The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

Since Color Affects Human Judgement and Perception, Shouldn't We Control for it in Public Relations Measurement?

I've been saying for a long time now that public relations measurement has to somehow begin to account for what goes on inside the heads of its audience. It can't just assume that human readers are passive recipients of impressions. On the contrary, they think and feel and consider what they are reading or hearing.

Well, if you still doubt that the reader brings significant baggage to your message, read the article in today's NYTimes entitled "Reinvent Wheel? Blue Room. Defusing a Bomb? Red Room." Among other interesting results:

"The study also tested responses to advertising, finding that advertisements listing product details or emphasizing “avoidance” actions like cavity prevention held greater appeal on red backgrounds, while ones using creative designs or emphasizing positive actions like “tooth whitening” held more appeal on blue."

Think about that next time you do some media analysis. --WTP

If Liberal and Conservative Brains Work Differently, What Does That Mean for PR Measurement?

 

It has always amazed me that there are two large groups of US voters, who, after reading more or less the same information about candidates or issues, can come away with two quite different interpretations and opinions. Recent research has shed some light on this Liberal/Conservative split: it is starting to become clear that this division is not just a matter of background or upbringing, it is, at least in part, a result of fundamental differences between how people understand the world, and how their brains work.

For example, in today's NYTimes, the article "Basics | Obama and McCain Walk Into a Bar ..." relates the results of research that implies that Conservatives have more of a sense of humor than Liberals, and that they tend to be happier. 

There is much more work to be done on this topic, of course, but it is not too early to speculate that Conservatives and Liberals have brains that function differently at some basic level, a level that affects their understand of all sorts of information and media. 

What might this mean for public relations measurement? Well, consider the possibility that Liberals and Conservatives might understand a press release, or a news article, or a blog post, in two very different ways. If their response to corporate news is as varied as their response to political news, then measurement will have to allow for this, or be very inaccurate. As I have said before, measurement needs to take into account what goes on inside people's heads, not just the messages they are presented with. --Bill Paarlberg, TMS Editor

Why Public Relations Measurement Is Like Phrenology, or... Just because it is easy to measure, doesn't mean it's the best thing to measure.

PR measurement and marketing measurement often find themselves in a situation analogous to the 19th-century practice of phrenology. Way back then, some people used to think that the shape of your skull indicated your personality or intelligence. It was a very easy thing to measure, so they did. And they hung on to it as a serious area of study for much longer than they should have, because it was far more difficult to measure personality or intelligence by other, more effective, means.

Click-throughs aren't quite as useless as bumps on the head, but still... In the news today is a study by Starcom USA, behavioral targeting firm Tacoda, and comScore that suggests that clickthroughs might not be a very effective measure of the usefulness of online ads. See here for the news and here for Sam Harrelson's ReveNews discussion.

The obvious point here is that clickthroughs, while easy to measure, probably are not very effective at measuring what we would like to measure. The more interesting point is: What aren't we measuring what we really want to know?

I have noticed that PR and marketing metrics are often determined by what technology makes easily possible, rather than by what we would really like to know. Thus people tend to measure what technology drops in their laps (the easy things like click-throughs or AVEs) rather than something more relevant but difficult to measure (like, "Did the ad with the red type result in more sales among wealthy women?"). Then at some point they realize that their easy-but-less-relevant metric is not very effective, and then they spend a lot of time asking why the metric doesn't work.

What they should be asking themselves is: "What made us think that that metric would work in the first place?"

Instead of focussing on what technology is available (in this case click-throughs), wouldn't it be more productive to think about human thought and behavior first? (I've written about this before: "Measurement's Empty Head: Measurement ignores the most complex part of PR.") First think about what it is that might make PR work -- why it affects people's thoughts and behaviors -- and then decide what might make a good metric. First determine what we really want to measure (regardless of the technology or data available), then figure out a way to measure it. -- Bill Paarlberg, editor, The Measurement Standard

When Is An Impression Not An Impression: How Does Public Relations Measurement Take News Timing Into Account?

The other day I was re-reading Ed Moed's blog post about how much media coverage depends on what other events happen to be happening at the same time. His point, in part, was that events get pushed out of the media by other events, and what we think of as news actually depends greatly on what other news is also being covered.

And this got me to thinking about how public relations measurement typically measures media outputs with media content analysis, but -- to my knowledge -- does not typically take the news environment into account.

My point is that Article X might result in ten zillion impressions, but if it was published on a day with really big other news (an extreme example would be 9/11/01) then those impressions just aren't the same as they'd be on a slow news day.

We all recognize that the news hole shrinks when something else big is hogging all the coverage. But what we're talking about here is not whether or not there's room for an article to get published, but whether or not there is room in the reader's head for another article. Or conversely, if there is no other news in a reader's head, does an article somehow gain extra importance?

I asked Katie Paine about this and she said she recognized the phenomenon from experience. As to how to deal with it, measurement-wise, she emphasized the importance of human experience behind data analysis: "That's actually why [KDPaine & Partners'] human intervention and hybrid approach is so important. The automated systems just give you numbers, we give you an explanation."

Does anyone out there adjust or modify their media analysis results to take into account the news environment? (I mean formally, with some kind of multiplier or variable that corrects raw impressions data for the impact of other news activity on the reader.)

Some might argue that correcting for the news environment doesn't really belong in media analysis, that it is part of some later stage of public relations' impact on the public's mind. If we put that in terms of outputs, outtakes, and outcomes, then what we are talking about here happens somewhere between outputs and outtakes: Between the outputs and outtakes lies the news environment, which may enhance or inhibit the results of impressions.

To my knowledge, measurement does not formally take this "news environment" phenomenon into account. How does the news environment affect PR's effectiveness? How does PR affect a person differently according to what other news they are experiencing?

In "Measurement's Empty Head: Measurement ignores the most complex part of PR" I wrote something that's pertinent here:

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... Measuring impressions is a whole lot easier than measuring what happens to those impressions once they're inside a person's head... 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.

--Bill Paarlberg