The Contemporary Approaches to Evaluating Media Relations Campaigns

The Effectives of Media Campaign Evaluation
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The Effectiveness of Media Campaign Evaluation
Measurement and evaluation have been critical in public relations (PR) communication. Organizations emphasize measurement and assessment that relies more on scientific methodologies than an intuitive art form approach. Various scholars have developed models for public relations, which provide a better understanding of PR value and are also supposed to be used in the PR practice. Over the years, the demand for accountability has increased in all marketing disciplines, and PR is not an exception (McDonald, 2010). Clients want to evaluate PR programs to gain insights that will assist them in refining programs. They also want to undertake cost-effective analysis of various methods and to assure a return on investments. In the current era, there is consensus that PR programs can be measured and evaluated and that there is value in doing it. Through evaluation, executives establish the value or essence of PR programs and determine which methods are suitable. This essay demonstrates that the contemporary approaches to evaluating the outcome of media relations campaigns are ineffective. It hence should not be relied upon to show the success or failure of PR or in the management of clients.
Ways of evaluating media campaign
Metrics
PR metrics are worthy of tracking. They provide a bigger picture and the details of the successful campaigns. At the same time, metrics are critical in determining what the competitors are doing. With the right PR metrics, a company can determine which approaches work and the ones that do not provide the desired return
Media impressions
This measures how many times a portion of the content is consumed. In other words, they consider any interaction an audience member has on a piece of content (Bacev-Giles & Haji, 2017). PR communication entails the number of individuals who have heard about a company or product within a particular period. For instance, if a product has been mentioned on a radio with a million listeners, that would be a million media impressions. Media impressions are not limited to television, radio, or print media. Every time a user scrolls an ad that can be counted as an impression on social media.
Advertising value equivalency (AVE)
AVE is a method by which public relations and communication agencies determine the impact of media coverage. They are arrived at after considering a range of metrics like comparing the equivalence cost of coverage based on the ads paid (Watson, 2013). The main essence of AVE is putting a value on media coverage. Metrics are commonly used in social media to determine the effeteness of campaigns.
Defective
AVE is unable to evacuate social media posts. The influence of social media has become a major source through which PR agencies reach clients. The increase in Internet coverage and smartphones have increased the number of individuals on social media. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become critical in reaching out to clients. More and more companies are placing advertisements on social media (Voorveld, Van Noort, Muntinga & Bronner, 2018). However, the configuration of social media is different from that of traditional media outlets like newspapers. Hence, editorial placement, which AVE uses, does not exist in social media. It is challenging to pinpoint what constitutes “page one” in a platform like Facebook. Since AVEs have been around for some time, social media was not what it is currently. AVEs are unable to capture some developments that have taken place in social media. For instance, if influential individuals tweet an article, this can enormously affect the brand’s publicity. However, AVE would not capture that since it is not made for social media. The same applies to online publications, where AVE is not effective.
Hence, because of the limitation of AVE on social media and online publication, the method is not appropriate. Using it to determine the effectiveness of a PR exercise can lead to misleading results. Its inability to cater to social media makes it less effective in evaluating the online space. More businesses are using online platforms to advertise and engage clients (Dwivedi et al., 2021). Additionally, AVEs do not reflect what has been done, and hence they do not have much relevance to the value and finances of an entity. Any successful communications campaign needs to have tangible results to be considered successful (Krizanova et al., 2019).
Consequently, AVEs have less value to an organization. They cannot be used to inform f...