Breaking News! PR is not three times more effective than advertising, at best it's one to one.

For years, there’s been a myth out there that there is some sort of multiplier for PR that assumes that PR is x times more effective than advertising. The most frequent number used was three, but for years organizations and their agencies have been multiplying their PR “impressions”  by  whatever number they chose to indicate how much more effective PR is than Advertising. The only problem is that there has never been or will never be any statistical evidence to support this assumption.

Dr. Don Stacks of the University of Miami and David Michaelson proved this initially in 2004 and this morning presented the results of phase 2 of their study at the 4th Annual Summit on Measurement.

So just to set the record straight: THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN IMPACT BETWEEN PR AND ADVERTIISNG.  But this is not necessarily bad news.

The study was conducted in shopping malls in five suburban locations around the US. A total of 351 people participated.  I won't go into the research methodology but it was unbelievabley rigorous, and the confidence level is 95%.  To eliminate existing bias, participants were presented information about a totally fictious new product – ZipChips.  – a new potato chip that contains no fat, no salt and no calories.

 One group was exposed to messages exclusively thru an ad, another group saw only editorial and the control group saw no messages at all. Interestingly the "editorial"  was from the New York Times, included an endorsement from the head of the FDA and was in essence a best-case scenario of a story that exceeded all our wildest hopes and dreams. 

For those of us who have been dissing the multiplier factor for decades, the results were hardly surprising, but for a ton of PR practitioners who have been foisting this myth on their clients for years, this is the PR equivalent of Hurricane Katrina. The landscape will never be the same.

 In reality, the implications are actually quite fun. First of all, we can now say with out any doubt that PR is just as effective as Advertising at least for product launches. And given the fact that PR is generally cheaper, if I were an accountable communicator, I’d pay a lot of attention to this data the next time I was developing an integrated communications plan.

 Interestingly enough, the only differences were in the “don’t know” category. There were fewer “don’t knows” among those exposed editorial, leading to the obvious conclusion that if you are trying to explain something to someone, PR is more effective.

 The bigger question is how does PR fit within the broader context of marketing communications? Clearly this shows that when there’s news, PR is a more cost effective way to get the message out. But if you don’t have nothing to say that is newsworthy, and/or you have a product that is potentially controversial, advertising may be the way to go.

  Needless to say, the presentation sparked a lively debate among attendees at the Summit, one that will presumably continue long into the lobster bake and I hope, into the blogosphere, your thoughts???

 

 

Comments

[Nicolas Boillot]

This is a really interesting topic, and great research. However, I would urge people to base conclusions with a strong understanding of the market the study reached -- 351 people in malls who read newspapers at least once a week. Given the malls chosen, there's a great potential that The New York Times may not have been a credible source for them. Would the same thing be true in B2B technology markets -- for instance, the biomedical market -- weighing editorial in Journal of the American Medical Association against advertising in that same publication?

I think it's critical to add this research to the body of evidence on the PR/Advertising dilemma. However, the discussion cannot take place without a parallel discussion about specific target audiences and markets -- some of which will clearly respond to advertising in the same manner as they do to PR, and others who won't. I firmly believe that some audiences will actually respond better to advertising than PR, particularly as mistrust of news organizations continues to grow in certain markets and demographics.

Thank you for furthering this critical discussion.

[Robert J Holland, ABC]

Thank you for clearing up the issue. I believe in this day and age, when people are so skeptical of "research," especially as it relates to PR, we owe more of an explanation of methodology than "the study was conducted in shopping malls..."

[Katie Paine]

Here's the response to Mr. Hollands comments from the authors of this study:The research method for this project interviewed 351 respondents in five shopping malls that were geographically dispersed throughout the U.S. Malls were used for this method because it was necessary to show respondents test materials in a printed format.

Respondents were recruited for participation based on several criteria. These criteria included getting a mix of both genders, different ages and different ethnicities as well has being a regular reader of newspapers. In this instance, regular reader was defined as weekly or more often. Qualified respondents were, in turn, randomly assigned to one of three cells -- advertising exposure, editorial exposure or control group. Each respondent (except for the control group) were monadically exposed to the appropriate test materials and then completed a self-administered questionnaire.

A "random sample," given today's problems with contacting respondents is almost impossible and that we very carefully qualified our responses to this sample, which is by design as close to the national average as possible. In order assure that the data was as accurate as possible each test and control cell in each market was statistically weighted into correct proportions that reflected the actually demographic profile of weekly newspaper readers. These weights were based on a national survey of newspaper readers conducted in 2005.

David Michaelson & Don Stacks

[Katie Paine]

Robert, I'm not sure where you got the notion that this was a mall intercept study, but it was in fact designed by Don Stacks, author of The Primer of PR Research, and David Michaelson,another highly respected PR researcher. They sampled 351 individuals. The complete methodology can be seen here: http://www.instituteforpr.org/research_single/exploring_the_comparative_communications/

[Robert J Holland, ABC]

I can't believe that, so far, no one has questioned the methodology in this "research." Asking shoppers at five malls? You can't get much more of a self-selected sample than that.

Without having more details on the methodology, I would seriously question the validity of this research -- and certainly wouldn't tout it as "rigorous."

Of course, I can be convinced otherwise...

[Ken Kerrigan]

While the notion of there being no "multiplier" in the value of PR vs advertising may be of interest in a controlled academic setting it is so far from the real world that it makes one wonder how many thought leaders in our profession actually live in it! Trust me if the NY Times said Zip Chips was among the worst chips they ever tasted sales would plummet - and you can measure that force multiplier like a tropical storm. Conversely if a product really is that good and the media and the advertising are in agreement the multiplier logically would be equal - of course that doesn't take into account the power of word of mouth marketing in today's "brand" new world, which would likely have consumers already buzzing about the chips BEFORE the media or the ads ran. I'd give the study an A for effort but a C+ for reliable findings.

[Angie Jeffrey]

By way of correction, this study was originally conceptualized and funded by PRtrak/SDI, by Gary Getto and myself. We went to David Michaelson for study design and execution, and he brought in Don Stacks -- which was a great honor and boon to the work.

The initial 'Test' study used a 'new' water product (Ponsef) and was tested on college students at the University of Miami. Initial results did not show much difference between the control cells and others, so we chose not to publicize the initial work very far until more was done. We do congratulate Don and David for taking this the next step, with additional funding from another supplier, and seeing much more concrete results. I tend to agree with David Michaelson's conclusions that proving that editorial is AT LEAST as credible as advertising is not all bad. Since companies are spending enormous budgets on advertising, perhaps more will come our way now that marketing won't be as suspect of our multiplier claims.

[Glenn Fannick]

Good point. Though I suspect if a company's advertising department saw this they'd be more like to say "ah-ha! there is no 3x multiplier." But the biggest problem here is that this study used an unrealistic best-case and *only* got 1-to-1

[Katie Paine]

because if we can say definitively that PR is equally effective as Advertising AND PROVE IT, (CW can say anything they want but they can't prove it) and if PR is significantly less costly, shouldn't every good steward of corporate resources shift resources from Advertising to PR?

[Glenn Fannick]

KD
What I don't get is why this is seen as good news. If CW said that Editorial (sourced by PR) was 3x better than advertising and this study says its 1x. That seems, well, less good. This study also used the best-case scenario of a perfect placement. With the reality of the PR world being far from that.
(BTW, I'm sitting on the other side of the room.)