. It ought to be obvious to everyone that an ROI calculation based solely on AVEs should be rejected if only because all media coverage is not favourable, all media coverage does not deliver a positive ROI, all media coverage does not support — indeed, much of it opposes — the achievement of organisational objectives.

What was the value to Nortel (Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff — I could go on forever) of all its recent high-profile media coverage? Point taken, I trust.

Regrettably, even PR measurement specialists could be lured into this easy and utterly faulty approach. In the mid-1990s, I spent six months on a consulting contract with the Canadian branch of what was at that time one of the two largest media relations measurement outfits in the world. Pioneers in the field of computer-aided media content analysis, this company had a well-tested and fairly rigourous methodology for evaluating the results of a media relations campaign. When a client we were pitching asked that AVEs be included in the report we were proposing, the account executive selling to that client acquiesced.

I went ballistic. How could you choose to beggar a potent, effective and scientifically rigourous PR evaluation methodology by hiving on a discredited and scientifically unsupported approach like AVEs, I asked? The best answer the account executive could provide was that the client was demanding it. “If I sell shoes and a customer demands yellow shoes, I’m going to sell him yellow shoes,” this guy told me in an exchange I’ll never forget.

My contract was not renewed and I went on to refine my own media content analysis methodology that continues to inform both my strategic development of a campaign and my post-campaign evaluation. And yellow shoes are never on offer, no matter how much a customer might demand them.

In grudging defence of that misguided account executive, though, it is true that our clients and employers have long demanded we give them AVEs. This is one of the reasons this discredited practice has persisted. But practitioners who know better have an increasing arsenal of resources they can deploy to help sway even the most literal-minded boss.

Chief among these is the Institute for Public Relations, a respected research body, whose Commission on Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation recently voted 19 to 2 to reject AVEs. A consistent advocate of the uselessness of AVEs is Katie Paine, who presented at last month’s Third Tuesday Ottawa, and who greeted the IPR declaration as the industry’s “Emancipation Day.” Here in Canada, the Canadian PR Society instituted its Media Relations Media Rating Points System several years ago. It falls well short of being proper content analysis but it is a considerable improvement on AVEs.

I hope I’ve heard for the last time that media relations is free advertising. Even in jest.