RIP, pass-along rate
Posted on 20. Mar, 2009 in Marketing, Trends
While cleaning out my office at the Allied Box Factory, I came across this 2,488-page relic: a printed Bacon’s directory of editorial contacts at every newspaper in the US including The Rocky Mountain News, which shut down last week, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which this week went online-only in an attempt to stay afloat.
For PR firms – people whose job is to get editorial media coverage, as opposed paid advertising, by sending out press releases and the like – the demise of the newspaper carries with it the demise of one the industry’s most powerful tools: the pass-along rate.
Measuring the effectiveness of any marketing campaign is something of a black art. With PR, the key metric has been the impression, which is supposed to reflect a discrete instance of someone reading, watching, or hearing whatever you’re trying to promote. Traditional PR agencies have demonstrated value by building their client reports around gaudy, massive numbers of impressions. Theoretically reflecting the number of people other than the purchaser that read a single copy of a newspaper of magazine, the pass-along rate multiplies the media’s circulation by whatever the PR agency feels is appropriate. I was taught to use 2.3, which I believe was selected because it’s large enough to make a big difference, small enough not to be questioned too rigorously, and appears to be based on some sort of research because it ends in .3 instead of a whole number or .5.
But when you think about it, it’s really a stretch to tell a client that all of these things are true:
- Every copy printed is purchased.
- Everyone who buys a copy reads it cover-to-cover.
- Then they give it to 1.3 other people.
- Each of those people reads it cover-to-cover.
- There’s lasting value in every one of those instances.
Because newspapers have room for so much content in each issue, it’s made sense for PR agencies to focus on them because their massive circulations, combined with the ol’ pass-along, yield lots and lots of impressions. Although there was no way to measure the impact of those impressions, there wasn’t a great way to measure the value of print advertising, either. So PR agencies weren’t at much of a disadvantage relative to ad agencies.
But now, measurability is one the key selling points of online advertising, while the metrics for online PR remain murky. A savvy advertiser will know not only how many times their ad was displayed and clicked, but what the people who clicked on the ad did once they reached the advertiser’s site. Meanwhile, a PR person whose press release is run on a news page can’t provide their client with any information beyond an estimate of the site’s total traffic and visitors.
So, as newspapers fade into oblivion, let us pause to note the correlated demise of some PR agency bullsh*t.
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