Earlier today I helped judge public relations campaigns for
a major chapter of a major marketing communications association. The quality of the entries I judged (I won’t
say what category!) was better than in years past and several of the campaigns
were outright brilliant.
However, not naming names, one campaign, bothered me so much
that I thought it was close to PR malpractice.
The strategy and execution on
this campaign were terrific, but when it came to reporting out the media
results, my jaw simply dropped and I kept muttering, “this can’t be, this can’t
be.” The entry reported 11 million
placements from Road Runner, 17 million on USAToday.com, 1.865 million placements
from KSL.com and a herculean 150 million placements from Yahoo.
I know measurement of public relations results is a trick
business, but come on, half the US population did not read an article about this
campaign via Yahoo.
But it gets better.
To the right of the “circulation figures,” were reported “Publicity
Values,” apparently the monetary value of the placements. Without explaining their rationale, the
authors reported the above-mentioned Yahoo article was worth $28,000 and the
USAToday.com placement commanded a sticker-shocking $1 million. The poor old KSL.com placement was worth
only $230.73.
Oh, six million impressions from CBS.com were worth
$29.74. I checked that twice.
So what the hell gives here? Did the managing director, who signed the
entry, not pay attention? Does the
agency think its clients won’t notice?
Or do they actually believe this garbage? Public relations has a hard enough time
managing credibility. It doesn’t need to
be subverted from the inside.
No comments:
Post a Comment