[HN Gopher] The perils of PR
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The perils of PR
Author : hhs
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-07-05 14:51 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| gwbrooks wrote:
| Five years as a journalist, 30 years in PR and this article is,
| at the broad brush strokes, spot on.
|
| At the strategy and budget levels, PR is being eaten by
| marketing. We also have a quality problem -- there's virtually no
| barrier to market entry and many clients don't know what they
| need. The combination means there's a lot of relatively
| ineffective work being done.
|
| Practitioners, particularly on the agency side, are too invested
| in doing leading-edge, breakthrough work when most clients, most
| of the time, need consistently good-enough work that is
| repeatable and measurable against KPIs. It's our equivalent
| (well, one of our equivalents) of chasing shiny objects.
|
| The ice floe is melting. We used to be the gatekeepers to the
| media gatekeepers. Then earned media lost a lot of its power, and
| we became content strategists and producers. Now content is
| becoming largely commoditized so our production of it gets edged
| out in favor of paying influencers and their audiences for a
| slice of attention. You can build a business out of that (many,
| many have) but it's not PR. And that makes it harder to defend as
| a separate need/discipline.
| Q57C3HYc7g wrote:
| https://archive.is/2A080
| throwaway_2047 wrote:
| As an engineer, I have always wanted to quantify the effect of
| PR. The PR people I spoke to often says it is hard to measure,
| occupying mindshare, "upper" funnel, yada yada. Some may offer
| number of publicity as a measuring stick. Would love to learn
| what other "more useful" metrics are out there.
| mkmk wrote:
| You might be interested in Media Mix Modeling -- a regression-
| based approach to finding relationships between marketing spend
| and sales performance.
|
| A good primer is here: https://github.com/mecommerce/ThirdLove-
| Tech-Blog/blob/maste...
|
| And https://www.vexpower.com/ is an early but very promising
| educational tool in the space.
| hammock wrote:
| Media mix modeling is well-intentioned but in reality a huge
| overpromise and highly profitable way for data scientists to
| snow/fleece their advertiser clients.
|
| (More detail.. it's a bit like the Fed's inflation data: when
| you can manipulate the constants at will, introduce fake data
| as proxy for missing data, etc.. the ways and means to force
| a desired result are endless)
| mkmk wrote:
| There's a lot of truth to that. When done in house, though,
| it can be a useful additional check on spend allocation. Of
| course it still becomes political if channel owners feel
| like their career progression depends on growing share of
| budget.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Read a classic: "Ogilvie on Advertising" (1985).
|
| The only metric that matters is: did your sales go up? Ogilvie
| understood that. The ads that other PR and advertising people
| admire aren't necessarily the ones that work.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| Pedantic correction: "Ogilvy".
|
| While the only metric that matters is sales (I fully agree),
| you need other metrics to understand how those sales
| happened. This is the dangerous thing.
|
| I've worked at companies where people were evaluated based on
| very specific metrics, like web traffic or social media
| engagement. The problem with that is you end up focusing on
| improving those numbers rather than improving sales.
|
| But if you only focus on sales, you can't tell which
| activities made a difference (or in which direction). You
| need other data to understand what's happening.
|
| A better book than Ogilvy on Advertising, in this regards, is
| Claude C. Hopkins' Scientific Advertising. It lays out all
| the principles for testing ads, back when we didn't have any
| concept of analytics. The basic method was: Try different
| things in different markets to see what works best. Keep
| doing it indefinitely, so that your ads only ever get better.
|
| There's no reason the same approach can't be taken with
| public relations. If you're working for a national brand, try
| assigning some PR folks to exclusively work the media in one
| given region. Then see what the difference is.
|
| (Obviously, you have to do a lot of work to "control the
| variables", but any data scientist -- or any scientist at
| all, actually -- should be able to figure that out in their
| sleep.)
|
| It's not rocket science. These methods have been around for a
| very long time.
|
| Honestly, I think we've just gotten lazy. Setting up market
| tests is a lot of work, whereas creating an A/B test in
| AdWords is easy. But there's no such thing as an unmeasurable
| publicity tactic (whether it's advertising or public
| relations). You just gotta be willing to do the work.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Great message.
|
| A famous quote from an executive (not one in advertising):
|
| "I know half my advertising budget is wasted. I'm just not
| sure which half."
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| John Wanamaker said it, I believe. Both Ogilvy and
| Hopkins quoted him as well :-)
| sosborn wrote:
| With PR, the effects of a failed test can take down a
| company (or, the existing c-suite at least). That's why
| people tend to stick to a "tried and true" playbook.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| That's true of any test of any kind... Don't try stupid
| things.
|
| "Tried and true" means doing things the same way everyone
| else is doing it, i.e. following the crowd. The whole
| point of marketing/advertising/publicity/PR/other-words-
| for-the-same-thing is to stand out from the crowd.
|
| So while I agree that people tend to stick to the "tried
| and true", that's also why most of it doesn't work. You
| can't both stand out from the crowd and follow that same
| crowd. They're contradictions and mutually exclusive.
|
| But that doesn't mean you should lose your head and do
| stupid things just for the sake of doing something
| different. Small changes, implemented incrementally, are
| the best ways to enact long-lasting change. You have to
| go into every test fully prepared for it to fail. If
| failure would be catastrophic, that's a stupid test.
| sosborn wrote:
| > You can't both stand out from the crowd and follow that
| same crowd.
|
| I agree - but PR is about so much more than just standing
| out from the crowd. If you are talking about PR in the
| marketing sense - sure, but things like crisis
| management, investor relations and internal
| communications are different ball games.
| ghaff wrote:
| One of the challenges is that the most obvious numerical
| measures are mostly relevant to crappy PR, i.e. the spray and
| pray types that often seem to fill my inbox. The better PR
| people I know are much more about targeted relationships and
| their output metrics are probably something more along the
| lines of coverage in "good" (a word doing a lot of work here)
| outlets.
| stadium wrote:
| I believe that those emails would be considered marketing,
| not PR.
|
| https://www.themuse.com/amp/advice/the-difference-between-
| ma...
| ghaff wrote:
| It's a mix. Yes, I get a ton of "nurture" emails for
| webinars and the like. I also get a ton of PR pitches that
| want me to write about something or interview some "expert"
| about a topic. (I have a blog, a podcast, and write or have
| written for various online pubs so I'm on a ton of mailing
| lists.)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I was just talking to someone about this topic (can't read the
| paywalled article, but I think I get the drift).
|
| Brand-reinforcement is the Philosopher's Stone, these days. It
| explains a lot of decisions made by corporations, that don't seem
| to make sense to empirical animals, like us engineers.
|
| I worked for a corporation that had an _incredibly_ valuable
| brand, and was constantly frustrated by the decisions they made,
| in an effort to reinforce their brands.
|
| A brand is a very "fuzzy" concept. It basically starts with a
| "persona," like an actor's part, and everything the company does,
| needs to reinforce that persona.
|
| It works very well, and is very difficult to quantify.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| Which makes sense. The point of branding is to enable a
| faceless assemblage of processes and relationships (otherwise
| known as a "company") to engage and interact with potential
| consumers. Branding is an interface between the human and
| inhuman, and it's always going to be at least as complex as any
| person-to-people parasocial relationship would be, and probably
| more so on average.
| b6z wrote:
| I read on and on to find where the interesting, eye-opening,
| mind-boggling part started. Then the article ended.
| Sr_developer wrote:
| It is The Economist, par for the course.
| blamazon wrote:
| I for one am happy that not every article of journalism has to
| have an eye opening or mind boggling component.
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