Point Oh!

I found myself agreeing with Steve Rubel this morning. In what seems like a long overdue comparison, Rubel cited Billy Beane’s “Moneyball” as an example of how marketers need to change their key metrics to better serve their objectives. The premise of “Moneyball” is that the Oakland A’s built a competitive team on a much smaller budget than their competitors by changing the key statistics they looked at for their players and prospects.

This works particularly well in PR, where the metrics have been traditionally skewed by bad sources. Circulation inflation has been rampant in print media for a long time but for some reason, with only a few exceptions, it hasn’t fazed the marketers that continually dump millions of dollars into the channel. Instead of finding a better system, PR’s prevailing answer to measurement has been advertising value equivilent (AVE), which relies on these same flawed numbers.

Rubel suggests that a cost per action (CPA) model would be a step in the right direction. I mentioned in a previous post that measuring interactive media must take the interactive element very literally and any measurement must ask “what is the desired interaction?”

I’m also a big proponent of partnering with niche media as opposed to just being a blip on the radar of an outlet with a bigger reach. When you partner with a smaller outlet, like a niche blog or social network, they will probably work with you to give you all the data you need to show ROI. Getting custom data from bigger players like Gawker Media and MySpace/Facebook is probably a bit more of a stretch. Dealing with numbers doesn’t mean you can’t get creative.