Measure This!

Dubai’s second annual PR Congress began today and is expected to attract hundreds of PR practitioners from across the region.

The congress aims to bring together leading regional PR practitioners on a single platform, where they can discuss and debate regional PR trends and strategies.

According to the Middle East Public Relations Association (MEPRA) the total value of the Middle East PR industry has crossed the USD 25 million per annum mark, a figure dismissed by rival PR practitioners organization, Arabian Business Communicators Association, due to the failure of MEPRA to give a credible source.

This growth is apparently due to the expansion and development of the perception and usefulness of Public Relations as more than just an extra marketing tool. PR is now considered the most useful means of publicly communicating a company’s message, ensuring positive investor and governmental relations and is considered as a crucial crisis management tool.

However, the launch of the event comes with a strict warning to PR practitioners from its official sponsors and the region’s only media intelligence firm, Mediastow. Mohamed Elzubeir, Managing Director of Mediastow, commented: ‘The PR industry needs to take a serious look at the way in which it measures the efficacy of its work, or risk losing all credibility in the eyes of the businesses. Traditional methods of counting clippings and calculating advertising equivalence values are simply not accurate measurement techniques. If agencies don’t find a way to measure the real value of their work, they risk losing their clients and missing out on future business opportunities.’

The main issue of the PR industry is underlined as the measurement of the effectiveness of PR campaigns. The majority of PR agencies in the region still refer to the traditional measurements tools which fail to demonstrate bottom line effects. Some believe the congress to be a result of continual inter-industry disagreements over a lack of a standardized set of guidelines, objectives and agreed-upon PR effectiveness measurement techniques.

‘The PR industry needs an effective way to measure the efficacy of their work,’ continued Mr. Elzubeir. ‘At Mediastow we have developed a new system called RAVE (Real Advertising Value Equivalent), which gives you a realistic indication of the value of your clipping. The system takes into account variables such as the mention type (headline, 1st paragraph or marginal) and the use of visuals (color, black and white or none at all). These variables provide us with a prominence index that allows us to adjust other figures to come out with the real advertising value equivalent. This is not to mention other variables such as the rating of the publication itself, its (claimed or audited) circulation as well as the positioning of the clipping,’ continued Elzubeir. ‘RAVE provides tools that allow you the only way to truly assess your PR performance and effectiveness,’ he concluded.

United Arab Emirates: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 A new Dubai-based integrated media intelligence service has been launched this month to give businesses the ability to study and assess their public image though the review and monitoring of their media presence.

The media intelligence firm, Mediastow will be providing the service across the region and will extend its operations to a number of countries, in order to have accurate coverage for its clients.

The integrated media intelligence firm will be one of the first to offer news and advertising monitoring across every media with a clear measurement structure. It provides public relations firms, advertising agencies and in-house marketers in the region with the most comprehensive and cutting-edge solutions including editorial and advertisement retrieval and management and analysis solutions, including among them scientific advertising and public relations tracking tools.

Integrated media intelligence is already a major tool in the western world. In-depth media reputation and communication analytics are already used by decision makers from all industries but such a system has not been readily available in the UAE until now. With public relations expenditure in the region reaching 40 million USD annually, it is expected to fill a major gap in the market for media measurement and effective analysis.

‘Staying on top of media coverage is a key element of an effective marketing strategy. Businesses particularly in the UAE are paying too much attention to how to penetrate the media, while often neglecting to analyze effectively the impact of their media presence,’

said Mohamed Elzubeir, CEO of Mediastow.

‘Mediastow will offer the ‘Intelligence Monitor’ service with a high-powered, low-cost Web service that allows businesses to simultaneously monitor thousands of newswires, publications, web sites, databases and document collections for mentions of the topics that are important to them,’ he said.

‘This is a ground breaking service because for the first time, a business can integrate all of the information sources it needs to monitor into a single, easy-to-use, outsourced application online,’ he added.

‘Media intelligence has many benefits for the businesses of the UAE and one of the most important is to finally empower businesses with the capacity to measure the effectiveness of their PR efforts. Measurement in the PR industry is a major issue and our unique measurement parameter called RAVE will demonstrate the value PR adds to any business,’ he concluded.

Mediastow is sponsoring the PR Professional of the Year Award at the PR Congress 2006, which will be presented at the gala dinner.

The event will take place on September 17, 2006 at the JWT Marriott Hotel from 7:30PM onwards.

Once again, we have been busy adding new features. We promised to deliver this by June, but we decided to roll it now anyway. You can now see the Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) of each article individually,

Seeing the ad value is great, but how about the overall picture in comparison with competitors? The media measurements takes care of that.

We have added a new feature to our already advanced search engine. You can now search by topic. When some of our clients wrote to us telling us about how it would be great if they could search by topic, especially when it is not necessarily written in the clipping or the summary, we got right to it.

Every company has a set of topics attached to it. For instance, company A could have topics X, Y and Z. So the topic would list A::X, A::Y and A::Z. This allows you to narrow down the search to that specific topic.

The reason why this is important is that it is often the case when certain subjects are written differently in various publications. Sometimes, the subject matter itself is contextual and not literal.

The new feature is a demonstration of the powerful database design employed by Mediastow and reaffirms our commitment to our clients’ suggestions and feedback.

Editorial values are dollar amount values for a given article. There is no standard to how an editorial value is calculated, as it varies from 3-8 times the advertising value equivalent. The problem with this is that it is absolutely impossible to provide an accurate value for an editorial piece. For example, there are pages in papers that would never have an advertisement appear in. How can you place a value on that?

In fact, editorial values are considered as an unethical practice to boost the value of PR. Let’s face it, PR does have tremendous value, but this is simply misleading and only does the clients a disservice into assuming their PR campaign is worth X amount.

At Mediastow, we do provide AVE’s, but would under no circumstance provide an editorial value for a client. We also make sure we explain to the clients that the AVE is just that — an estimate. It simply gives you an ‘idea’ of the value of your campaign. Let’s face it, everyone likes to see dollar amounts that justify their spendings.

I would dare say that the PR industry in the UAE should completely abolish Editorial Values from their reports.

We are always trying to add more information to help our clients get the most out of their service. We have now added a new option. What we wanted to do this time is add the ability to see the massive amount of information we have been collecting over the past few months.

We know that there are several sources of information about the different publications in the Middle East. We also know that all PR/Advertising agencies have their own lists. However, we realized that most of the sources being utilized today carry an incredible amount of inaccurate information. So, we decided to carry our own database of all the relevant information AND provide the advertising rates as provided by the publisher!

Now when we add the AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent) bit to our clippings, you will know where those figures came from.

I have had the pleasure of meeting with several of the leading personalities in the PR industry here and have come to the conclusion that there is an increasing level of frustration at the lack of tools available. Not only are PR agencies struggling to evaluate the output analysis, but they have absolutely no clue what the outtake and outcomes are.

It is not secret that clients are increasingly pushing PR agencies to lower their prices as they pour the larger portion of their marketing budget into advertising. One of the main reasons this is happening is the complete lack of ability to measure PR.

Agencies will tell you that clients are not wililng to put in a budget for research and evaluation of outtakes and outcomes. They will also tell you that even the evaluation of output is something only multinationals and large corporate groups are willing to shell out the money for. It is both time consuming and expensive for them to do anyway.

Mediastow tried to solve this problem by providing the basis for output evaluation with the instant media measurements of the share of voice, coverage reach and coverage size. We are also excited about the new addition of the advertising value estimate, which is scheduled to be rolled by June.

Those tools help but do not solve the fundamental problem though. You can measure what you have produced, but the ability to measure the results and success of what you do as an industry is perhaps the most important justification for your very existence. Without this, I am afraid the PR industry is doomed. Or is it?