Monthly Mavens and Menaces
of Measurement

This month’s award goes to Alice Brink, APR, ABC and Senior Vice President of Vollmer PR. This woman and her agency are complete Measurement Mavens. Alice has developed the “Vollmer Measurement Model” which is about as close to nirvana for measurement wonks as you can get. Imagine a process that makes clients articulate measurable objectives, prioritize their audiences and decide on measurement methods BEFORE they start talking about a PR program. (If every agency did this, The Measurement Standard and I could retire knowing that our mission was accomplished.) Even more astounding, her system doesn’t just look at media results. There’s a section on pre-post testing, another one on speaking engagements, plus a detailed section on measurement of spokespeople and positioning. For more information contact Alice Brink. —KDP

And the monthly Menace Award goes to The Texas Commission on the Arts, which advises visitors to their web site to “determine the advertising equivalency” of PR. Even worse, without any justification or substantiating research, they suggest using the following procedure:

“...mark up the advertising value by a factor of three for a general story and especially for print, add another multiple for any visuals like a photo, logo or other graphics that helps draw in the reader. For example, a 10-inch column story at $100 per column inch times an ad equivalency of three would equal $3,000.00.”

This is—purely and simply—bad advice, based on unfounded assumptions. The implication here is that an article in The Weekly World News or free weekly “Pennysaver” will have three times the credibility of an ad in the New York Times. Has anyone ever tested this by polling a representative sample of the US population? No. There is no evidence whatsoever to back up this premise, and anyone who claims so opens themselves up to hostile questioning by their Board or top management. I should know. I sit on half a dozen boards, and the moment anyone uses Advertising Value Equivalency as a measure of success, they’re dead meat.

The good news is that there are valid and effective alternatives for non-profit organizations like this one to measure their communications’ effectiveness. In fact, stay tuned for the next issue of The Measurement Standard, in which we’ll have have an article on just that topic. —KDP