We were recently approached by a prospective client who had been using one of the largest organizations in the country which distributes PSAs (public service advertising) campaigns. When they told us the dollar value that the other organization had supposedly generated, I was astounded. It was ten times more than the most successful campaign we had ever distributed. The prospective client was quite concerned because their board had bought into this astronomical value and to use another distributor which may not be able to match previous results would have been a significant problem.
This background establishes the need for standard methods to measure the value of public service advertising. No one knows how many organizations use PSAs as a way to communicate with their stakeholders, but it is a large number. Nearly every federal agency uses them along with states, public interest groups, associations, and non-profits so the aggregate amount being spent on these campaigns is huge. Thus, having objective methods of measurement is key to continued credibility for the entire field of public service advertising.
For example, when we questioned one distributor’s methodology, we were told that their advertising equivalency values came from the National Association of Broadcasters. Being quite familiar with NAB, it sounded very suspicious so I called them to see if they indeed provided such data. “We do not have that kind of data and if we did, we would not give it to external parties,” the staff person at NAB told me. So much for objective data. And it is this data that distributors use to impress their clients with the success of any given campaign. Perhaps more importantly, it makes it very difficult to compare results from one distributor to another in an objective manner.
At our firm, we post our methodology statement on each client’s reporting portal, spelling out in specific detail how we calculate values, where the data comes from and what it means. We believe that the time has come for all distributors to provide similar methodology statements for the benefit of their clients as well as a way to determine how one campaign has performed against others. Being even more bold, perhaps the time has come for all companies which distribute public service materials to the media to form some type of professional organization where we could share common interests and lobby the media to provide more public service time and space for public benefit.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
"Parsing the PSA Effect"
A colleague sent me an article published in the Congressional Quarterly with the above title. Oklahoma congressman Rep. Ernest Istook ordered the Government Accountability Office to survey the scope and effectiveness of the federal government's public service announcements. The GAO published the findings which are not very encouraging to we who produce, distribute and evaluate PSAs...but there is a reason for it which will be discussed below.
The auditing arm of Congress examined 105 PSAs produced from October 2002 through March, 2005, most of them addressing health and safety issues (which should get more exposure than any other type in our experience). According to the report, the campaigns cost the American taxpayers $152 million, or an average of $1.447 million per campaign. According to the author of the CQ article, [some of the campaigns] "carry a distinct whiff of pop faddishness..." and he went on to say that a number of the other campaigns reviewed by the GAO were "extensions of lobbying mission statements..." or imparted meaningless information and he implies they should not have been created in the first place.
But here is where the story gets very interesting....according to the article, 57 PSA campaigns had not been evaluated for effectiveness. As a professional PSA evaluator - and we are not the only firm that does this work by any measure - why in the world would the U.S. government permit a PSA campaign to ever see the light of day without an evaluation component?
Moreover, how could any responsible government executive permit their agency to spend on average $1.45 million to create a PSA campaign without solid evaluation? I can honestly say that in the past 22 years of distributing literally hundreds of national PSA campaigns - and many of them for federal agencies - we would not think of doing so without an evaluation component. In fact, one of the reasons I started our firm in the first place is that evaluation was lacking in most PSA campaigns being distributed at that time.
Over all of those years we have been an outspoken proponent of PSA evaluation, and in fact, the tools to provide that service have become increasingly more accurate and sophisticated. It is absolutely unconscionable that any organization - non-profit or federal agency - permit a campaign to be distributed without knowing in detail the kind of exposure it is getting. To use federal, taxpayer funds to do it, in my view is almost criminal.
As it presently stands, the level of professional PSA campaign evaluation is almost as good as the evaluation systems used for commercial advertising and getting better every day. While we have had sophisticated tracking systems for broadcast TV for a number of years, there are a couple of companies who now offer electronic tracking for radio as well, and it is just a matter of time until someone figures out how to do it for cable TV which is now not monitored electronically.
Accordingly, we hope that the federal government will take notice that there are at least a dozen firms - including ours - which can offer these kinds of evaluation services and give the taxpayer what they should have - a good return on their tax dollar. And for those campaigns that should not be developed in the first place because they are inane, irrelevant or politically motivated, we hope the GAO and the Congress will hold federal government executives accountable for approving these campaigns in the first place. We would be interested in any thoughts that anyone else has on the subject.
The auditing arm of Congress examined 105 PSAs produced from October 2002 through March, 2005, most of them addressing health and safety issues (which should get more exposure than any other type in our experience). According to the report, the campaigns cost the American taxpayers $152 million, or an average of $1.447 million per campaign. According to the author of the CQ article, [some of the campaigns] "carry a distinct whiff of pop faddishness..." and he went on to say that a number of the other campaigns reviewed by the GAO were "extensions of lobbying mission statements..." or imparted meaningless information and he implies they should not have been created in the first place.
But here is where the story gets very interesting....according to the article, 57 PSA campaigns had not been evaluated for effectiveness. As a professional PSA evaluator - and we are not the only firm that does this work by any measure - why in the world would the U.S. government permit a PSA campaign to ever see the light of day without an evaluation component?
Moreover, how could any responsible government executive permit their agency to spend on average $1.45 million to create a PSA campaign without solid evaluation? I can honestly say that in the past 22 years of distributing literally hundreds of national PSA campaigns - and many of them for federal agencies - we would not think of doing so without an evaluation component. In fact, one of the reasons I started our firm in the first place is that evaluation was lacking in most PSA campaigns being distributed at that time.
Over all of those years we have been an outspoken proponent of PSA evaluation, and in fact, the tools to provide that service have become increasingly more accurate and sophisticated. It is absolutely unconscionable that any organization - non-profit or federal agency - permit a campaign to be distributed without knowing in detail the kind of exposure it is getting. To use federal, taxpayer funds to do it, in my view is almost criminal.
As it presently stands, the level of professional PSA campaign evaluation is almost as good as the evaluation systems used for commercial advertising and getting better every day. While we have had sophisticated tracking systems for broadcast TV for a number of years, there are a couple of companies who now offer electronic tracking for radio as well, and it is just a matter of time until someone figures out how to do it for cable TV which is now not monitored electronically.
Accordingly, we hope that the federal government will take notice that there are at least a dozen firms - including ours - which can offer these kinds of evaluation services and give the taxpayer what they should have - a good return on their tax dollar. And for those campaigns that should not be developed in the first place because they are inane, irrelevant or politically motivated, we hope the GAO and the Congress will hold federal government executives accountable for approving these campaigns in the first place. We would be interested in any thoughts that anyone else has on the subject.
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