A Case in Measurement
29th May 2006 by Eric Bergman, ABC, APR
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Natalie Lavigne, who won an IABC Gold Quill Award of Excellence for a media relations teaser campaign that helped launch the board game Brin de jasette (the English translation of which is “chit-chat”) in the Quebec market.
Natalie will be presenting a case study on the campaign at IABC’s international conference next week.
The campaign was interesting, innovative and targeted. For those who have been following the threads here, you might be interested to know that she did not use a news release to get the attention of francophone reporters, nor would a news release have worked (whether “traditional” or “Web 2.0″). Instead, she sent teaser samples of the game to specifically targeted journalists for a week, captured their interest, and turned that interest into success.
Like any excellent communicator, she established time-bound and measurable objectives up front and then found ways to measure whether those objectives were actually achieved.
She set objectives in three areas — output, outgrowth and outcome — to create buzz in the Quebec market about the game. She didn’t limit herself to thinking of advertising equivalencies as the indicator for success. There were business outcomes that needed to be achieved, or the press coverage would be wasted because, as she told me, “we knew we had one kick at the can” in the highly competitive board game market.
So how successful was the campaign?
The output goals were achieved with stories, reviews and recommendations in francopphone print and broadcast media.
From an outgrowth perspective, the stories on the game were extremely positive and the messages she hoped would make it into the stories did (and the game even became somewhat of a favorite topic of bloggers, even though bloggers were not specifically targeted).
The outcome objectives of finding a distributor for the game (four distributors came knocking) and selling out the inventory of 2,000 games was achieved (in three months instead of 15 months).
The moral of the story?
Media relations success means “thinking beyond the fold.” Too many times, I’ve chatted with media relations practitioners who think that their success is measured in impressions and whether the story they pitched appeared above or below the fold. Even more importantly, they have convinced their (internal or external) clients that impressions and some form of multiplier are the primary indicator for success.
In today’s world, that’s not good enough. I’m not suggesting that we should ignore impressions, but true success lies in opinions and behaviors of the end audiences for which the campaign is targeted. Did the impressions you generated influence either, neither or both?
True success lies with both. And thank you, Natalie, for providing such a wonderful example of how such success can be achieved.
May 30th, 2006 at 4:47 am
You’re absolutely right, Eric. Any time we think of media relations only in terms of output, we’re making a mistake.
A release isn’t the goal; heck, even some form of generalized “coverage” isn’t the goal.
The only thing we should be trying to achieve is to move the needle, changing attitudes, actions, beliefs, behaviors, and opinions in measurable ways — ways that benefit our company or client or something that’s important to them.
And that often means we need more tools in our kit than simply “media releases.”
What’s the old saying? If all you have is a hammer, then you see every problem as a nail?
The correct response to, “Write a news release about this” is, “What are we trying to accomplish?”
One solution may be a release, of course. But it may not be.
And if all we know or think about is “How do I get a story in The Times or The Journal?” then, although we may be doing something that we’re comfortable with, we may not be solving the problem.