November is AMEC Measurement Month, and the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications, the communication measurement industry’s peak body, has a range of webinars and events happening across the globe, including several in the Asia Pacific region. Once such event was a free webinar produced by PRIA and The Communication Dividend, looking at how to build a measurement culture in an organisation. We caught up with the webinar’s moderator, Paul Cheal (pictured, left), Managing Partner of The Communication Dividend, and one of the panellists, Craig Badings (pictured, right), a Partner at SenateSHJ.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in big numbers when reporting on communications activity, but when presented to management or the C-Suite, the response can sometimes be “So what? What does that mean?” What is the key to getting buy-in from senior management?

Paul Cheal, Managing Partner, The Communication Dividend: For the comms and PR function to get buy-in from the C-suite, we have to speak the language of the C-suite - strategy, data and insights - not simply activities.

Many senior executives are not well-informed about the communication metrics that matter. They’re impressed by big numbers like millions of impressions, or go searching for a silver bullet single number, like Return on Investment or AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent).

Buy-in is a two-way street and senior practitioners need to be bold and equipped to educate up, down and across the management hierarchy when knowledge of effective PR measurement is limited or non-existent.

Craig Badings, Partner, SenateSHJ: It happens well before you present any measurement, and it goes to the why. Why are we doing this? Who are we trying to reach? What are we trying to get them to think, feel or do? And how will we measure this? If you agree all of this up front it negates the “So what…” from senior management at the end. I have also witnessed a huge shift in executive awareness about the importance this all plays in their reputation management which means they are much more aligned now strategically to what we do.  

PR has always been the poor cousin to marketing and advertising in terms of measurement. With digital channels and platforms driving a lot of activity, and the increasing level of integrated communications, how has this changed?

Craig: I think it’s only been the poor cousin because of a lack of understanding or desire to understand how you can measure the impact of PR, and of course, availability of budget. In some instances the wrong things are measured, i.e. inputs and activities vs outputs and results.

Marketing measurement is often used to support or validate through the line advertising, and the big budgets in this area drive a need to prove the spend, hence more effort is given to measurement.

But this has changed; a shift from shareholder to stakeholder primacy in the PR sphere dictates a need to understand and better measure behavioural change and, critically, reputation impacts. Add to this the ability of tools like The Communication Dividend, where in one dashboard you can gain a strategic view of all campaigns - digital, marketing, advertising and PR - and you now have the ability to start using data to show linkages and impacts like never before.

What are the particular challenges that PR agencies face in measuring their work for clients, and has measurement evolved to effectively support agencies?

Paul: Clients are looking for quick returns and visibility of effort and that focus has kept the conversations at a transactional level - x media releases, y posts and z comms plans.

The far greater value in the agency-client relationship comes from fully understanding or being the architect of the communication strategy and being able to devise a measurement and evaluation framework at the strategy planning stage.

Measurement in agencies has long been manual, labour-intensive and backward-looking and that’s something The Communication Dividend is working to change.

Our analytics solution gives PR agencies access to, and the ability to interpret, the right data to deliver real-time reporting. They can quickly review results to identify gaps in strategy that may need tweaking, using real-time data to measure and drive quick decisions for better results.

We are seeing an increase in purpose-led offerings at agencies, and in corporate activity, often associated with a desire to effect behavioural change. What sort of challenges - and opportunities - does this present in terms of measurement?

Craig: I don’t think it changes anything. Instead, it comes back to understanding the why of your campaign, the who, the what, and then the how of measuring it. All that changes is the hypothesis for the measurement and the measurement tools you decide to use to best test that hypothesis.

Paul: Purpose-led communication is an opportunity for the PR profession - communication is at its best when it’s driving behavioural change.

In terms of measurement, AI and predictive modelling are adding a whole new dimension to insights made possible in terms of people‘s behaviours. There are great opportunities and the landscape is evolving rapidly, which can also be challenging.