Monthly Mavens and Menaces
of Measurement

Jim MacNamara is not just the guest author of our Department of Controversy article this month, The Ethics of PR Evaluation, but also our Measurement Maven. Jim is the CARMA representative for Australia and the CEO of Mass Communications Group, which includes Macnamara & Associates Pty. Ltd., a communications research and consulting firm, CARMA International Asia Pacific, and a publishing business, Archipelago Press.

In 1999 Jim Macnamara developed CARMA COMaudit (see our review elsewhere in this issue), a suite of PR research tools and CARMA MEDIaudit, a PC-based media content analysis program. He was a contributing author to the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Gold Paper on Evaluation in 1994, and his views on evaluation research have been published in the IPRA Academic Review and the Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal. He is the author of nine books about communications and public relations. He is a fellow of the Public Relations Institute of Australia and was National President of that organization in 2000. —KDP

And the monthly Menace Award goes to Mark Scott, VP of Marketing for HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation, who says his most important metric is advertising equivalency. He claims he can justify his expenses by the “concrete value” of ad equivalency. Who's he justifying to? Arthur Andersen?

We’d love to examine his research—or any research—that demonstrates that a negative story in the Wall Street Journal brings in as many new customers as an ad in the same publication. Or even if he's relatively objective and doesn’t include the negative stories, we’d still like to know how many new customers walk through his doors as a result of that 10-column inch blurb about HomeBanc's new line of credit vs. an ad that communicates the benefits of doing business with HomeBanc.

We completely agree with Mark that of course PR needs numbers and ways to quantify its success. But Mark, ad equivalency is NOT the right number. How about share of recommendations? Or share of positive positioning? Or cost per message communicated? Or percent improvement in customer loyalty? Any of those numbers would at least be based in solid research. Mr Scott’s numbers belong in the same bucket as all the rest of those wacky accounting schemes we’ve seen coming out of corporate America in recent months. —KDP