Media and The Message

by Nicholas G. Licata, M.A.

If I Had a Nickel... [Back to Columns]

If I had a nickel for every dollar wasted on advertising and public relations in this country, I would buy a house right next door to Bill Gates.

Maybe it is because of the nature of the media, but many companies get tied up in the technical side of their communication efforts. They allocate vast resources on the look, sound, and placement of their advertisements and don't budget in any money for research or evaluation.

While the elements of design and good writing are the foundation for creating effective messages, without research and evaluation, your money is wasted. This is why advertising and public relations should be viewed as management functions and included in your strategic planning process.

Suppose the goal of your most recent communication effort is to raise community awareness of your company's environmental policies. You've scheduled a series of events and developed and placed a flight of print and electronic messages, and you've spent all the money allotted for the effort. At your monthly board meeting, you are asked, "So how successful was our campaign?"

Unless you know what the level of community awareness was before you began your campaign, you cannot answer this question. Unfortunately, too many in the position to ask such a question are satisfied with the answer, "Great! It's been all over the papers and the radio." But, without research in the form of a "baseline" survey of your audience's level of awareness, there is no way to know.

Now, I know what you are thinking: If the messages have been in all the media, many people must have been exposed to them and the level of awareness must have risen, right? Naturally, but let's look at it from a different perspective.

Imagine you go to the grocery store and ask the grocer for some fresh ground coffee. He takes a brown paper bag from his shelf, reaches into a big barrel and puts a couple of scoops of ground coffee in the bag. Without weighing it, he writes $7.00 on the bag and hands it to you.

Would you be satisfied to pay the seven dollars? After all, you know that there is coffee in the bag. Of course you wouldn't. You would want to know how much coffee you got, and what the price per pound was. That way, you would know if it was worth your seven dollars.

Why is it any different with your communication budget? The obvious difference in my two examples is that the price per pound information in the grocery store is free, and you have to pay for the research in your marketing plan. But, by building methods of evaluation into your plan, you gain knowledge that will help you maximize the return on your investment. Without them, you are going to the checkout with your results in a brown paper bag.