5 ms·

The perils of PR

54 points by hhs 5y ago

throwaway_2047 5y ago
As an engineer, I have always wanted to quantify the effect of PR. The PR people I spoke to often says it is hard to measure, occupying mindshare, "upper" funnel, yada yada. Some may offer number of publicity as a measuring stick. Would love to learn what other "more useful" metrics are out there.
- ghaff 5y ago
  One of the challenges is that the most obvious numerical measures are mostly relevant to crappy PR, i.e. the spray and pray types that often seem to fill my inbox. The better PR people I know are much more about targeted relationships and their output metrics are probably something more along the lines of coverage in "good" (a word doing a lot of work here) outlets.
  - stadium 5y ago
    I believe that those emails would be considered marketing, not PR. https://www.themuse.com/amp/advice/the-difference-between-marketing-and-pr https://www.themuse.com/amp/advice/the-difference-between-ma...
    - ghaff 5y ago
      It's a mix. Yes, I get a ton of "nurture" emails for webinars and the like. I also get a ton of PR pitches that want me to write about something or interview some "expert" about a topic. (I have a blog, a podcast, and write or have written for various online pubs so I'm on a ton of mailing lists.)
- mkmk 5y ago
  You might be interested in Media Mix Modeling — a regression-based approach to finding relationships between marketing spend and sales performance. A good primer is here: https://github.com/mecommerce/ThirdLove-Tech-Blog/blob/master/Media_Mix_Model/ThirdLove_MMM_Whitepaper.pdf https://github.com/mecommerce/ThirdLove-Tech-Blog/blob/maste... And https://www.vexpower.com/ https://www.vexpower.com/ is an early but very promising educational tool in the space.
  - hammock 5y ago
    Media mix modeling is well-intentioned but in reality a huge overpromise and highly profitable way for data scientists to snow/fleece their advertiser clients. (More detail.. it's a bit like the Fed's inflation data: when you can manipulate the constants at will, introduce fake data as proxy for missing data, etc.. the ways and means to force a desired result are endless)
    - mkmk 5y ago
      There’s a lot of truth to that. When done in house, though, it can be a useful additional check on spend allocation. Of course it still becomes political if channel owners feel like their career progression depends on growing share of budget.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  Read a classic: "Ogilvie on Advertising" (1985). The only metric that matters is: did your sales go up? Ogilvie understood that. The ads that other PR and advertising people admire aren't necessarily the ones that work.
  - nickelcitymario 5y ago
    Pedantic correction: "Ogilvy". While the only metric that matters is sales (I fully agree), you need other metrics to understand how those sales happened. This is the dangerous thing. I've worked at companies where people were evaluated based on very specific metrics, like web traffic or social media engagement. The problem with that is you end up focusing on improving those numbers rather than improving sales. But if you only focus on sales, you can't tell which activities made a difference (or in which direction). You need other data to understand what's happening. A better book than Ogilvy on Advertising, in this regards, is Claude C. Hopkins' Scientific Advertising. It lays out all the principles for testing ads, back when we didn't have any concept of analytics. The basic method was: Try different things in different markets to see what works best. Keep doing it indefinitely, so that your ads only ever get better. There's no reason the same approach can't be taken with public relations. If you're working for a national brand, try assigning some PR folks to exclusively work the media in one given region. Then see what the difference is. (Obviously, you have to do a lot of work to "control the variables", but any data scientist -- or any scientist at all, actually -- should be able to figure that out in their sleep.) It's not rocket science. These methods have been around for a very long time. Honestly, I think we've just gotten lazy. Setting up market tests is a lot of work, whereas creating an A/B test in AdWords is easy. But there's no such thing as an unmeasurable publicity tactic (whether it's advertising or public relations). You just gotta be willing to do the work.
    - sosborn 5y ago
      With PR, the effects of a failed test can take down a company (or, the existing c-suite at least). That's why people tend to stick to a "tried and true" playbook.
      - 5y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I was just talking to someone about this topic (can't read the paywalled article, but I think I get the drift). Brand-reinforcement is the Philosopher's Stone, these days. It explains a lot of decisions made by corporations, that don't seem to make sense to empirical animals, like us engineers. I worked for a corporation that had an incredibly valuable brand, and was constantly frustrated by the decisions they made, in an effort to reinforce their brands. A brand is a very "fuzzy" concept. It basically starts with a "persona," like an actor's part, and everything the company does, needs to reinforce that persona. It works very well, and is very difficult to quantify.
- bsanr2 5y ago
  Which makes sense. The point of branding is to enable a faceless assemblage of processes and relationships (otherwise known as a "company") to engage and interact with potential consumers. Branding is an interface between the human and inhuman, and it's always going to be at least as complex as any person-to-people parasocial relationship would be, and probably more so on average.
Q57C3HYc7g 5y ago
https://archive.is/2A080 https://archive.is/2A080
b6z 5y ago
I read on and on to find where the interesting, eye-opening, mind-boggling part started. Then the article ended.
- Sr_developer 5y ago
  It is The Economist, par for the course.
- blamazon 5y ago
  I for one am happy that not every article of journalism has to have an eye opening or mind boggling component.
gwbrooks 5y ago
Five years as a journalist, 30 years in PR and this article is, at the broad brush strokes, spot on. At the strategy and budget levels, PR is being eaten by marketing. We also have a quality problem -- there's virtually no barrier to market entry and many clients don't know what they need. The combination means there's a lot of relatively ineffective work being done. Practitioners, particularly on the agency side, are too invested in doing leading-edge, breakthrough work when most clients, most of the time, need consistently good-enough work that is repeatable and measurable against KPIs. It's our equivalent (well, one of our equivalents) of chasing shiny objects. The ice floe is melting. We used to be the gatekeepers to the media gatekeepers. Then earned media lost a lot of its power, and we became content strategists and producers. Now content is becoming largely commoditized so our production of it gets edged out in favor of paying influencers and their audiences for a slice of attention. You can build a business out of that (many, many have) but it's not PR. And that makes it harder to defend as a separate need/discipline.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

54 points by hhs 5y ago

throwaway_2047 5y ago

As an engineer, I have always wanted to quantify the effect of PR. The PR people I spoke to often says it is hard to measure, occupying mindshare, "upper" funnel, yada yada. Some may offer number of publicity as a measuring stick. Would love to learn what other "more useful" metrics are out there.

ghaff 5y ago
One of the challenges is that the most obvious numerical measures are mostly relevant to crappy PR, i.e. the spray and pray types that often seem to fill my inbox. The better PR people I know are much more about targeted relationships and their output metrics are probably something more along the lines of coverage in "good" (a word doing a lot of work here) outlets.
- stadium 5y ago
  I believe that those emails would be considered marketing, not PR. https://www.themuse.com/amp/advice/the-difference-between-marketing-and-pr https://www.themuse.com/amp/advice/the-difference-between-ma...
  - ghaff 5y ago
    It's a mix. Yes, I get a ton of "nurture" emails for webinars and the like. I also get a ton of PR pitches that want me to write about something or interview some "expert" about a topic. (I have a blog, a podcast, and write or have written for various online pubs so I'm on a ton of mailing lists.)
mkmk 5y ago
You might be interested in Media Mix Modeling — a regression-based approach to finding relationships between marketing spend and sales performance. A good primer is here: https://github.com/mecommerce/ThirdLove-Tech-Blog/blob/master/Media_Mix_Model/ThirdLove_MMM_Whitepaper.pdf https://github.com/mecommerce/ThirdLove-Tech-Blog/blob/maste... And https://www.vexpower.com/ https://www.vexpower.com/ is an early but very promising educational tool in the space.
- hammock 5y ago
  Media mix modeling is well-intentioned but in reality a huge overpromise and highly profitable way for data scientists to snow/fleece their advertiser clients. (More detail.. it's a bit like the Fed's inflation data: when you can manipulate the constants at will, introduce fake data as proxy for missing data, etc.. the ways and means to force a desired result are endless)
  - mkmk 5y ago
    There’s a lot of truth to that. When done in house, though, it can be a useful additional check on spend allocation. Of course it still becomes political if channel owners feel like their career progression depends on growing share of budget.
AlbertCory 5y ago
Read a classic: "Ogilvie on Advertising" (1985). The only metric that matters is: did your sales go up? Ogilvie understood that. The ads that other PR and advertising people admire aren't necessarily the ones that work.
- nickelcitymario 5y ago
  Pedantic correction: "Ogilvy". While the only metric that matters is sales (I fully agree), you need other metrics to understand how those sales happened. This is the dangerous thing. I've worked at companies where people were evaluated based on very specific metrics, like web traffic or social media engagement. The problem with that is you end up focusing on improving those numbers rather than improving sales. But if you only focus on sales, you can't tell which activities made a difference (or in which direction). You need other data to understand what's happening. A better book than Ogilvy on Advertising, in this regards, is Claude C. Hopkins' Scientific Advertising. It lays out all the principles for testing ads, back when we didn't have any concept of analytics. The basic method was: Try different things in different markets to see what works best. Keep doing it indefinitely, so that your ads only ever get better. There's no reason the same approach can't be taken with public relations. If you're working for a national brand, try assigning some PR folks to exclusively work the media in one given region. Then see what the difference is. (Obviously, you have to do a lot of work to "control the variables", but any data scientist -- or any scientist at all, actually -- should be able to figure that out in their sleep.) It's not rocket science. These methods have been around for a very long time. Honestly, I think we've just gotten lazy. Setting up market tests is a lot of work, whereas creating an A/B test in AdWords is easy. But there's no such thing as an unmeasurable publicity tactic (whether it's advertising or public relations). You just gotta be willing to do the work.
  - sosborn 5y ago
    With PR, the effects of a failed test can take down a company (or, the existing c-suite at least). That's why people tend to stick to a "tried and true" playbook.
    - 5y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I was just talking to someone about this topic (can't read the paywalled article, but I think I get the drift). Brand-reinforcement is the Philosopher's Stone, these days. It explains a lot of decisions made by corporations, that don't seem to make sense to empirical animals, like us engineers. I worked for a corporation that had an incredibly valuable brand, and was constantly frustrated by the decisions they made, in an effort to reinforce their brands. A brand is a very "fuzzy" concept. It basically starts with a "persona," like an actor's part, and everything the company does, needs to reinforce that persona. It works very well, and is very difficult to quantify.

bsanr2 5y ago
Which makes sense. The point of branding is to enable a faceless assemblage of processes and relationships (otherwise known as a "company") to engage and interact with potential consumers. Branding is an interface between the human and inhuman, and it's always going to be at least as complex as any person-to-people parasocial relationship would be, and probably more so on average.

Q57C3HYc7g 5y ago

https://archive.is/2A080 https://archive.is/2A080

b6z 5y ago

I read on and on to find where the interesting, eye-opening, mind-boggling part started. Then the article ended.

Sr_developer 5y ago
It is The Economist, par for the course.
blamazon 5y ago
I for one am happy that not every article of journalism has to have an eye opening or mind boggling component.

gwbrooks 5y ago

Five years as a journalist, 30 years in PR and this article is, at the broad brush strokes, spot on. At the strategy and budget levels, PR is being eaten by marketing. We also have a quality problem -- there's virtually no barrier to market entry and many clients don't know what they need. The combination means there's a lot of relatively ineffective work being done. Practitioners, particularly on the agency side, are too invested in doing leading-edge, breakthrough work when most clients, most of the time, need consistently good-enough work that is repeatable and measurable against KPIs. It's our equivalent (well, one of our equivalents) of chasing shiny objects. The ice floe is melting. We used to be the gatekeepers to the media gatekeepers. Then earned media lost a lot of its power, and we became content strategists and producers. Now content is becoming largely commoditized so our production of it gets edged out in favor of paying influencers and their audiences for a slice of attention. You can build a business out of that (many, many have) but it's not PR. And that makes it harder to defend as a separate need/discipline.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]