By Gabriel Pedreschi
Having hired a media relations service, how should the company interpret the achieved results from a specific action or from a monthly media relations service?
Before approaching the subject of how the client receives the results report, it is worth remembering that every agency uses its particular method for measuring results, which can be: column centimeter, impact measurement or the so called Barcelona Principles, which consider the level of quality of the publications (high relevance media outlets) rather than the quantity of publications.
To facilitate the interpretation of the results, the agency will use some preset metrics such as: the value of the published material (Earned Media Value, EMV), audience reach, provoked media or spontaneous media, classification (positive, neutral or negative), type of media (TV, radio, print etc) and its relevance. As an example, we can take a client from the financial sector that gets a piece published in Valor Econômico, considered one of the most important business news publications in Brazil. To make this information more complete, the clipping agency (or the media relations agency itself) calculates the value of that page and the space that is being occupied by the client in the publication, had it been paid for. To know the tier and the relevance of the news media, the news paper’s (or the site’s) media kit is used, reaching the number of 60.000 and defining the tier as tier 1 (the most relevant for the area).
Having done this for every piece published for the client, the agency puts together the report, which provides the sum of all the results for each publication during a predefined period of time (usually the previous month). Along with the explanation of what work has been done, the same file will also contain infographics adapted to each piece of information and also adapted to the needs of the client. In other words, every client receives a customized report that is designed according to its needs.