Sunday, October 01, 2006

PR Return On Investment or bull sh**

Toni Muzi Falconi tells of the IfPR Summit on Measurement and notes that Jim Allman, Ceo of Devries public relations who works for some ten major Procter & Gamble brands, showed how the world’s largest fast moving consumer goods company succeeded in demonstrating that every dollar invested in marketing public relations gives an average return of sales of 2.8 dollars against 1.1 dollars for advertising and 85 cents for promotions!

I wonder how they do that!


Is this more PR agency smoke and mirrors? It has that taint about it.



If the measure is based on return of sales generated attributed to each activity (press, radio, tv bought for time and space v not paid for v promotions) do they also include social media (blogs, wiki, podcasts, vertical search, SEO, RSS, SL etc) in PR or does that not have an effect? For example Arial which is exposed to perhaps ten time the 20,000 blog posts in the last year (and I agree it does not seem to have any expert optimisation of this asset) would be included in what kind of calculation? OTS?<br>
Alternatively is this a measure of return on PR investment and if so:

Is this return on investment on the trading account or balance sheet (and how long is the tail - we know it is quite long on-line)
If cash, is this discounted cash?
Is this based on social media asset as well as press, radio, TV etc assets.
How long is residual value discount for press v social media. Is archive press now included on the balance sheet now that Google as Google News Archive with a repository of 4,000 Ariel citations and 4000 blog posts on permanent display, not to mention web sites going back to those embarrassing ones like this 2002 version.

Then there is the extent to which the brands are the object of consumer interest as a result on PR activity. Is this on the trading account or balance sheet?

I only ask.






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