EASTWEST PR Roundtable Series PR ROI

Whatever they do, they do media monitoring. So that's basically, that's where they actually look at an article and calculate the space.

So that's the traditional ones, right?

The traditional media sort of thing.

Okay.

But we haven't actually learned about the online media. Because I think a lot of advertisers do not really use the online media part because it's not as credible for certain audiences.

But at the same time, you said for your target segment, the high school crowd, this is where you take your information from.

But we usually get it through word of mouth. So we like it if our friends or people on our network talk about it. Then we are interested about it. But if you put an advertising little segment on the website, we will never click it because we think it's a virus or spam.

I was reading something about Richard Branson and how he jumps at every opportunity to create a PR value for his company. I mean, is it partly because of who he is or what? I'm not sure, but I remember in an interview he said he never turns down an invitation for an interview from the press, you know, whereas there are CEOs who are very media shy. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure whether there will come a time where, because of what is going on with internet and technology and blogs and things like that, where the PR company— will there even be a need for a PR company when there are so many people out there creating content on their own?

You put everything together. It's also interesting to make a big difference in building. Public relations and private relations. Because when you speak about word of mouth, it's not public relations to me. And this is something for me kind of new coming up, that today some of, as far as I'm concerned, with little businesses or also all the service industry wants much more to focus on private relations. Because being too much in PR, it's sometimes not a good Too much visible means that you don't have anything to do in real business. You don't have clients because you spend too much time by doing this kind of old show, blah blah, and being, you know, instead of taking care of your clients and customers because you have some. So I think that it's very important also today on service industry, that the one I know the more, for hotel, restaurant, little businesses. If you see all the specifically in Singapore, all the places are doing well. Don't do any public relations. They do private relations. So that is little ads, articles, very targeted. But then they invite people. They spend time. As you say, time is money. So it's not you cannot put a value on it and measure their ROI. But at the end of the day, they're doing very well because everybody is.

I've been there. USC does a study about every 3 years or so of, you know, top-level PR directors, as well as some C-level executives, on how they integrate PR and what are some of the best practices in PR. The most recent study that they did found that, I think, I can't quite remember the percentage, but a very high percentage of them said it's quite important to have measurement Integrated into PR strategy from the start, so it's important to have some level of measurement in the plans from the beginning so you can measure the effectiveness and make changes as we need to. So certainly agree with the concept that measuring ROI is is important to have as part of your PR plan. But you know personally, and actually that my company has has a stance that. AWEs are not— they're a flawed mechanism for that measurement. If you take an article in the Straits Times and it mentions your brand, it may also mention a competitor in the same article. So how does that equate to an advertisement? Is it even reaching the right audience? Do you want to reach people that read the Straits Times? Are you looking really more to reach a very niche audience? All these things need to be taken into consideration when you're trying to measure the effectiveness of an article. And so while ADEs can be kind of a quick and dirty way of justifying a budget, they're not— I don't think that they can be really effective. Thank you.