Fishburn Hedges

02.06.2010

COI campaigns always seem to benefit from more evaluation rigour than much of those in the private sector. 

 

So now that the Government has unsurprisingly taken the axe to its PR spend, the industry has been warned that it has to show clearer evidence of tangible benefits for any communications.

 

Are the budget cuts a good thing or a bad thing for us?  Clearly it’s going to hurt some agencies in the short-term, many of them who rely quite heavily on this kind of income.  But if there’s one good thing to come from it in the longer-term, it will make everyone far more determined to show how much of an impact their work has had.

 

Nowadays the communications business is so much better at delivering work that is carefully crafted around a social or commercial end-game – but as an industry we still haven’t quite mastered how to measure it beyond the simple outputs of our trade.

 

For our cousins in advertising, you could argue that the £20m cut that we’ve just seen would be a mere drop in the ocean to them.   While they will have their own storms to weather, we also know that they are far more sophisticated when it comes to justifying their budgets.

 

Certainly for public sector work, evaluation is going to be scrutinised like never before, but perhaps this is the catalyst that the whole industry needs to measure our successes much more around the impact.

 

The budget cuts will no doubt mean even sharper, smarter Government work than before, and in agencies where public and private sector clients rub shoulders, it will raise the measurement bar for those with business and consumer clients.  It’s our responsibility to make sure that we make sure one keeps up with the other.

 

Posted by Adam Keal