Winning: The Best Yardstick for PR Measurement
My last exposure to math was the final question in a high school physics exam: “If a dog is sitting at the bottom of a six-foot window and sees a man fall past, how fast is the man plummeting?” My answer: “What’s the dog got to do with it?” Since that day I’ve nurtured a healthy distrust of math, which — fortunately for me — has no place in my chosen profession of PR.
You wouldn’t know that to look at the horde of formula-chanting statisticians vying to lull the minds of today’s account team leaders and communications department heads. Practitioners of an inexact science, we’ve always sought justification for our work in algebra of some sort: primitive hit counts, ad equivalencies and so on. The latest numeric toys are software programs that link media hits and social media to traffic fluctuations on corporate web sites. When forced to sit through presentations on such nonsense, I must choke down the impulse to turn the speaker into a physics problem, i.e., grab him by the hair and toss him out the window.
In the end, statistical analysis of PR performance is tenuous at best. Bean counters can spout numbers to me all day long. There’s only one measure I care about: Is the client winning? And by winning, I mean have they –
- Sold more product?
- Toppled an incumbent from the market throne?
- Grown from a tiny start-up to a profit-generating machine?
- Cashed out by selling that machine to somebody else?
- Kicked an opponent’s butt in a life-or-death policy battle?
In the end, winning is the only yardstick that counts. The common denominator of PR success is money — the one math I understand.
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