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.
By Linda Forrest
While we’ve previously shared on this blog what we feel are best practices when it comes to the use of embargoes and, after seeing a PR misstep, recommended that it would have been an effective tactic, the debate continues on whether embargoes are still an effective tool for PR practitioners or will even be honoured by an increasingly user-generated media for whom the old newsroom rules do not apply. A group of folks from both sides of the debate gathered yesterday to discuss the pros and cons. What do you think?
By Linda Forrest
Last week, my family went on a quick trip to the States to do some shopping. As with any good roadtrip, we brought along handfuls of CDs (we’re old school like that) and listened to quite a few different albums on our trip there and back. One of these was the fabulous new record by Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johansson, the latter better known as an A-list actress than a singer. The album is doing quite well; at the time of writing, it was sitting at 80 on the Billboard Top 200, having peaked at 41. Entirely respectable for an album from a largely unknown entity (Yorn) and starlet (Johansson.) They’ve been making the rounds on a full-scale publicity campaign, and I caught a minute or two of them on Ellen a few weeks ago. It turns out the album was recorded several years ago, that Yorn and Johansson just happen to be friends, and that when Yorn decided he wanted to record an album of duets, he contacted Johansson and asked her to be the female singer, not really knowing whether she could sing or not. Ellen said what most of us were thinking when she asked — and I’m paraphrasing — what made you think she could sing? And Yorn responded that he didn’t even know if she could sing, then in an AP article he said, “I figured, you know, most actors are multi-talented. They’ve got to be able to do a lot of things and they probably have some ability to sing.”
He’s absolutely right. It used to be that actors did indeed have to be multi-talented: actor, singer, dancer, and potentially more. Gene Kelly comes initially to mind. Sinatra. John Travolta. Jennifer Lopez. On and on… More recently it seems that successful actors are talented in more technical areas like writing, producing and directing, in addition to their skills in front of the camera. Arguably the most talented of Hollywood’s current line-up that can do it all is Clint Eastwood – actor, writer, director, producer, songwriter, singer, dancer — and incredibly talented in all of these areas.
Point being, in today’s competitive marketplace, marketers, like actors, need to be multi-talented. And while a PR company like ours might not immediately spring to mind as the proper service provider for some of the more strategic marketing communications disciplines, we’ve been reminded more often than once recently that our skill set and experience lend themselves well to providing counsel on bigger picture marketing strategy issues. Our fearless inmedia leader has recognized and identified this opportunity and as a result, our business is gradually moving up-stream. His post yesterday not only details the beginnings of this transition and the reasons for it, but also points to exactly the issues I’ve mentioned here.
By Francis Moran
Most of this blog post ran on DangleTech last week, a general technology and management blog to which I make the occasional contribution. I am running it here on our own blog not just to get extra mileage out of it but because it continues the conversation I started a month or so back when I told you that I and the rest of the crew at inmedia were looking at where else we could apply our tech market knowledge and skills. In the process of doing so, I have been giving a lot of thought to the nature of professional specialisation.
My introspection on this subject stems from this recent decision of ours to move beyond the highly specialised public relations services that have been the core of our professional services offering for the past more than 10 years. That move has been prompted by a realisation that public relations has become an over-competitive, highly commodified proposition where a small agency such as ours faces relentless competition from both large agencies trying to keep their infrastructure funded through the current downturn and one-person shops of often-quite-well-qualified practitioners who used to work at agencies or on the client side. Add to this a widespread lack of any kind of objective framework within which agency searches are conducted – they often amount to little more than glorified beauty contests or are managed by very junior staff simply unqualified to make such a judgement – and you have the very epitome of what statisticians and management consultants W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne have characterised as “a bloody ‘red ocean’ of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.” They argue that “tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating ‘blue oceans’ of uncontested market space ripe for growth.”
For an individual or a consulting firm, such an approach means offering the marketplace a unique set of capabilities that, for a given situation, are not to be found elsewhere. My search over the past four or five months for my own personal blue-ocean strategy has dovetailed nicely with a growing understanding that the age of the specialist may well be behind us. Consider the following quote, taken from a recent edition of the CBC’s excellent series examining the nature of work:
“You have this long list of professional trades, and they’re all speaking different languages and they all have some sort of compartmentalized knowledge and that’s the challenge. That’s where the future is, in having a knowledge. The separation of design and build, the Ford model of assembly-line production – we are through that and we’ve entered into almost an older evaluation of skill where people have a sense of the general picture, the big picture and be able to bring together all the different specializations required. And that’s a new way of looking at problems. But it’s also a very old way of looking at problems.”
You might think the person who said the above words was a management consultant, maybe a systems analyst. But although he likes to use that latter term to describe himself, Jonas Spring is, in fact, a rooftop gardener, who needs to pull together many different and heretofore disparate and unconnected specialised professions and trades in order to plan, plant and maintain a rooftop garden.
Although our specialty at inmedia for the past dozen years or so has been very narrow – we did media and analyst relations and little else, and we did it for B2B technology ventures and no-one else – our skill set is far more diverse than might be immediately apparent, even to me.
For example, a recent assignment that came to me from well beyond the normal ambit of my PR agency was to help a Montréal systems integration company bid to be the Canadian value-added reseller for a U.S. software vendor. What the heck, you might well ask, does a PR guy know about any of that?
Well, as I broke down the requirements with the help of the certified management consultant who brought me in on the assignment, it became quite clear that what I might have seen as quite specialised capabilities could be far more generally applied.
In the first instance, we had to determine if there was a market in Canada for the software company’s product. That’s the sort of straightforward market-sizing research that needs nothing more than an objective definition of the target customer – size, sector and so on – and a good database that can be used to identify which and how many companies meet the criteria.
Then we had to make the case that our client, the systems integrator, was the right fit for the software company’s requirements. Well, that’s the sort of thing we do in PR all the time – develop, pitch and defend the story that says our clients are the right fit for a certain requirement.
The next step was to demonstrate how, should they get the nod, the systems integration company would go about pursuing the market opportunity and bringing in sales and revenue. Well, that’s a sales and marketing strategy, the sort of thing I had been doing before starting the PR agency and continued to do even while running the agency.
Finally, the whole thing had to be wrapped up in a well-written, persuasively argued proposal to the software company. And if I am not a writer, I am nothing.
I have gone on to other assignments over the past few months where I might have got my foot in the door thanks to a particular specialisation but where the client has swiftly seen that, in the right situation, I possess the exact mix of skills that are required. Presto – I have a blue-ocean opportunity with that client and face no competition, no qualification round and no pricing pressure. In almost every case, my value has not been a narrow specialisation but, rather, the requirement to apply generalised skills across a broad area. In today’s increasingly complex world where formerly disparate systems and processes must come to work together, this is the future of work.
Our thinking in these two areas – the rise of the generalist and building a personal blue-ocean strategy – has progressed to the point where we are about to formalise a market-facing entity to build a business around it. As these plans are unveiled, I will, of course, keep our readers up to speed on what’s happening.
