CASE STUDY Pfizer's PR campaign „Openly about sex“ - PRO.PR

.
James Davies
Managing director
Impact evaluation
Great Britain
When “Total Quality Management” was in fashion
15 years ago, every manager was taught about how
objectives should be S.M.A.R.T: Specific; Measurable;
Achievable; Realistic; Time limited. This particular
management acronym remains with us, and
you will still hear it today.
What has really changed since then is how the
power of the computer has altered every aspect of
our lives, including the way we work. In marketing
services (advertising, PR, and direct marketing) it
has powered the fragmentation of media, the rise
of navigation tools such as Google, insight and targeting
through data, real interaction with audiences
and consumers including direct or one-to-one
promotion.
Direct marketing, a relatively new discipline, started
to erode budgets traditionally used for advertising
because it was measurable - you could directly
see the return on investment. Big international advertising
groups were surprisingly slow to embrace
direct marketing and then digital or web marketing,
but made up for a late start with a frenzy of
acquisition.
Advertising itself has seen media planners go from
being the poor relation within agencies to the new
glamour discipline with stand-alone media buying
shops becoming the norm. On the research side there
is much greater use of tracking, with research
panels looking to identify the smallest of shifts in
brand perceptions after advertising activity.
Implications for PR
So what about PR? Have its special qualities made
it immune from this focus of measurement and
tracking return on investment? The traditional way
PR professionals have demonstrated their worth to
their clients and paymasters has traditionally fo-
Why return on investment
in PR is so important
How a measurement culture has transformed the
marketing landscape
The management guru Alfred McKinsey’s mantra “you can only manage
what you can measure” has been strongly embraced by business culture and
governments.
llowed a format - firstly, PR professionals provide
photo copies of the articles published or audio or video
tapes of broadcast coverage. These are provided
to the clients and managers, usually monthly, the
thought being that they should be impressed by the
weight of the coverage that has been achieved through
good contacts and hard work! If the PR professional
is particularly diligent they may supply a few
Excel charts to show simple volumetric measures
such as number of items, and name checks by broad
media category. They might add some commentary
along the lines “we didn’t get much coverage in paper
X because the journalist wasn’t very receptive”,
or “thanks to my hard work with journalist X we’ve
got some very good coverage in magazine Y”.
However PR clients and paymasters within the context
of the business culture outlined are increasingly
demanding to know what return they are really
getting on their expenditure or investment.
A long established response to this question is the
production of advertising value equivalents (AVEs).
These are arrived at by adding up the column centimetres
of the editorial coverage and then using the
advertising rate card to work out what this coverage
would cost if it was paid for as advertising. Sometimes
a slightly spurious formula is used where the figure
you get is then doubled or even trebled on the
basis that editorial has a value of two or three times
advertising. The result is that - for your modest fee
or salary - you can show that you achieved coverage
which would have cost a huge amount of money
to buy as advertising. This has the virtue of talking a
language (money) that even financial directors understand.
On the downside, these figures are increasingly
being greeted with disbelief.
There are a number of problems with the AVE
approach. Firstly, advertising hardly ever sells for
rate card - that is just the starting point for negotiation.
Secondly, how do you value coverage on public
service broadcasting that does not carry advertising?
Thirdly, what do you do about unfavourable
1 PROPR winter 2007.