One more time, there is no "standard" for public relations

There's good news and bad news in yesterday's announcement of the Canadians new standard for PR Measurement.
The good news is that it shines the publicity light on measurement once again. And, I suppose its good news that all those people came together and agreed upon something.  And they do a very good job of explaining the various criteria used in media analysis.  And to their credit, they don't mention Ad Value Equivalencies anywhere. And, they do take the industry beyond the concept of just counting clips and column inches. And, if I take off my industry hat and put on my CEO of a measurement company hat, it's a great standard because most of the metrics are ones that we already incorporate and our software.  Okay in the interest of full disclosure, their template costs about half as much ($725 per year) as ours but ours is customized and much more intuitive than the template they offer.)
So what's not to like?
First of all, it leaves most people with the impression that PR measurement is the same as media measurement and its NOT. The goal of public relations is to nurture, develop and build relationships. And you can't measure that with impression figures and clips.
It assumes that PR programs have similar goals and objectives and can be measured by any one standard. I defy them to compare results between Walmart's PR and the PR for the Susan B. Komen Foundation. All programs have different audiences, goals and objectives so any program purported to be "standard" is bogus to begin with. Another problem is that when you start adding multipliers chosen by the organization being evaluated, you run into issues of bias and bad data. Finally this new "Standard" requires you to subscribe to News Canada's services for $725 a year.. I've got nothing against News Canada, but essentially this body has gotten together to endorse a particular vendor of data. Is that right? Would love to hear opinions.

Comments

[David Jones]

Hi Katie. Thanks for posting about the MRP system. As a CPRS measurement committee member, I'd love to clarify a few points that maybe were not so clear on our site or in our news release:

- the system is free, the data feed costs money to access. Practitioners will be able to access the excel template, the user guide, etc. if they want to use the system offline. If they want up-to-date readership/viewership data, there is a cost for that as it doesn't come to us for free.

- News Canada was chosen through an RFP process. We went out to the industry to find a data vendor who could supply audited, verifiable data to the PR industry. News Canada came back with the data and the nifty online tool that can be used to create reports. However, it was all designed to our specs. They have put deals in place with multiple data vendors to access and resell the raw data to users of the MRP system. There is no multiplier involved. The data is viewership, listenership and readership as supplied by PMB, NADbank, Combase, etc.

- The word "standard" is not the best one to use as you correctly point out. What we've tried to create is a system that we can all agree measures media coverage in the same way across the industry. No more "we multiply the circulation by 7 for magazines and 3 for newspapers to get some sort of PR value." The other "standard" we had in mind was standardizing the data we use. Our industry is notorious for getting supplied with and/or using out-of-date circulation, viewership, listenership numbers As we discussed at our launch event, this system does not measure outcome, it measures output. This system is the first step in getting our industry in Canada using some sort of agreed-to metrics for evaluating what our media coverage is worth. Determining the impact and business outcomes of that media coverage is something else entirely....hopefully we can figure that out as well.

I'd love for you to get into the site and have a look around and see what you think. I'd be happy to share a user ID with you so you could take it for a spin. I'll send you an e-mail.

Our blog is about sharing and discussing ideas on measurement and I'm glad you've already contributed. We want this to be a starting point and give the Canadian industry access to other blogs, papers, resources on measurement so we can keep advancing. I hope you'll be a part of that.