I greatly enjoyed David McLaren’s clinical destruction of the concept of
Advertising Value Equivalents (PR Week, 20 October).
The challenge facing measurement services like Impact and its users in
the PR industry is to align the parameters of content analysis
(described by David McLaren as an interim measure) with the
communications objectives and the more direct audience-related
measurements to which he refers. For clients, where this happens,
content analysis is seen as a key programme control mechanism; where
there is no such alignment, content analysis is of limited use as an
evaluation tool.
But of course media content analysis goes beyond the boundaries of PR
evaluation. It can be used as a fundamental research resource in its own
right, as a method of tracking competitors, and as a way of exploring
the whole media environment in which the PR professional is operating.
Dermot McKeone, Managing director, Infopress, London
