Getting the Communications Function on Track

You may be interested in a backgrounder I recently developed that may be helpful to you or someone you know. While the document is titled “Getting the Communications Function on Track,” it is anything but an indictment of the people who comprise the function. Rather, it is centered on how to systematically assess communications to take a snapshot of the current operating environment and challenges faced by the communications function, and using the process to provide a basis for future planning and activities.

The assessment evolved out of communications audits I’ve done for clients over the years. Only, rather than use the old “audit” process simply to identify problems as most audits do, the assessment is designed to identify what’s working, where there may be inconsistencies that need to be addressed, and how the process can be leveraged for future communications success. Senior management tends to find such assessments helpful in staying on top of one of the most important leadership functions within the organization – communications. And communicators may find this approach useful in helping them manage expectations and support their own cases for a renewed commitment to communications.

Here are some questions that managers may want to ask themselves if considering a closer look at the communications function:

1. Are you concerned that recent changes could have an impact on communications, and ultimately the organization’s marketing, recruitment and retention, or any other important function?
2. Has your organization been forced to make cuts in the communications function?
3. Have these cuts affected the staffing levels or responsibilities within the communications function?
4. Have people in the organization begun to go “rogue,” preparing their own communications materials leading to inconsistencies and reduced quality?
5. Do you have excessive amounts of old collateral materials mixed in with newer designs?
6. Are you concerned by how important stakeholders now perceive your organization?

It’s obvious that the more questions you say “yes” to, the more likely you’d have an interest in the backgrounder. The development of these backgrounders is in response to common questions or issues I currently tend to address in my own work. If you’d like a copy of the backgrounder, just get in touch with me using the contact information on this page, and I will follow up. Thanks.

Advertising Equivalency Measurement and Why it Shouldn’t Matter

Communications professionals are not infrequently asked by clients to provide Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) numbers as one means to evaluate the effectiveness of a public relations program. Most commonly, AVEs are tied to the measurement of publicity campaigns that support larger marketing communications efforts.

The thinking behind AVEs is to show management how much value is received by publicity. While the AVE has become more sophisticated over the years, it is basically a process where the PR firm calculates the volume of media space or time and compares it to that media outlet’s advertising rates and/or its market share.

Numbers crunchers then estimate that a certain amount of media placements are equivalent to a certain amount of ad dollars and audience reach.

For example, if the ACME software company is prominently featured in a Daily Gazette article that takes up an entire full page of the newspaper, the PR firm would then find out how much it would cost to actually purchase a full-page ad. It would then make an assumption what the article about ACME is worth in advertising dollars. Further, if the publication has a circulation of say 250,000, then the PR firm might tell the ACME software company that the publicity generated 250,000 “impressions.”

That’s pretty simplistic. I’ve seen PR firms throw in other factors that gin up the numbers even further. “Pass along rate,” is one. This is where the PR firm tells ACME software company that not only did the Daily Gazette’s original 250,000 subscribers see the article, but it is likely that about 15 percent of the newspapers were “passed along” to others who also saw the favorable publicity. This then serves to reinforce the PR agency’s claim that the publicity actually generated 250,000 plus 15 percent favorable impressions, or 287,500 gross impressions.

As an aside, it appears that the PR firm does not usually take into account that of the original 250,000 subscribers to the Daily Gazette, some may not have read or cared about the full page article, and of those who did read the piece, how many may have gained a favorable impression of ACME software company. I’m absolutely sure the actual numbers are much less.

Over the years, I’ve been in meetings or seen AVE reports where it was said that a particular campaign generated millions of media impressions in towns with fewer than 250,000 residents. Even with the Internet and SEO, I don’t know how this is likely.

There are many other bells and whistles that to some extent further refine the AVE approach to measurement, but since the whole process is based on what I believe is a flawed assumption – that publicity is in effect free advertising – I just think it all serves to further confound anyone who wants a true picture of the effectiveness of the PR campaign.

Because public relations is as its name states is a relationship business, it really cannot be effectively measured according to the AVE system, which is now largely considered archaic in communications measurement circles. Rather, it is best measured by finding out what targeted audiences perceive, comprehend, remember and act upon. This often requires both quantitative and qualitative research of the actual targeted audience. Tactics include primarily surveys and focus groups, but of course, there are many other ways.

What I like best about how far the communications business has come is that it no longer sees itself only as a publicity machine that can be measure according to the same standards as advertising. Instead, its focus is on the building and preservation of reputations, creating awareness among broad swaths of stakeholders, not just the media, and at the end of the day, making sure that everything it does is designed to build stronger relationships with key audiences.

Attitude Matters in Media Interviews

I saw a woman interviewed on television today. She was the mother of one of the World Trade Center victims on September 11, 2001. Her son was an off-duty police officer who was supposed to be on the golf course that morning, but he voluntarily rushed to the scene to help, where he saved many lives and sacrificed his own.

This woman broke every media interview rule in the book this morning. She wore a hat that didn’t fit. She had no “talking points.” She talked of struggling to forgive Osama Bin Laden but that she would try, and then leave justice to God. And she talked of a meeting with then President Bush in the days after her son died. In matter-of-fact terms, she described another human being, not a caricature, who consoled her at a time of need.

Any one of these things could cause a media interview to go south in seconds, yet this interview was different. She broke every rule of successful media interviewing, and yet she likely won the hearts of hundreds of thousands if not millions. So how did she do it?

She spoke from the heart, simply and with compassion, and ultimately with a general optimism that she exuded from start to finish. Through all her experiences in life, she continued to have faith, and it all came through.

There is no better preparation for a media interview than going into it with the right attitude.

The Five Commandments of Local Television News

I know your first question. “Why not ten commandments?” That’s been taken, and since we’re talking TV, there’s no time for ten, so we’ll have to go with five commandments.

After years of witnessing the evolution local television news and pitching substantive story ideas at times only to lose out to stories about 20-pound cats and talking Christmas trees, I feel compelled to list the unsaid rules of local TV news story selection. So, here goes – The Five Commandments of Local TV News:

One - Begin with Sports and Weather teasers. Feature Sports and Weather. And end with Sports and Weather.
Two - Always lead the newscast with a fire, a car accident or a crime story.
Three - Always find someone who’s long on opinion but short on information for a man-on-the-street interview to explain macroeconomic concepts like foreign trade deficits. (“They took our jobs!”)
Four - Lay a guilt trip on your audience with at least one preachy story about what people shouldn’t eat, or what they're not doing to save the planet. (“Remember, it’s good for you, and it’s good for the environment.”)
Five - Scare your audience into watching. Food recalls are great. Light snow or rain is even better if you can work the words “storm watch” into the teaser.

Katie Couric and the Future of the "Evening News"

In the industry trade magazines, all the talk is about Katie Couric stepping down from her anchor spot at “CBS Evening News.” To be sure, within the industry, it is a major position because it’s the same desk where Walter Cronkite told the world of Moon landings and the John F. Kennedy assassination. But times have changed.

The country no longer sits in living rooms at 6:30 or 7 p.m. each night to get the news. Cable news, satellite news and the Internet have made it possible to get up to the minute information from anywhere in the world no matter where we are. In effect, the Walter Conkites of days gone by have been replaced by a smart phone.

Against such a major shift in information consumption, Ms. Couric took the helm of “CBS Evening News” in 2006 and was never able to build enough market share among a decreasing pool of viewers to even take first place among network news. At last check, her newscast was a distant third in the three-horse race with about 6.5 million viewers, the smallest number ever recorded for the broadcast’s audience since Nielsen tracked such numbers in 1992.

What’s been interesting for me is to watch how local news operations have responded to the same dynamics. Local news stations emphasize breaking news and place a lot more attention on fresh video, weather, sports and neighborhoods. As a result, they’ve maintained somewhat healthy viewership simply by being current, extremely local and thus relevant. Just don’t count on your local news to keep you current on world affairs and business news.

On the other hand, Couric’s news operation has tried to stay true to the 1960s vintage Walter Conkite model of newscasting – a 30-minute report, once commercial breaks have been removed, amounts to about 20 minutes of news reporting. “CBS Evening News” has opted to spend more time on the world-event-of-the-day, whether it be a comprehensive report from a war-torn country, or analysis of a major bill before congress.

The CBS operation usually picks another major social issue on which to focus a second comprehensive feature, such as the state of public schools or the lack of affordable housing in some cities.

What this means is that once commercials and the two feature stories are removed, the “CBS Evening News” has allotted roughly ten minutes to report nearly all of the news of the world. And Ms. Couric does so with all of the energy of a driver's license center worker who missed her coffee break.

I think CBS has a tremendous opportunity to make its news operation more relevant going forward, but to do so, it would have to start by thinking beyond the boundaries of simply, “the evening news.”

Second-largest St. Patrick's Parade in the Country

One of the best things about St. Patrick’s Day in Pittsburgh is that it usually follows a cold and dark winter and marks the first glimmer of warmer weather and the arrival of Spring. Around the middle of March, the grass in the region starts to turn from brown to green again and so do the streets as roughly 200,000 spectators line the streets of Downtown Pittsburgh to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

Always held on the Saturday immediately prior to or on St. Patrick’s Day, the Pittsburgh parade is considered the second-largest St. Patrick’s parade in the country. Over 23,000 participants travel the parade route along Grant Street and the Blvd. of the Allies to the review stand at Stanwix Street.

I help with the handling PR for the event, which is one of the highlights of my year. This year will be the second time in as many years that I have worked on the parade, and it seems to only get better with time.

We started a Facebook page last year, along with a Twitter feed. The Facebook page has about 10,100 followers, and the Twitter feed has over 500. These are helpful in keeping people informed leading up to the event, and it’s a great way to get the pre-parade buzz started. One of the things I like best about this event is its genuineness. For an event of this magnitude, sponsorships are extremely reasonable and nothing is contrived. The volunteers do it for their love of their Irish heritage, the City of Pittsburgh, and for the camaraderie of doing something with their old and new friends.

This year’s parade is Saturday, March 12th, rain or shine. Slainte!

Levi's Commercial Puts Marcellus into Some Perspective

Levi’s has an interesting ad campaign targeting its national audience of youth. I understand that the ads are designed to sell blue jeans, but one ad struck me at a level beyond marketing and perhaps what the producers intended.

The ads feature Braddock, Pennsylvania as a setting to create these striking mini-motion pictures that seem more like what you’d expect if watching a classic movie about the Great Depression.

Even a casual viewer gets the sense that this town was once a vibrant hub of steelmaking and has gone through years of neglect and abandonment. What the ads could not capture, however, was how the loss of this industry affected the steelworkers, their families and these communities for decades.

The point of this campaign is to show good people in Levi’s jeans working to bring this downtrodden community back through the general volunteer, clean-up, fix-up approach.

What the ads never hint about is that it takes much more than sweat equity to truly revitalize a community, a region. It takes the emergence of a major industry to drive an economy big enough to build new schools, churches, infrastructure and hospitals.

Not far from Braddock and all around it, natural gas producers are converging on the region to tap a tremendous deposit of natural gas known in energy circles as the Marcellus Shale. For the first time since the demise of steelmaking in this region, an industry has emerged here with that kind of economic potential.

Most residents welcome this because they know that we have a strong history of co-existing with heavy industry. We were able to do so because of strict pollution controls and diligent monitoring and enforcement of rigid environmental regulations.

This is not to dismiss the concerns of those who worry about the impact drilling could have on local communities. Concern is good, but blind opposition ignores this region’s strong track record of fostering thriving industry while protecting the environment.

While Levi’s may not have had the Marcellus in mind, its “Go Forth” ad campaign follows a theme that is more than fitting when considering the opportunity Marcellus presents.

A child runs down dark hallway, out a door into daylight, and metaphorically speaking into a brighter future. The voice of another child speaks softly over a building soundtrack of strings and percussion, “People think there aren’t frontiers any more,” the child says. “They can’t see how frontiers are all around us.”