INDUSTRY GUIDE

From Measurement to Management

PART 1:
EXPOSURE

From Measurement to Management Part1: Exposure

EDITORS NOTE
Exposure is the first of a five-part PR measurement series based on the five key
dimensions adopted in the LEWIS measurement framework.
Additional guides include:
Engagement
Preference
Impact
Advocacy

CONTENTS
Overview 4
Abandoning AVE and multipliers 5
More audience or better audience?

Setting exposure goals 8

Key KPIs 9

From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure

OVERVIEW
At first glance, exposure seems the simplest public relations deliverable.
Everyone knows PR folks get companies media coverage placements, hits,
cuttings, ink however you want to call it. Its a PR mission thats easy to
convey, which is perhaps why getting exposure so often forms the totality
of the laymans understanding of the PR role.
When it comes to truly defining and measuring exposure, though, it gets
a bit trickier. Piles of physical clippings long dominated as the bottom line
number in PR sheer coverage counts. If we improved on the total cuttings
from the previous year, then the PR program was working. This measure
went reasonably well, until contraction in the media industry meant fewer
titles each year to pitch. And certainly, volume remains the first key
performance indicator around exposure. But as this paper will detail, no one
KPI tells the full story.
Exposure also calls for measures of the importance of each cutting. After all,
not all cuttings are equal some are in big publications, some are placed in
media properties few or even an unknown number of people read.

From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure

ABANDONING AVE
AND MULTIPLIERS
So how many total people actually see each clip each day? Two
AMEC-suggested metrics for exposure include Opportunities to See (OTS)
and Impressions. There was once a slippery slope around these measures,
but in the last ten years, research professionals have smoothed the
pathway with better thinking. As late as the early 2000s, many organizations
evaluated public relations based on its advertising value equivalency, or
AVEs, which has since been discredited throughout the industry. Back in the
AVE days, firms also employed PR multipliers as a means to capture the
true value of public relations activity. These were largely arbitrary equations
espousing higher value for third-party credibility and pass-through
circulation guesses, and have also been dispelled as PR myth.
Now, best practice dictates the abandonment of multipliers for measurement
exposure, in favor of use of audited circulation figures and audience
numbers, such as those produced by Nielsen (broadcast), Comscore
(online), Audit Bureau of Circulation and BPA Worldwide (print).

From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure

MORE AUDIENCE
OR BETTER
AUDIENCE?
That said, however calculated, raw circulation numbers still dont provide
a measure of whether the people comprising the audience are those who
represent message targets or customer prospects. And there are many
publications with smaller circulations that represent important targets not
because of the raw number of readers they gather, but because they serve
up content to a smaller segment that represents a concentrated group of
targets. A publication focusing on a segment around a particular industry, a
specific role, political leaning or even hobby may represent a more important
media target for a company than a widely circulated daily newspaper with a
low audience proportion of the intended target.
For this reason, many organizations look at exposure by media segment or
by tier. Some do still tier their media mostly by raw circulation, but
increasingly, others are taking a more granular approach to creating tiers.
Brands are increasingly focusing on the demographics of readerships, the
publications own methods for syndication and audience engagement, and
even the perceived influence of media sources among sales targets or
internal executive audiences.

From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure

While there is no single prescriptive method for choosing how to create a

tiered view of an organizations key media, a rule of thumb is to do so on the
basis of communications goal. Tier 1 is rarely the same across organizations.
For organizations for whom boosting sales is the top driver, those
publications that reach the most potential prospects might headline Tier 1.
For those seeking to quickly disseminate information, mainstream
dailies might very well represent the top tier. If attracting investment is a top
goal, publications aimed at venture capitalists might dominate Tier 1. And
as journalists increasingly work across publications, another trend among
companies is to track coverage volume among a finite group of Tier 1
influencers and the audiences they typically bring to each article, which may
or may not fall within the typical core audience for a publication. In the end,
Tier 1 should be defined by a finite list of publications or influencers, a list
that does not change during the measurement cycle.
Some organizations may lump all non-Tier 1 placements into a bucket they
call Tier 2, but best practice also calls for elimination of the measurement of
junk media first. This is a recognition that there are a number of media that
reprint news without delivering the earnest audiences brands are seeking,
and that these properties should be eliminated from measurement and not
at all counted toward exposure totals. Tier 2 should represent viable media
targets that still gather important targets they simply might gather fewer of
them, or represent the targets for secondary communications priorities.

From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure

SETTING EXPOSURE
GOALS
Setting coverage goals within each tier should be based on an analysis of
past campaign performance whenever possible. While often time
consuming, a requisite kickoff activity for nearly any campaign is to gather
up previous coverage numbers, and manually tier each piece of past
coverage, in order to both inform reasonable goal-setting as well as to
provide the basis for year-over-year comparisons. In the absence of
historical data, such as instances when an organization is entering a new
market or intersecting with a new audience segment, assess the
performance around exposure of a likely message competitor working with
similar resource levels.
Exposure goals should also be correlated to the relative amount of resource
being invested toward each tier, whether guided by a quantified
communications budget or by the relative volume of news and content being
generated with specific segments in mind.
Once segmentation and goals are determined, teams tally placements by
tier, and the resultant data provides a deeper view into exposure than the
sheer number of clips.
Some organizations also pair tiered and segmented media coverage goals
with total impressions or OTS. This necessitates research into audited
audience numbers for each media property identified in Tier 1 and Tier 2.
These numbers are then totaled across the Tier to provide a raw measure of
exposure. However, because circulation numbers are top-down estimates,
and not at the per-article level of granularity, a front page article counts as
much in an impressions-only measurement scheme as small blurb buried
deep inside a publication. The combination of the time-intensive nature of
impressions tracking and its lack of precision suggests other methods for
evaluating exposure are a better choice for most PR campaigns.

From Measurement to Management Part 1: Exposure

KEY KPIs
LEWIS recommends the following KPIs as the easiest to implement yet fully
valid for exposure measurement:
Total number of media placements
Total number of Tier 1 media
% of placements in Tier 1 media
% of placements in media category (i.e. industry) A, B, C, D, E
But measurement certainly doesnt stop at exposure. There are many more
questions to answer to determine whether communication is effective,
starting with whether people are engaging with the messages these
placements carry.
This will be explored in the next chapter in the series: ENGAGEMENT.

White Paper Exposure

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