Challenging the Titans: making media effectiveness your secret weapon   Whichever way you look at the data, Oxford and Cambridge dominate the media effectiveness rankings for UK universities.  It’s not only about awareness, visibility or share of voice. They also manage to scoop by far the largest size of interested audience, as the graphic below [...]

Is the needle stuck on your PR performance?   Even with the most advanced media monitoring tools and evaluation, it can be hard to prove that media relations activity is having an impact on the business metrics that senior leaders care about. That’s why it’s important to set metrics that reveal how PR and comms [...]

Media evaluation is not a hygiene factor! In the hierarchy of needs, hygiene factors are essential, basic requirements. Without them, progress remains limited. The problem is, once we have ticked the boxes, we begin to take things for granted and forget just how important they are for survival. Media evaluation has become a hygiene factor [...]

Back the odds-on favourite! Your online media coverage is having an impact on your organisation’s success. Odds on. Yet PR is a Marketing horse that often gets starved of oats. This horse has better legs than most people understand. Backing media relations within the Marketing mix gives organisations a powerful competitive advantage against a strong [...]

Happy birthday Google! In September 1998, a tech behemoth was born. This week, Google has turned 25. Google’s influence on many aspects of our lives since its inception merely a quarter of a century ago has been phenomenal. The company soon saw off most competitors in the fledgling search engine industry, becoming the dominant player [...]

National media remain key to influencing the audience With each passing year, the readership of print media declines. Now, we do a double take when we see somebody in a café or on a train with a print version of a national newspaper. That’s hardly surprising – reading online is much more convenient and often [...]

New research reveals that search advertising’s effectiveness depends on PR In June 2023, Google published a case study, Driving into the future of advertising: How Kia UK lifted conversion value on Search. It revealed the critical importance of search in generating sales for electric vehicles. In the Google case study, Kia’s UK Head of Brand [...]

Path to purchase, or road to nowhere? Next time a senior executive asks what the organisation gets in return for its investment in PR, the very worst answers you can give (or receive!) are “X number of press releases”, “X volume of articles”, “X impressions” or “£X AVE”. Justifying investment isn’t about counting activities or [...]

What a load of s**t! The discharge of raw sewage by water companies in the UK has become a serious issue, for public health and corporate reputations. Consumer response to media coverage about the issue reveals growing concern around the health and safety implications of sewage disposal. As celebrity campaigners and others increasingly take the [...]

Bridging the gap: PR’s biggest challenge In our recent webinar, our guest Jim Pierpoint, lecturer in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University, shared a picture of a solid stone bridge. For Jim, this symbolises the challenge facing the PR industry today: media measurement and evaluation is still struggling to bridge the [...]