"Joining-Up" Marcomm Measurement
Planning and measuring PR in the context of other marketing communication
Anna Salter

Why does PR need to be measurable
against other media?

This strategy in planning marketing communications campaigns requires a “joined up” approach to measurement. If the correct tools are used to evaluate these mixed-media campaigns, the information is available to effectively evaluate the success of initiatives and plan more efficient and successful campaigns next time around.

What tools can we use to plan and evaluate PR in a “joined up” way?

Tools that already exist in the advertising planning world can be applied to evaluate return on investment in a mixed-media campaign.

How do the ad guys do it?

In the example below, you can see how media buyers might select the publications and programs that best fit their target. The media have been mapped in terms of their affinity toward different attitudes, age or interest groups.

How does this relate to planning a PR campaign?

The age/sex/income criteria have a weakness in that they do not take into account the different needs, preferences and attitudes across these broad groups. For example, the buyers of Harley Davidson motorcycles cannot be typified by these classifications. The people who buy Harleys might be Hell’s Angels, men seeking adventure, or “chicks on bikes.” These groups do not have age, sex or income in common. What they do have in common is a desire for liberty. The question is how do you reach these people through the media without using a very broad PR campaign, attempting to gain coverage in any and all media, on the off chance that one of the key customers might see it? You need to understand their lifestyle, needs and preferences.

How do we find out which media are important
to our customers?

Through the TGI database, the media habits of people are mapped according to their lifestyle or attitude, not their perceived position in society. Examples of the ways in which groups can be categorized include:

• People who tend to consult a financial advisor before making a major financial decision
• People who believe that a woman’s place is in the home
• People who spend more than $40 per month on skin and hair care
• People who fly for personal or leisure purposes over three times each year

Indeed, you could use TGI to define the media habits of the people who meet some or all of these profiles. Clearly then, we can use these definitions in order to aid a client’s segmentation strategy.

The output is a list of the media that will be most effective in “hitting” the target audience. The PR team can therefore concentrate on achieving coverage in these titles with the knowledge that they will be using their time and budget effectively.

In this example, we have ranked some of the key U.K. media to deliver an audience who “usually consults a financial advisor before making a financial decision.” This could be used for a client who only markets its products through financial third parties.

These media are more likely to be read by an older, more risk-averse group. At the other end of the scale, youth media such as Mizz, Playstation Magazine and Bliss are of little interest to a client who markets through financial advisers, with less than one percent of the key audience being reached by them.

So now I know where I should be placing coverage, how do I evaluate how effective my campaign has been?

In our partnerships with TGI and Mindshare ATG, we have successfully adapted the planning tools used by the advertisers to fulfill this post-program evaluation role. The following example highlights the application of this process in assessing Volvo's launch of its XC90 SUV.

In the case of the Volvo XC90, there was significant emphasis placed on PR at the launch. PR traditionally plays a large part in the buying decision for a car, but how do you reach out to exactly the right group of people? In this instance, the market insight department had identified this target as Adults 25-44, higher income band, higher education level, with a keen sense of adventure. And, even more difficult, how do you ascertain whether you have reached them or not?

Adults 25-44, higher income band, higher education level, with a keen sense of adventure

Mindshare ATG calculated the size of this target audience at 609,000 people in the U.K.

Volvo put together an excellent campaign aimed at the consumer, lifestyle and news media, selected specifically for their ranking against the key audience. These were targeted in addition to the traditional media for a vehicle launch – the specialist automotive pages.

The campaign produced a large quantity of press clippings, but to complete the process, the actual penetration of the campaign within the identified key audience was evaluated. Results were calculated based on the reach and frequency of the coverage. Reach means the percentage of the target audience reached and frequency denotes the average number of times audience members have been exposed to the information. These are terms used in ad media buying to determine the efficiency of an ad campaign buying schedule before the media time is purchased. The difference here is that this tool is used as a post-campaign evaluation of PR.

The XC90 launch was highly successful in terms of the reach and frequency achieved, with 96.7% of all people within the target audience being reached by the campaign at least once. When compared against the control sample of all U.K. adults, the result within the target group was significantly better: 85% of all U.K. adults were reached at least once.

Another aspect of this analysis is that the reinforcement of the PR message can also be measured in terms of the frequency of hits within the target audience. Whereas 47.5% of all U.K. adults were reached seven or more times, 65.6% of people within the target audience were hit on at least seven occasions by the campaign.

Therefore, we found that this campaign was more effective at reaching the core audience than the population at large, in terms of both reach and of frequency.

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So, we targeted the right media and attained coverage. But did it work?

In the case of the XC90, the successful targeting of the campaign yielded excellent results, both in terms of consumer awareness and sales.

The findings from the brand awareness tracking were that almost twice as many people claimed to be very familiar with the XC90 than either of its two key rivals. This was a major coup, as the brand was so new. The largest increase in familiarity during the analyzed period was directly attributable to its highest peak in PR.

Orders for the XC90 were found to correlate closely with bursts of PR activity. The small amount of advertising undertaken was effective in creating a minor uplift in the number of enquiries, but the campaign was so successful that Volvo was selling higher numbers of cars than anticipated and building up a waiting list. The decision was therefore taken to cancel further advertising, saving significant budget, which could then be diverted to support other models.

I don’t have the budget to do all that research. How can I compare the output from PR with other media?

In the example below, it can be seen that, although it is difficult to beat TV advertising’s cut through to consumers, the delivery of this audience is relatively expensive. Radio advertising and PR appear to be relatively inexpensive ways of delivering audience reach.

But the currency of PR is time, not money. How do I evaluate return on investment on time spent?

On this FMCG - Fast Moving Consumer Goods - campaign, the amount of time spent trying to gain coverage in the broadcast media did not pay off. National press achieved very good coverage, but in terms of the time spent on gaining coverage, the relative return on investment was extremely good within the consumer press.

Thus, this can be a learning for the next campaign – to concentrate more on targeted lifestyle features and spend less time chasing TV coverage, which appears to represent too much pain for too little gain, at least in this category.

The silver bullet?