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October 29, 2002 The Paine of Measurement
Agents
of Change When I first started out measuring PR results, Bob Strayton, who at the time was running H&K’s high tech practice, responded to my analysis by stating, “Anyone who isn’t using this by the year 2000 doesn’t deserve to be in business.” Those words inspired me to launch a company, and I envisioned PR and marketing agencies as my distribution channel. I figured that they had the client contacts, they would need the data most since they were the people giving the advice, and they wouldn’t have the research capabilities in house. And indeed, some of my earliest clients were agencies, including Barbara Marx at Hill & Knowlton, Paul Franson and Susan Thomas at Franson, Cunningham. But even though clients were telling me, “Measurement is something my agency should be doing,” by the year 2000 there were a heck of a lot of agencies who must not have deserved to be in business. Because they certainly weren’t using mine or anyone else’s measurement program. They would pay lip service to the concept and then explain that, “We really don’t have the budget to measure anything, because we need to spend it all on the execution.” I’ve always marveled at the thought process behind that rationale: Isn’t it just common sense to spend a few thousand dollars to find out if the hundreds of thousands you’re spending executing your plan are actually having some effect? But of course back then it was still the go-go times—and who needed to worry about whether anything was working, the point was to just do it. Those days are now long gone, and not measuring is no longer an option. To say that you don’t need measurement is the equivalent of your accounting team saying, “I know we’re making money because I see checks coming in.” Arthur Andersen might have let you get away with that three years ago, but no one is going to fall for it today. So now every agency wants its own measurement system and everyone in the agency from the interns on up is talking about column inches, OTS and AVEs. The problem is:
This leads to some pretty shady practices:
Whatever the ethical violations of actually fudging results, (see this month’s Measurement Menace) the biggest problem with such practices is that they hurt credibility—of the individual, the agency and of the profession itself. What I’ve learned is that management can be pretty skeptical; a constant parade of great news may be interesting for awhile, but sooner or later someone is going to question the validity of the data. Worse still, you aren’t doing the client any favors. The only way to improve is to identify the failures and repair the weaknesses in a program. (See “Ask Dr.Paine,” elsewhere in this issue.) Far too often, AVE and OTS reports aren’t even measuring what matters to a company. They are a cheap and easy solution that someone has glommed on to, without actually making the effort to get buy-in from top management on some more valid criteria that would really measure the organization’s success. Take the case of a police public affairs officer in Nova Scotia who was charged with building her department’s trust and credibility in the community. Turns out she was using AVEs to measure her success, which, of course, could never actually demonstrate increased trust or credibility. That woman can measure all she wants to, but if she doesn’t measure against the objectives and goals that she was hired to achieve, it won’t help her do her job, or prove she is doing it. For the sake of her department—and her job—I hope she develops more applicable measures of success. The big point in today’s diatribe is that I still strongly believe that agencies should be playing a major role in the measurement process (see “Should You Trust your Agency with Measurement” also in this issue) but most agencies need to rethink their definitions of measurement and retool their measurement programs to reflect those things that matter the most. They need to see measurement as a way to make their programs work harder for the client, and as a means for continuous improvement, not justification for the status quo. Measure on...
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