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The Measurement Maven and Menace
of the Month Awards

The Measurement Maven:

William Ryerson
Founder, Population Media Center

The Population Media Center uses media, specifically radio and television dramas, to change attitudes around the world regarding HIV/Aids, birth control and family health. These "entertainment-education" melodramas teach viewers new attitudes and behaviors by including characters that evolve into role models in the areas of HIV/AIDS prevention and other health or social issues. What makes PMC unique from most other nonprofits is their emphasis on measurement. And they're not just measuring attitudes, they're measuring changes in behaviors.

Here's just one example of a PMC program and its measurement. In Tanzania between 1993 and 1997, Radio Tanzania broadcast a serial melodrama that attracted 58 percent of the population (age 15 to 45) in areas of the broadcast. By design, in the region surrounding the city of Dodoma, a music program was heard instead of the soap opera during the first two years of the project (1993-95). Then, from 1995-97, the soap opera was broadcast in the Dodoma comparison area.

Nationwide random sample surveys of 2750 people were conducted before, during and after the broadcast of the program. Data was also collected from the AIDS Control Programme of the government, the Ministry of Health, and the Demographic and Health Survey.

Of listeners surveyed, 82 percent said the program had caused them to change their own behavior to avoid HIV infection, through limiting the number of sexual partners and through condom use. Independent data from the AIDS Control Programme of the government of Tanzania showed a 153 percent increase in condom distribution in the broadcast areas during the first year of the soap opera, while condom distribution in the Dodoma non-broadcast area increased only 16 percent in the same time period.

The program was also shown effective in promoting family planning, as measured by:

• percentage of men and women who were currently using any family planning method;
• percentage of men and women who discussed family planning with their spouses;
• an increase in the ideal age of marriage for women and the ideal age of first birth for women; and,
• average number of new family planning adopters per clinic.

Counting all of the costs of the radio serial, the cost per new adopter of family planning was under 80 cents (US). The cost per person who changed behavior to avoid HIV/AIDS was 8 cents.

After a similar program ran in Kenya, contraceptive sales increased 23 percent in one year. By the time that particular series had ended, contraceptive use in Kenya had increased 58 percent and desired family size had fallen from 6.3 to 4.4 children per woman. 

So for all of you out there still measuring column inches and AVEs, imagine how much more credible you'd be if you could calculate the cost per changed behavior. -KDP

The Measurement Menace of the Month

Burrelle'sLuce

Burrelle'sLuce wins the prize for either sheer stupidity or sheer chutzpah or possibly both. Their recent marketing newsletter offered the "7 'Must Have' Metrics for Media Measurement," and topping the list was advertising value equivalency. Now given the fact that the entire country of Canada, the Institute for Public Relations, this newsletter and most respectable PR practitioners have rejected this metric as entirely bogus, you have to wonder what they were thinking? Such advocacy for bad research, in my mind, calls into question the validity of all of their work.

To make matters worse, the other six "'Must Have' Metrics" have nothing to do with proper research but rather are simply those elements that are offered as part of Burrelle's standard service. They are: Tone, Spokesperson, "Marketing Power" (another made-up number without research behind it); Story Type; Messaging, and finally "Quality Rating and ROI" – two more multipliers based on bad science. -KDP

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