INDUSTRY GUIDE
From Measurement to Management
PART 1: EXPOSURE
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From Measurement to Management Part1: Exposure
EDITOR’S NOTE Exposure is the first of a five-part PR measurement series based on the five key dimensions adopted in the LEWIS measurement framework. Additional guides include: Engagement Preference Impact Advocacy
CONTENTS Overview 4 Abandoning AVE and multipliers 5 More audience or better audience?
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Setting exposure goals 8 Key KPIs 9
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From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure
OVERVIEW At first glance, exposure seems the simplest public relations deliverable. Everyone knows PR folks get companies media coverage – placements, hits, cuttings, ink – however you want to call it. It’s a PR mission that’s easy to convey, which is perhaps why “getting exposure” so often forms the totality of the layman’s understanding of the PR role. When it comes to truly defining and measuring exposure, though, it gets a bit trickier. Piles of physical clippings long dominated as the bottom line number in PR – sheer coverage counts. If we improved on the total cuttings from the previous year, then the PR program was working. This measure went reasonably well, until contraction in the media industry meant fewer titles each year to pitch. And certainly, volume remains the first key performance indicator around exposure. But as this paper will detail, no one KPI tells the full story. Exposure also calls for measures of the importance of each cutting. After all, not all cuttings are equal – some are in big publications, some are placed in media properties few or even an unknown number of people read.
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From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure
ABANDONING AVE AND MULTIPLIERS So how many total people actually see each clip each day? Two AMEC-suggested metrics for exposure include Opportunities to See (OTS) and Impressions. There was once a slippery slope around these measures, but in the last ten years, research professionals have smoothed the pathway with better thinking. As late as the early 2000s, many organizations evaluated public relations based on its “advertising value equivalency,” or AVEs, which has since been discredited throughout the industry. Back in the AVE days, firms also employed “PR multipliers” as a means to capture the true value of public relations activity. These were largely arbitrary equations espousing higher value for third-party credibility and “pass-through” circulation guesses, and have also been dispelled as PR myth. Now, best practice dictates the abandonment of multipliers for measurement exposure, in favor of use of audited circulation figures and audience numbers, such as those produced by Nielsen (broadcast), Comscore (online), Audit Bureau of Circulation and BPA Worldwide (print).
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From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure
MORE AUDIENCE OR BETTER AUDIENCE? That said, however calculated, raw circulation numbers still don’t provide a measure of whether the people comprising the audience are those who represent message targets or customer prospects. And there are many publications with smaller circulations that represent important targets not because of the raw number of readers they gather, but because they serve up content to a smaller segment that represents a concentrated group of targets. A publication focusing on a segment around a particular industry, a specific role, political leaning or even hobby may represent a more important media target for a company than a widely circulated daily newspaper with a low audience proportion of the intended target. For this reason, many organizations look at exposure by media segment or by tier. Some do still tier their media mostly by raw circulation, but increasingly, others are taking a more granular approach to creating tiers. Brands are increasingly focusing on the demographics of readerships, the publications’ own methods for syndication and audience engagement, and even the perceived influence of media sources among sales targets or internal executive audiences.
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From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure
While there is no single prescriptive method for choosing how to create a tiered view of an organization’s key media, a rule of thumb is to do so on the basis of communications goal. Tier 1 is rarely the same across organizations. For organizations for whom boosting sales is the top driver, those publications that reach the most potential prospects might headline Tier 1. For those seeking to quickly disseminate information, mainstream dailies might very well represent the top tier. If attracting investment is a top goal, publications aimed at venture capitalists might dominate Tier 1. And as journalists increasingly work across publications, another trend among companies is to track coverage volume among a finite group of “Tier 1” influencers and the audiences they typically bring to each article, which may or may not fall within the typical core audience for a publication. In the end, Tier 1 should be defined by a finite list of publications or influencers, a list that does not change during the measurement cycle. Some organizations may lump all non-Tier 1 placements into a bucket they call Tier 2, but best practice also calls for elimination of the measurement of “junk media” first. This is a recognition that there are a number of media that reprint news without delivering the earnest audiences brands are seeking, and that these properties should be eliminated from measurement and not at all counted toward exposure totals. Tier 2 should represent viable media targets that still gather important targets – they simply might gather fewer of them, or represent the targets for secondary communications priorities.
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From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure
SETTING EXPOSURE GOALS Setting coverage goals within each tier should be based on an analysis of past campaign performance whenever possible. While often time consuming, a requisite kickoff activity for nearly any campaign is to gather up previous coverage numbers, and manually tier each piece of past coverage, in order to both inform reasonable goal-setting as well as to provide the basis for year-over-year comparisons. In the absence of historical data, such as instances when an organization is entering a new market or intersecting with a new audience segment, assess the performance around exposure of a likely message competitor working with similar resource levels. Exposure goals should also be correlated to the relative amount of resource being invested toward each tier, whether guided by a quantified communications budget or by the relative volume of news and content being generated with specific segments in mind. Once segmentation and goals are determined, teams tally placements by tier, and the resultant data provides a deeper view into exposure than the sheer number of clips. Some organizations also pair tiered and segmented media coverage goals with total impressions or OTS. This necessitates research into audited audience numbers for each media property identified in Tier 1 and Tier 2. These numbers are then totaled across the Tier to provide a raw measure of exposure. However, because circulation numbers are top-down estimates, and not at the per-article level of granularity, a front page article counts as much in an impressions-only measurement scheme as small blurb buried deep inside a publication. The combination of the time-intensive nature of impressions tracking and its lack of precision suggests other methods for evaluating exposure are a better choice for most PR campaigns.
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From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure
KEY KPIs LEWIS recommends the following KPIs as the easiest to implement yet fully valid for exposure measurement: Total number of media placements Total number of Tier 1 media % of placements in Tier 1 media % of placements in media category (i.e. industry) A, B, C, D, E‌ But measurement certainly doesn’t stop at exposure. There are many more questions to answer to determine whether communication is effective, starting with whether people are engaging with the messages these placements carry. This will be explored in the next chapter in the series: ENGAGEMENT.
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White Paper Exposure
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