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The Editorial Imperative

Measurement's Empty Head
Measurement ignores the most complex part of PR.

by William T. Paarlberg,
Editor, The Measurement Standard

A recent topic in measurement news has been The Multiplier, that conveniently unconstant constant in the PR value equation. Until now it's been the all-purpose PR value inflator: "PR is worth X times more than an equivalent amount of advertising because of Y." Just fill in the blanks with whatever suits you and your client for this month's project. The recent news is that The Multiplier doesn't exist. Or at least that it probably doesn't exist, and if we are smart we'll act like it doesn't exist (Stacks and Michaelson, 2006, Weiner and Bartholomew, 2006).

What is most interesting about the alleged death of the multiplier is what it tells us about what we don't know: We don't know much about how PR happens to people. About how all those things we measure--like impressions and key messages and tone--actually do something inside a person's head to affect their thinking.

Jim Macnamara makes a similar point when he claims that PR people don't do measurement because we have not developed a useful theory of how PR affects people. (See his "Fork In The Road" paper also in this issue.)

Contemporary PR measurement treats the mind of the media consumer like it's some sort of an empty box to be filled: The media dumps in impressions and we measure the outtakes and outcomes. But human beings aren't just empty heads, and they don't consume media in a simple and rational fashion. They purposefully ignore much of what the media throws at them. And much of what they do pay attention to, they don't believe anyway.

Measuring impressions is a whole lot easier than measuring what happens to those impressions once they're inside a person's head. But do we really think PR measurement is going to make progress if we just ignore whatever it is that goes on in the mind of the media consumer? What happens there is probably the most complex part of how PR happens, yet state-of-the-art PR measurement doesn't take it into account.

The researchers mentioned above get high marks for their work on The Multiplier. But what is The Multiplier really supposed to be, anyway? Where does it exist, what does it act on, and how does it do it? Where does it fit in the empty head of the media consumer?

Measurement needs something to fill that empty head; it needs a Theory of How PR Happens. Measurement knows what it can measure: outputs, outtakes and outcomes. Perhaps if we had more of a theory, we'd know a little more about what we ought to measure. Let's fill that empty head with something that will help us do better measurement.

William T. Paarlberg is the editor and art director of The Measurement Standard. He has been publishing a newsletter on measurement with Katie Delahaye Paine since 1991.

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