The Paine of Measurement
by Katharine Delahaye Paine

Who Needs a
Measurement Standard, Anyway?

The name of this publication not withstanding, there’s an awful lot of folderol going about on the subject of standards these days. Standards for Internet measurement (see “A Standard for Internet Measurement at Last?” in this issue) standards for media analysis, standards for reputation measurement. Here’s a revolutionary thought: Maybe we as an industry need to spend a lot more time doing and promoting measurement and less time talking about setting standards. The reality is, just as with print and television advertising, if the need arises, a standard will be chosen.

In the 1940s when “the value of television advertising” was the talk of the day, the editors at Fortune magazine (who arguably had the most to lose from the success of TV) began a campaign to question the value of TV advertising, claiming that it was unmeasurable. The National Association of Manufacturers representing the advertisers got together and said, “We need a standard way to measure this stuff… That guy Artie Nielsen had something going, let’s use his method.” And thus, the Nielsen ratings were born.

In the case of PR measurement, I would argue that the need has not yet arisen.

While we definitely need to agree on some definitions and guidelines, we already have those in place. Five years ago the Institute for PR’s Commission on Research and Evaluation wrote the Guidelines. Similar efforts were undertaken at the time in Europe, and AMEC and the UK’s IPR have also published similar guidelines that say essentially the same thing. PRWeek has had its PROOF campaign, and the U.K. has it‘s PRE-FIX campaign. (PRE-fix is an industry wide intitiative in the UK backed by the Institute of Public Relations (UK) PRCA (Public Relations Consultants Association) to encourage and support the use of PR research and evaluation for planning.)

The good news is that in all this time, the percentage of budget devoted to measurement has been steadily on the rise, and arguably (given the continued growth of the PR research industry with the addition of newcomers like Biz360 and Competitive Insights, as well as the entrance of heavyweights like Observer Group), there must be a growing demand for measurement somewhere out there.

My point is that although there is definitely interest in—and a market for—measurement (I wouldn’t have started this publication if there wasn’t), I have yet to see a great deal of interest in or demand from PR practitioners for any single standard of measurement. As much as I may suggest certain standard criteria by which organizations can measure their success, or a specific methodology, most practitioners’ response is to describe in great detail why that particular “standard” methodology won’t work for them. And the truth is that most of the “standard” methodologies don’t work across the board.

Try talking “competitive share of recommendations” to a non-profit, or a “PR GRP” to a state or local public affairs officer. And how relevant is share of ink to someone who works for an organization that sells industrial equipment and can realistically expect to get covered once a year in a handful of publications? The reality is that measuring public relations is about measuring the strength and success of your relationships with your various publics. And publics are made up of human beings, and as a former editor of Fortune (Ralph Delahaye Paine Jr.) once commented:

I am not against research, or anything else which contributes to a better understanding of a market, a media or to the improvement of the [communications] but I think we do a lot of research which doesn’t prove very much of anything, or which proves something which any experienced person already knows.

Perhaps the key word is prove. We all crave certainty. If we can put a man into orbit, why can’t we demonstrate at least to a client’s satisfaction precisely what his advertising budget is going to buy? No computer can do it and I doubt very much than any ever will. The reason is simple and perhaps, therefore, a little old-fashioned: people, human beings with a wide range of choice. Unpredictable, cantankerous, capricious, motivated by innumerable conflicting interests, and conflicting desires. No machine is a match for man. Only man is a match for man.

All of which means that human beings tend not to be happy when put into neat little boxes and tend to believe that their needs are unique.

So let’s put our efforts into promoting the tools and standards that are available, spreading the word about what has already been done, and...

Measure on…

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