That’s entertainment.

In 2025, combined spending on high-end TV show and film production in the UK was £6.8bn (bfi.org). This included investment by Disney, Amazon and Netflix in content filmed here, as well as spend by domestic content producers. The industry is hugely important to the UK economy.

Such levels of investment must be converted into viewers. Domestic production companies and international competitors benefit from industry momentum but have a constant imperative to effectively promote their shows. Some have deeper pockets than others, but all comms teams are accountable for generating strong audience interest in watching, either live or on demand. Selling entertainment is just as competitive as selling cars, shampoo or chocolate. Witness the hype around Wuthering Heights and Marty Supreme – just one recent example of the efforts to generate as much news coverage as possible, in a multitude of creative ways.

PR has historically struggled to measure its impact. For comms teams, there is pressure to demonstrate the outcomes of earned media coverage in relatable terms that executives understand – for example, viewing figures or new subscribers.

Metricomm has substantial experience quantifying the impact of earned online media coverage for TV shows and documentaries, including evaluating the results of PR for multiple high-profile BBC Studios series over several years. We quickly realised that volume and sentiment of coverage mean nothing. Understanding the effects of communication on consumers requires very different metrics.

What makes us different is the ability to uncover previously unseen relationships between the size of audience generated by earned coverage and the metrics that matter. Taking client data relating to viewing and subscriptions, as well as the impact of PR on Google search or website visits, we reveal the substantial contribution of PR to getting eyeballs on TV content.

Of course, advertising and other paid activities make a massive contribution too. We’re not claiming otherwise. However, using robust statistical techniques and combining our media audience data with client-owned data sets, PR can be shown to substantially influence audience behaviour. We became expert at predicting the likely viewing audience for weekly episodes of one of the UK’s most popular TV series by looking at the size of audience engaging with media coverage in the days leading up to transmission.

Are you in the TV content creation business? Do you need data that allows you to have meaningful conversations about the power of PR?  Contact us via hello@metricomm.com or complete the form below.