The moment you ask for advertising equivalency, you (PR) are already dead! (Angry)

Now, Shinmeikai "Strategic PR" Season 2 is already nearing its midpoint (What? Already?). Yes, seasons are short, and topics change rapidly. Like fashion, trends pass in the blink of an eye, but they often come back into vogue after a cycle. So, this month too, we'll be answering your questions squarely. It's time for "Ask Ino-chan About That!"

How do you measure PR effectiveness?

This time, we tackle the KPI dilemma plaguing our PR industry peers. Clients often ask, "So, how do you set KPIs?" Of course, there's no single right answer. First, you must decide "what to base it on" and "where to set the passing line." But it feels like, "Huh? We're supposed to set the goals?" The target goal should be something the client clearly holds, and I sometimes wonder if it's really okay to leave that up to the people they're hiring to do the work. In advertising, it's probably fine to say something like, "With this budget, doing this much work will get us this level of awareness. Other companies are satisfied with that approach!" But PR is often unfamiliar territory for many companies; they see it as uncharted waters. So, perhaps it's inevitable that we end up with requests like the one mentioned earlier.

Advertising results are primarily judged by how many people it reached. This can be measured through TV ratings, newspaper/magazine circulation, or website page views as reach metrics. In terms of "making people aware," these metrics certainly seem appropriate. However, in this age of information overload, most advertising messages no longer achieve their intended effect. That is, it's like, "I think I heard something about that, but what was it again?" The information isn't sticking in people's minds or hearts.

PR's results should focus on "awareness change, attitude shift, and engagement."

So what are the essential outcomes expected of PR? The PR category at Cannes Lions consistently follows the same guiding principle: It boils down to whether you've achieved "Change Minds, Change Behaviors, Engagement." In other words, "How much did you shift consumers' awareness?" "Did you guide them to change their attitudes?" "Did you build and strengthen empathy between the company/organization and consumers over the medium to long term?" If you haven't reached that point, it's no good. "Didn't we say it?" "No one heard it!" is absolutely unacceptable.

However, the method currently rampant in effectiveness measurement is the familiar "advertising equivalent." It measures how many people saw it when placed in media. But ultimately, that evaluates it as an "advertising substitute." In other words, information reach becomes the goal, failing to address the substance of PR's effectiveness: credibility, persuasiveness, and the ability to spread conversation. Furthermore, this falls into the stereotype that "PR = publicity."

Of course, there are cases with simple goals: "We want to maximize reach!" or "We don't have the budget for commercials, so we want to get mass media publicity exposure through PR!" While you can't say that's inherently wrong, in today's complex information flow structure, if you're thinking about creating mechanisms that actually move real people, I believe it's time to reject such simplistic thinking. Otherwise, we risk falling into an approach that ignores the fundamental purpose: "Just get exposure. The content doesn't matter, right?"

Are there KPIs beyond advertising equivalency?

"They exist!" I'll state that emphatically right here. Yes, they do. Perhaps even more than numbers, clients might be satisfied if something like "After that TV show aired, the product vanished from supermarket shelves in an instant!" happened. Witnessing such an event would let them experience "Forget those petty numbers! It's a celebration, a celebration! Wahahaha!" They get to experience the PR effect firsthand, and before you know it, they're thinking "Next time, we'll aim for another big haul!" and PR becomes "treated like a god" (I get treated like a god sometimes too. At home, I'm pretty much treated like trash...). But that kind of thing can't happen every time, right? So, we end up saying, "Alright, let's look at the detailed results then."

Actually, the more experienced a company is with PR, the less they tend to obsess over such metrics. Living in the unpredictable world of PR builds a kind of gut instinct. That said, if there are evaluation metrics you can track over time or per project, you'll probably want to look at them. For those folks, let me introduce a few representative metrics I recommend.

① Media Feedback

This involves gathering opinions from a media perspective on the content and dissemination structure of a company's information releases. Even if a reporter finds something interesting and wants to cover it, media space and airtime are limited. Depending on the timing, coverage might not happen. For example, even if a TV program plans to feature a story and conducts an interview, that report might never air and get shelved due to a major social event. Simply quantifying whether coverage happened to determine if the information release was successful isn't the only KPI. Whether covered or not, journalists will have formed their own impressions. Therefore, asking media reporters how they actually perceived information from companies can lead to a qualitative evaluation of PR activities. For companies, receiving third-party critiques of their activities allows them to strategize their next steps. Such feedback, offering hints for future activities, is extremely valuable.

② Social Listening

Some companies may find mass media exposure difficult or simply prioritize online presence over traditional media. In such cases, we recommend capturing the raw, unfiltered voices of consumers circulating online. This is known as "social listening." While services monitoring negative online comments for risk management have existed for some time, recent approaches also gather positive opinions and conduct detailed analysis.

Online, it's common to discover new evaluation points or areas for product improvement through unexpected interpretations that differ from the intended message. Comments like "Actually, I really like this part of the product!", "This feature makes more sense when used this way!", or "This phrasing shows they don't understand us at all!" frequently surface. The goal is to capture these opinions in real-time, amplify the positively received aspects, and adjust strategies for the negative points to enable immediate response. Simultaneously, we can identify which attributes of groups value what aspects, and through which channels information was acquired and disseminated. While understanding how the immediate information deployment unfolded is important, this approach can also be leveraged to strategize the next steps.

③ Comparison of Consumer Perceptions Before and After Information Exposure

Finally, this is research to track whether PR actually caused the previously mentioned shifts in awareness or changes in attitude. This is a bit large-scale, involving comparing changes in thousands of consumer samples before and after the PR campaign. For example, during a three-month PR campaign period, we observe what kind of information exposure consumers experience daily and what actions they take as a result—such as "becoming interested in the product," "wanting to buy it," "visiting a store to consider purchasing," or "actually buying it."

Naturally, consumers encounter various information sources. Some might have seen commercials during the same period, others might have encountered online news derived from PR, or they might have learned about the product at a street event or a store sale. However, by comparing groups based on conditions—such as those exposed to a single information source versus those exposed to multiple sources—we can derive the effectiveness of each individual measure. This approach reveals the "pure effect of PR" itself.

Store visit intent rate / Purchase consideration rate each increased 4-fold

Here, I had a key realization: the combined effect of multiple touchpoints is often more significant than the isolated results of each. While just one example, a campaign I worked on revealed that consumers exposed to both PR and advertising had a 4x increase in both store visit intent and purchase consideration compared to those exposed to advertising alone. Rather than relying on standalone solutions like advertising or PR alone, the critical demand for modern communication plans lies in how effectively each initiative can be organically designed and integrated.

Other metrics exist too: tracking points across categories in the Nikkei Corporate Image Survey over time, examining links with product sales, or prioritizing correlations with stock prices. Approaches vary—sometimes focusing on real-time short-term data, sometimes on long-term trends, sometimes using quantitative methods, sometimes incorporating qualitative insights. But the key question remains: What is the goal? In other words, what truly matters is clearly communicating to us, "What are you aiming for?" Of course, we're more than happy to discuss this together. Following last month, "Please contact me."