Government Evaluates PR …

We are mild sceptics on evaluation in public relations for two reasons.

The first is that it is useful precisely to the degree that the message being monitored is simple and relates to large numbers of individuals.  Much of our work is at the higher end of the B2B market.

The second is that it is often used in corporate settings for ‘backside covering’ where added costs are applied to a programme (see below for the standard additional cost in Government) simply because a manager is anxious that he may not be believed or trusted in his or her work.

Government and Accountability

For Government, the issue is complicated further by the political expectation that every pound of taxpayers’ money must be accounted for. Civil servants, otherwise allowed to operate surprisingly freely, are ultimately disciplined by the fear of being hauled before the somewhat random terror of the Public Accounts Committee.

The previous New Labour Administration tried to deal with the problem through encouraging internal scrutiny, managerialism and the misery of targeting.

This was a typical ‘progressive’ solution to the problem of accountability but, in effect, it infantilised and demoralised many public servants, downgraded judgement and the use of calculated risk and added a layer of expensive bureaucracy that, in the event, not only did nothing about waste but allowed it to expand so long as the right boxes were ticked.

This was not entirely the fault of those civil servants who otherwise passively connived in an essentially political determination to use the public sector as a job creation scheme for graduate overspill and for the employment and identity agenda of New Labour.

Civil servants, by their nature, go where they are told and then tend to intensify the bad as well as the good effects of policy by following instructions to their logical conclusion. They are trained to implement and not to question what they are told to implement.

And this brings us back to government public relations …

The last Government saw a massive and rather wasteful (sometimes politically dubious) use of communications to sell its policies. By the end of the New Labour era, the opposition (both bits of it) were getting thoroughly miffed at what appeared to be a use of communications for cultural engineering against their political interest.

This was not paranoia. New Labour’s creators were very aware of the late Marxism of the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci. He saw politics as a matter of active intervention in culture in order to change not merely behaviour but the very foundations of society for redistributive ends.

This is an approach that has emerged with a new scientific justification and means in recent years as ‘nudge’. But the central questions are, as always, ‘cui bono’ and ‘quis custodiet custodes’.

Now, we are into a new era. The new Government might still be in love with ‘nudge’ but ‘nudge’ is now an alternative to high spending whereas Gramscian ideology was about directing high spending to social and cultural ends. The civil servants are now all of a flutter. New masters require new thinking.

Major cuts are on the way. The communicators within the service see themselves as potentially squeezed between the desire to continue to get outcomes amongst a recalcitrant and distrustful population and a fresh interest in ‘waste’ in a world where, notoriously, no-one really understands how communications actually work and even the leading edge of the social media world is confused as to its own real value and application.

Government communicators will sheepishly admit that they have often been relying for public relations evaluation on an advertising value equivalent metric for which the phrase ‘clutching at straws’ might have been invented.

The COI Response

Late last year, almost like the cavalry arriving to protect the stagecoach as the ammunition was running out, the Central Office of Information came up with its alternative model, offering it to the baronial Departments of State as a tool for arguing its case for particular expenditures to surly and cynical Ministers with whom they may have to live for the next half decade at least.

The clue to the necessity for COI action comes from Director of News and PR, Neil Martinson, himself. Mid-2009, the COI sent an identical brief on evaluation to five companies and came up with five different results – with a very large range within each. The introduction to the COI brochure ‘Standardisation of PR Evaluation Metrics’ (2009) is polite but you might well imagine the cynicism and alarm that such a result might cause.

The COI has now produced mandatory core standards for the first time but it doesn’t stop there. The COI is talking of a much wider ‘holistic evaluation’. This is being cross-linked to changing behaviour in precisely the way envisaged by ‘nudge’.

There is, of course, the now mandatory reference to climate change as well as to smoking. Political discretion will have limited reference to others such as obesity but the bottom line is that ‘holistic evaluation’ is going to be at the heart of the guidance of and justification for continued state involvement in behaviour modification, stripped of its Gramscian theory and now getting down and dirty to ‘nudge’ us into being healthy and responsible.

Our own view is that this technology of behaviour modification is likely to be useful but will not be as startlingly successful as the proponents of it would like us to think.

The Limitations of Holistic ‘Nudge’

There is still an element of backside-protecting in all this because behaviour modification is a sign of state weakness rather than state strength. Stalin would not have piddled around with obesity management through persuasion, he would have cut fat in foods and punished fat intake. Our Government cannot do such things – or so it thinks.

There is also the element of bloody-minded resistance as a normal mode of dealing with authority amongst the British. The political risks of resentment are great. Tory MPs have no illusion about some important factors in their election – simmering rage at ‘political correctness out of control’, two weekly waste bin collections and urban cultural engineering applied to suburban and rural cultures.

Even today, the programmes created by the last Government and laundered through compliant local authorities may take two or three years to work their way out of the system regardless of the cuts. Many ‘progressive’ attitudes (notably towards race and ethnicity) have been fully adopted amongst the Middle English. Traditional Tories will be uncomfortable about the world that they have inherited.

Finally, there is the instinctive fear of a minority that behaviour modification strategies, in which ‘holistic evaluation’ plays a central role, might come to be extended beyond health and education into new areas of national identity and security, even of acceptance of the European Project.

This might backfire in a war between authority and street where the internet – as we have seen in the recent Wikileaks saga – has, possibly temporarily, shifted the terms of trade to the street.

But this is still progress …

However, the good news is that AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent) is now dead in the water. At the least, Ministers and Parliamentarians have a single standard (assuming that it is applied consistently across Government) against which to measure expenditures. This reform has nothing to do with political choices about value as such. Ultimate responsibility still lies with our ‘nudging’ politicians despite the weakness of nudge’s scientific underpinnings.

Of course, it has to be work in progress. The COI leaflet is clear: digital audience measurement ‘is in its infancy’. There is no ‘great and the good’ (like the PRCA, CIPR or AMEC) for digital measurement.

Somewhere between 5% and 10% of the costs of all Government campaigns are going to be expended on media evaluation. The question has to be asked (since the evaluation is really of money already spent) whether this ‘tax’ might be better spent as the ‘cost of risk’ component involved in making judgements.

Why do we say this? Because a conservative evidence-based rational approach to political action might sound as if it is self-evidently good but, if its purpose is solely to mitigate career risk amongst civil servants and politicians, then it implies that we might not have escaped very far from wasteful box-ticking after all.

The danger is that initiatives will be chosen because they can be measured or fit some (often incomplete) academic evidence model when the same funds or less funds might be targeted with more political judgement on specific outcomes.

Government, in short, is still living in a somewhat anal world of systems and procedures that appear to be as much about sustaining the legitimacy of the State as serving the population.

For example, it might be cheaper and more productive to tax fat and sugar in foodstuffs in a decisive act of Government, one that might see a temporary rise in food inflation during a period of adjustment, and to subsidise fresh fruit and vegetable production – and not spend at all on behaviour modification.

But that would require a mentality of decisiveness, leadership and calculated risk. The Government has been ‘frit’ of its own population for far too long to do anything so bold.  Behaviour modification and backside covering will remain the order of the day and ‘holistic evaluation’, in that context, is a definite reform and move forwards.

But if the future is digital and if it proves that digital spread is actually not measurable (as memes and viruses), then perhaps the basis for backside-protecting goes and Government will be forced to behave like the rest of us mortals and exercise judgement and make firm decisions in real time …

The COI Pamphlet Standardisation of PR Evaluation Metrics (2009) is referenced as 301538