What’s the Point of Public Relations if You Can’t Prove it Worked?

David Olajide (00:00):
Before we start today's conversation, let's begin with a story from professional baseball, not about contracts or championships, but about the numbers that coaches choose to celebrate. And in the end, this story might sound uncomfortably familiar to anyone in public relations.

Farzana Baduel (00:31):
It was a summer afternoon at Fenway Park in Boston. The crowd was loud, the vendors were busy, and the Red Sox were facing the Yankees in front of a sold-out stadium. The home team had power in the line up, a strong bullpen and fans eager to see fireworks, but the coaching staff had a curious way of measuring success. They were not watching the scoreboard for runs. They were watching something else. They counted hits every time a batter slapped a single into the outfield. The dugout erupted in cheers. Assistants marked tallies on the clipboards. By the fifth inning, the Red Sox coaches proudly announced, “We already have 10 hits today.” The fans clapped, but they noticed something was odd. The Yankees had only five hits, fewer runners on base, fewer trips to the plate, and yet the Yankees were leading six to two. By the seventh-inning stretch, the Red Sox still celebrated.

(01:27):
 Each base hit as though it were a victory. The coaches pointed to their charts. The players felt reassured, but the game was slipping away because baseball is not won by how many times you reach first base. It is won by how many times you cross home plate. And here is the truth. No professional manager ever managed a game that way. No fans ever left Fenway Park proud of more hits and fewer runs. The story never happened. But in public relations, it happens every day. We celebrate impressions, likes and AVEs just like singles that never score. Meanwhile, leadership is watching the real scoreboard, outcomes, objectives, results. Today on Stories and Strategies, we are stepping up to the plate with Richard Bagnall to talk about the urgent need for PR to start driving runs across the plate with real measurement because piling up hits without scoring will never win the game. So my name is Farzana Baduel.

Doug Downs (02:43):
And my name is Doug Downs, and our guest this week is Richard Bagnall, joining today from southwest London. Hey Richard.

Richard Bagnall (02:51):
Hey guys. Great pleasure to be here. Great to have you.

Doug Downs (02:54):
How are things where you are at? Still walkable trails, warm and lovely park space and all that stuff?

Richard Bagnall (03:01):
We have had the tail end of that storm that was in the US. It came over here. It has completely flooded and drowned us after a lovely hot summer. But I am really pleased to say today the sun is back out. It is going to be a lovely weekend and we have got some great plans to have some fun.

Doug Downs (03:19):
Excellent. Richard, you are a leading global voice in public relations and communications measurement with over 30 years of experience guiding organisations to prove real value. You have chaired AMEC, AMEC or AMEC, is that right?

Richard Bagnall (03:34):
I love you, Doug, for saying it like that because as one of the founding members of AMEC, that is how I would always say it. But half our membership today call it AMEC, and we have a standing joke about it.

Doug Downs (03:43):
It is one of those, alright.

Richard Bagnall (03:45):
We have a standing joke about it. But to an old duffer like me, AMEC, please.

Doug Downs (03:51):
Chaired AMEC, or AMEC if you are among the majority, helped create the Integrated Evaluation Framework and advised clients from NATO to the World Bank. Your contributions have been recognised with top industry honours including PR News’ Measurement Hall of Fame and the CIPR President's Medal. Wow.

Richard Bagnall (04:11):
Lucky boy for being around a long time. I think you get the gongs if you do the time.

Farzana Baduel (04:18):
Now Richard, we have had conversations about the PR industry's relationship with measurement. And last time you said, “You know the PR industry, they need to wake up and smell the coffee on measurement or risk irrelevance.” And I wanted to know, you have been banging the drum about measurement for a long time now. Why is it so critical and important today, more than ever?

Richard Bagnall (04:48):
It matters more than ever now because budgets are under huge pressure. There is so much global uncertainty, strife in the world. Confidence amongst CFOs is at an all-time low. The latest research from Deloitte looking at CFO confidence across Europe shows it is at the lowest it has been for a long time. It is no surprise, we have had a succession of bad events. Obviously we have currently a hot war in Europe as well. We have scares on the stock market. We have cost-of-living crises. We have many challenges happening, which is creating a lack of certainty. And where there is no certainty, CFOs have a fiduciary responsibility to their businesses and their organisations to frankly protect cash. And when they want to do that, they stop spending money on anything that does not demonstrate value. Activity without value is a fool's job. It is useless. There is no point in doing it, you are just a busy fool if you are busy and not actually able to demonstrate the value you are creating for your organisation. And for far too long, despite repeated calls, the comms industry, or large parts of it, continue to just measure activity and not measure the outcomes.

Doug Downs (06:14):
I had a conversation with a colleague probably a couple of years ago now, and the prelude to the conversation, we were both data freaks and that is what we both said. But when I sat with them, they started talking about ad value equivalencies, AVEs. They started talking about impressions and views and things like that, and what was running through my inner monologue, I never said it, my inner monologue was like seeing my friend coming out of a McDonald's and me thinking I did not know I was better than you. What necessitates the mindset shift that has to happen here?

Richard Bagnall (06:51):
I think one of them is feeling inferior when you are in a meeting with marketing colleagues. I think as PR and comms professionals, we feel that they have all of the answers. I think another one is when we present our vanity metrics, AVEs or impressions, those types of things, and we expect a drum roll and that “Haven't we done well?” moment. And actually, the person you are presenting to just asks the difficult question, “Well, how have you supported sales?” or “Have you driven attendance at my event?” or whatever the organisation’s objective might have been.

Farzana Baduel (07:27):
So Richard, you have talked about how it is not just about outputs, it is also outcomes and outtakes. Can you talk us through the difference between outputs, outtakes and outcomes so that we just understand the language first of all?

Richard Bagnall (07:45):
Yes, of course. Let us do that. I think that is really important. Outputs is the word the measurement industry uses to describe the stuff that is generated by the work that we do, and the different ways of measuring it. So depending on our work, and of course PR and comms is so multi-varied and multifunctional, but depending on what we are doing, it might be if you are doing internal comms, the emails that you are sending out. But if we are doing external comms, it is going to be the number of press releases we are sending out, the number of articles generated, the number of pieces of content we put on our homepage, and obviously with digital, social media content as well.

And the ways that we do content evaluation, these are all outputs. So that will be impressions. Doug, you talked about AVEs. I hope we are not using them, but if you are, AVEs are an output metric.

Doug Downs (08:42):
People still are.

Richard Bagnall (08:43):
Yes, I know. Not as many as before, which is the good news, but some people still are, and they need to urgently wake up and realise that it is an invalid metric. But these are the output metrics. They are the counts and amounts, and they are where the vanity metrics tend to sit. Moving up the value chain of what an organisation cares about, from the stuff that we do, the outputs, next up that value chain, or if you think about it moving down the funnel, is what do people think now. They have been exposed to our stuff, what do they now think. Are they aware. Have they changed their mind. What is their perception of our reputation. Has that changed.

So outtakes at their simplest, I like to say, is basically what people think. And outcomes is, having thought about something, what do people then do. Have they bought a product. Have they attended an event. Have they not done something that would perhaps have been catastrophic for our organisation. Have we prevented something from happening. All those things are an outcome.

When we can link those three things together, the outputs (the stuff), the outtakes (what people think) and the outcomes (what people have done), then we can start talking about organisational impact, which is what our C-suite and leaders really care about.

And so the great art of measurement is identifying a problem, understanding where we are before we begin, and then threading through our plan, the activity, the outputs, the outtakes and the outcomes, to talk about organisational impact. World-class evaluation really is storytelling, which of course PR and comms professionals are so good at, and it is about threading those things together.

Doug Downs (10:57):
I love this because really what you are saying is the true measurement of a communication effort is the do, what did they do, the action and or the not. Did they stop doing the thing they were doing before. And that is the point of professional comms.

Richard Bagnall (11:09):
That is the point. I would say it is, but I want to be really clear on this as well. I am not urging anybody to dispense output metrics. We still need to measure our activity.

Doug Downs (11:21):
Fair.

Richard Bagnall (11:21):
But we need to measure our activity and link it to what happened next. And the problem with most PR measurement is we stop at activity and we say, ta-da, we have done all of this. And it leaves the big question of so what, and now what. We measure the what, but we do not answer the so what and the now what.

Farzana Baduel (11:41):
I have got a question for you, Richard, because I get why we need to measure. I get that it is the money men and women that we need to convince for our value to unlock those budgets. I get the difference between outputs and outcomes and outtakes. But what I wanted to understand is both in-house and agency, there is not always sufficient empathy in terms of unlocking resources for measurement. And measurement is not a binary. You go the full hog or none at all. Now, what I wanted an answer from you is how do people who do not have the ability to set up huge measurement departments and unlock budgets from clients or in-house, how can they use free resources. Like you mentioned, AMEC has a framework. So for those people who are doing the basics in terms of outputs and want to step up step by step, what can they do. Where can they go to. How can they start at a basic level and then build up their ability to learn how to measure more effectively with impact and what resources are out there to help them and guide them, but with a realistic lens that people are busy and they have barely got enough time in the day to finish their tasks.

Richard Bagnall (13:08):
First of all, you should not do anything that you are not planning and you are not measuring. You would not get in your car and drive to the shop and not check that you are not about to drive into a pedestrian. You look, you measure your journey the whole way. You check you have got some fuel, your tyre is not flat. We are planning in terms of thinking, well, I am going to go to the shop, that is the route I am going to take, and we are measuring ourselves in real time all day long. Doing any kind of activity that costs money and costs time and costs effort at work should be the same, has to be the same. But I get the point that people do not have much money to spend on all bells and all whistles, and it does not have to be expensive.

Richard Bagnall (14:05):
So the important thing, and I would always advocate for this, in fact, I have just been talking to a massive global company whose measurement is not where they want it to be. And it is not about going from not where we want it to be to being world-class. Well, it is, but it is about doing that in baby steps and literally going crawl, walk, run. And I think that is how everyone should go. To your American listeners, many of you may remember an old colleague of mine, a chap called Mark Wiener, who was very well known on the US evaluation stage. Sadly, Mark passed away about 18 months ago. But Mark had the turn of phrase which I thought was so good about begin simply, but simply begin. If you are not doing anything, just start. Just begin simply. So if you have really got no budget and you are really doing nothing, begin with just some basic outputs.

Let us understand just some simple things about what it is we are trying to do. Let us make sure we have thought about our audience. What do they read, watch and listen to, who are they influenced by. And let us just do some quantitative counts and amounts to say, you know what, we wanted to reach these people, we got 30 clips, whatever it might be, make some numbers up. Then we want to start moving a bit further up that value chain. So how do we do it. Well, there are loads of free ways of getting information. Getting data out of Google, you can do it in different clever ways. You can use the Google Search Console for example. You can even use the pre-emptive search when you type into the search button, it drops to see what people are looking for. Then we want to understand what we have achieved.

If we are a small organisation, we can normally start to look at what has happened as a result. We need to make friends with our web developers, the people who hold some of the data. If we are at a charity or not-for-profit, then we need to make friends with the people who understand not just who is coming to our website, but donations and that type of stuff. And then let us start to get some data sets into Excel and just start to look and see if we can do some pattern recognition. And in fact, you do need Excel, but once you have done it, you do not even need to do a correlation there. You can ask ChatGPT to do it, frankly, and it will do a pretty good job on it for you. Begin simply, simply begin.

Then moving up that value chain, there are ways to do survey research to start understanding what people think, that outtake stuff, and to do that quickly and cost effectively. There are very expensive ways of doing it and much cheaper ways of doing it. There are whole new techniques of doing it. An exciting development in the sector is around what is called synthetic audiences. This is where challenges to the old market research companies that used to charge an arm and a leg to do survey work and it took ages to get the information. Now you can have a synthetic audience. It is real research, but they have grouped it together, and effectively through a large language model, you can ask it questions and you can do things like pre-testing and post-testing of, or certainly pre-testing of, how do you think this headline would work, what would the audience likely respond to this, and you get it really quickly. You get it in real time.

Now, if I was launching a new car brand, I would not count on that to give me insights to make a multi-billion pound strategic decision. But if I wanted some quick information just to guide me and to help me think stuff through, what a great idea. So we need to have the confidence to say, look, here was the challenge, this is what I did, this is what happened, this is the content I generated, the stuff, this is what people now think. Yes, they could have been affected by other things as well. This is what they have now done. Yes, absolutely, that is not just us that has created that, it is a combination of effects. It could even be the weather, right. If you are Coca-Cola, it will include the weather if your sales go up or down.

So let us take these factors, let us just take these data points, let us tell the measurement story, let us look to correlate it and let us say this is what has happened, and effectively draw your own conclusions on how much effect you want to put against this. We should not over-claim, but we should not under-claim either.

Doug Downs (18:29):
Richard, we could do two episodes here. Really appreciate your time today.

Richard Bagnall (18:34):
Oh, has our time flown by. It has been great fun. I have enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Farzana Baduel (18:40):
Richard, I do have one question for you that has been left by our previous guest, Jonathan Mast.

Jonathan Mast (18:46):
My question for the next person that you interview is really very simple, and that is, how are they going to help their team embrace AI as opposed to getting replaced by AI?

Richard Bagnall (19:01):
Yes, well, it is an absolutely brilliant question actually. I think it links to what we have been talking about superbly. If PR and comms continues to be a tactic and not a strategic partner within its organisation, it will be replaced by AI. I was talking at a conference yesterday and it was brilliant actually. It was in Prague, it was in Czech, and I do not speak a word of Czech, but there was an AI app that was being demonstrated at the event, and I had it on my phone and I listened to the previous speaker in real time through this AI app. There was no human in the sound booth translating it. It was real time.

And my colleague who spoke before me said, oh, we in PR have nothing to fear from AI, it is not going to replace us. And I said, I do not agree. It is going to replace us if we just allow ourselves to be doers. If we are doers of stuff and counters of stuff, be prepared to be replaced, because CEOs the world over are being told by their children, there is this great product called ChatGPT, and it can write press releases, it can write them in 10 different ways in two minutes, and they will go, good idea, let us get rid of our PR people.

So if we are just stuff generators, we are finished. So what we have to do is use AI effectively to make us more efficient and to make us have the time to do the stuff that matters. And that is where humans excel. It is our critical thinking, it is the context, it is the relationships that we have.

Doug Downs (20:53):
Amen. Your turn, Richard, what question would you like to leave behind for the next guest?

Richard Bagnall (20:58):
Yes, I guess it sort of builds on that in a way. I would ask the next guest, in five years' time, what does he or she think that a PR agency or a high-performing in-house PR team might look like?

Farzana Baduel (21:17):
Thank you, Richard.

Richard Bagnall (21:19):
Good. Well, it has been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

Doug Downs (21:24):
Here are the top three things we got today from Richard Bagnall. Number one, budgets demand proof of value. CFOs cut spend that lacks evidence. PR has to show business impact, not just activity. Number two, from outputs to outcomes, listen closely. Outputs equal activity, outtakes equal what people think, outcomes equal what people do. That is the piece we need to prove, link all three. Number three, start small but start now. Measurement does not need big budgets. Use free tools if you have to, build step by step, and just begin.

Farzana Baduel (22:06):
If you would like to send a message to our measurement guru guest, Richard Bagnall, we have got his contact information in the show notes. Stories and Strategies is a co-production of Curzon Public Relations, JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies Podcasts. You can catch the whole episode with Richard on our YouTube channel. There is a link in the show notes. And thank you to our producers, Emily Page and David Olajide. Lastly, do us a favour, forward this episode to one friend, and thank you for listening.