As Logan Flatt told us last week, you have to start somewhere with measurement. And if you’re a media relations practitioner based in Canada, Media Relations Rating Points (MRPs) are about as good a place to start as any.

MRPs are a relatively simple and inexpensive system. You download an Excel spreadsheet for free, and then pay $725 annually to get audience circulation data supplied by News Canada.

In a recent podcast conversation, David Jones of Fleishman-Hillard in Toronto, explained to me how MRPs evolved. Under the guidance of Tracey Bochner, APR, of APEX Public Relations, the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS) measurement committee was struck, which met every few weeks for a number of years to develop a consistent approach by which agencies and clients could measure their publicity efforts.

“People put clipping reports together and they always have,” David explained. “Sometimes they’re measured by how thick they are, or how heavy they are, or by how many individual clippings you get. The idea of Media Relations Rating Points was to figure out a standardized way in which we could all agree as an industry to measure media coverage.”

There were two underlying themes in the committee’s work to develop the MRP system. The first was to obtain reliable circulation data, with everyone relying on the same source. The second was to develop a system in which each clip could be measured against a set of pre-determined objectives.

The basic Excel spreadsheet has cells available for tone (whether positive, neutral or negative) and five other potential criteria that media coverage can be scored against, such as exclusivity in the story, the use of a picture, prominence in the publication or newscast, or whether messages are getting through.

The idea was to develop a flexible rating system that could adapt to the needs of specific clients, depending on what the media relations practitioner was attempting to achieve with specific coverage.

“You can really set those things up in advance,” David told me during our interview. “That’s the beauty of it. It’s not trying to tell anybody that everyone’s publicity goals are the same. You can select the ones that are important to you and score (your publicity) against them.”

David told me the committee developing MRPs soon threw multipliers out the window as a non-starter. Indeed, he has some strong opinions on the use of multipliers in assessing media coverage.

“I think multipliers are one of the worst ideas that we’ve ever come up with as an industry,” he said. “Since I’ve been in the business, about 15 years or so, no one’s been able to tell me why we use them.”

He believes that people try to justify the use of multipliers in a variety of ways. For example, some say that each newspaper is read by more than one person or editorial coverage is more valuable than advertising.

“But that only makes sense when you’re trying to equate (media coverage) to an advertising equivalency,” he explained. “People have just been cooking up their own numbers. I’ve never seen it done the same way twice.”

David agrees that media relations should be less fixated on generating clippings and focused more on changing behavior. And, while the MRP system does not measure attitudinal change or behavioral outcomes of the audiences reached, it can provide a relatively consistent basis by which different campaigns, and even different agencies working for the same client, can be measured on the basis of ink and electrons generated.

As such, it’s an important step along the measurement continuum.

And what can I say? In case you missed it before, I’ll say it again: MRPs are a truly Canadian innovation.

Listen to the podcast.

As part of this series, I thought it would be interesting to compare marketing measurement to media relations measurement. Part of my logic is that media relations is often used as a component of the marketing mix, although as Katie Delahaye Payne pointed out during the first part of this series, media relations can extend beyond marketing to influence “management of a reputation, or the education of constituencies around an issue, or the prevention of disease.”

But the common thread to marketing, reputation or education is influencing attitudes, opinions and behavior. And I suspect that marketers, simply because of the size and complexity of their budgets, are ahead of us in measuring the impact of what they do.

To understand the marketing perspective a little better, I recently had a podcast conversation with Logan Flatt, CFA, president of ROI Solutions, a unit of interactive advertising agency Tribal DDB Worldwide.

Logan is a bit of an anomaly in the communication business, having earned the right to use the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. While most of his CFA peers are analyzing stocks and managing pension funds, Logan uses his statistical and mathematical training to measure his clients’ marketing and advertising success along multiple variables, depending on the business objectives of those clients.

For example, by examining data, Logan and his team could remove the variable of weather to determine the effectiveness of a summer marketing campaign to increase market share of a particular beer. We all know that beer consumption goes up during hot summers and down during cooler weather. Using multi-variant models, Logan can remove outside temperature from the statistical mix to develop a clearer picture of the impact of a specific brewery’s marketing campaign.

Logan believes that, in theory, a media relations campaign is similar to any component of a marketing mix. It is simply a means to an end. And the end is a change in behavior that the organization hopes to get out of its target audience, based on the fact that financial and other resources were devoted to the campaign.

“What we as measurers of marketing would like to do is measure changes in behavior,” he explains. “And we want to associate that behavior with the components of it that you spent money on.”

Measurement should never be left to the end; indeed it should always begin at the beginning. In other words, set your objectives for the campaign in advance, along with how you’re going to measure against those objectives. In working with his clients, Logan negotiates in advance the specific behavior to which they would like to see a change over time. “Before spending the money, it’s important to know what needs to be measured and how it’s going to be measured,” he explains.

Logan believes you have to start somewhere with measurement. And starting somewhere doesn’t necessarily involve using multi-variant statistical models. “It might be something very simple, such as counting people going through a door if a campaign is designed to drive people to a retail store,” he explains. “The client may already have counters at all their retail stores. It’s something that is already in place and therefore their cost is near zero. It really just depends on each particular campaign and what they’re trying to achieve.”

When I talked to him about counting lines of newspaper copy and adding up airtime, he agreed that gathering such data could potentially be a good place to start from a media relations perspective. But if he overheard someone saying that their publicity campaign generated four million impressions and was therefore successful, he would respond by saying they probably haven’t gone far enough. Without some additional form of measurement, an organization can’t close the communication loop in its advertising and marketing activities — and by extension its publicity.

“You could pat yourself on the back based on some of the preliminary data you might get,” he says. “But you really need to close the loop to get the full view of how the money you spend is actually having an effect on the marketplace you’re trying to influence.”

What do you think? Do we focus enough on outcomes like attitudes, opinions and behavior? Or do we spend too much time on inputs like line counts and tone?

Listen to my conversation with Logan.

Enter the world of media relations measurement, and you enter a new dimension. Depending on the agency, practitioner or client in question, it’s often a virtual hodgepodge of approaches that includes column inches, advertising equivalencies, tone, exposure, awareness, attitudes and behavior.

But let’s face it. Anyone can count column inches, search blog hits, and add up airtime. Tone can be subjective, and there are countless versions of advertising equivalencies and the multipliers that accompany them.

Personally, I don’t believe that counting column inches or placing an article “above the fold” is good enough as a measure of strategic success in media relations. As my colleague Sue Johnston, ABC, recently commented when she and I discussed this series: “Placing an article above the fold is a measure of a journalist’s success, not a communicator’s.”

Column inches and advertising equivalencies are, at best, a starting point. They are rooted in the public information model of public relations. Loosely defined, the public information model says that if you throw enough information at the wall, some of it will stick, although we have no way of knowing how much actually did.

That’s fine, but as communicators, our business should be attitudes, opinions and behavior — which are more closely aligned with two-way asymmetrical and two-way symmetrical models of public relations practice.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a series of articles based on podcast interviews I’ve conducted with professionals in marketing and public relations. The purpose is to shed some light on the spectrum of media relations measurement, to hopefully outline some best practices, and to encourage us, as media relations practitioners, to strive for more.

I don’t think that counting column inches will disappear at any point in the near future, but I believe we cannot claim strategic success until we close the communication loop and focus on attitudinal and behavioral change as measures of how effective we’ve been.

You can click on the “subscribe” button to the right to automatically be informed when articles are uploaded. And, as this series unfolds, I welcome your comments, questions and suggestions for future inquiry.

By the end of the series, I hope to provide a range of ideas and tools you can apply to media relations measurement, and to inspire you to think beyond equivalencies and column inches to the challenge of positively influencing attitudes, opinions and behavior.