They didn't have an answer, because there is no correlation between a GRP. It's a measure of not even reach, it's a measure of reach and frequency. If you reach the same number of people three times you get 300 GRPs. So, running your ad, this is like an accounting for I ran the ad, what am I going to get charged for it? As opposed to pardon me, how many people actually saw it and did it move the needle? Did it even change brand awareness? By the way, is brand awareness actually what a 100 year old brand like Oldsmobile needed? You can be aware of something and not want to buy it. In fact, with sales going down, there seemed to be an inverse correlation here. He was unselling his customers. He was telling older Oldsmobile customers, "Pardon me this is not your car anymore." He was reminding younger prospects, "This is the car your father drove, do you really want to be seen in it?" So, it was my father who taught me the awkward, the painful lesson that there is no correlation between GRPs in brand awareness, and there may not be even a correlation between brand awareness and sales. So be careful. If somebody in your organization has an advertising background, and they say, " Well, yeah, this is how many GRPs we expect to get from this campaign." Or if somebody says, "Look, we want to get all the metrics together and measure all things the same way. Let's use GRPs as the common denominator." If you have the penalty flag, get it out and throw it. This is something you need to challenge. This is a bogus metric. Just realize GRPs are a bogus metric. Got it? Sorry, had to share the story. Wait, I have another embarrassing story. Only this one involves me, not my father. In 1986, about the time my father was running his classic ad campaign, I became the Director of Corporate Communications at Lotus Development Corporation and again, most of you are too young to even have heard of Lotus Development Corporation. They made a spreadsheet software called Lotus 123. In its era, Lotus was the biggest independent software company in the world, bigger than Microsoft. But this was back when DOS was the operating system of choice so, it probably is before your time but just follow me along here. So, I became the Director of Corporate Communications at the Hot Software Company. That was about four and a half years old when I joined it, and one of my employees informed me that, "Welcome, you're the 13th Director of Corporate Communications that we've had." If you do the math, you can understand the life expectancy of my predecessors, and it was like, "Boy, this is going to be fun. I wonder why nobody else has survived here for more than a few months." Well, after one month on the job, I had a clipping report of 700 newspaper and magazine articles that had mentioned Lotus, my first month in the job. I had done all of the calculations of the advertising value equivalency means, you measure the column inches that you get and you have to find out what the rate card is for that publication and you find out if you were to have bought advertising in that publication for the same number of column inches, what would it have cost and that is your PR value of all those articles. Took a lot of math, but I'd come up with a really big number and I put it in a report and there was an executive summary so you didn't have to wait to the end to get to the punchline. It was right there at the beginning. I was on the seventh floor of corporate headquarters, just down the hall from the CEO, and I walked down the hall and I casually put it on his desk and said, "Here's the first month's report." He paused, asked me to wait. I couldn't like sneak out. He started thumbing through it and the CEO said, "Jarboe, if I could deposit these little pieces of paper in a bank, then I'd know what they're worth, but until you can measure the impact of PR in cold hard cash, don't waste my time with these so-called reports." I'd done a lot of calculations. But you know what, he was right. He was right. I'd never had my bluff called before in public relations. But here's the secret, the CEO before becoming CEO had been a McKinsey consultant and before becoming a McKinsey consultant, he'd been a journalist, he worked for Ginap. He knew I was faking. So, I had to come up with a different way to measure results other than assuming that more coverage was better, and as I discovered over the years, he was right, he was very right. Getting more coverage is not necessarily better particularly if it's old. Let's say negative publicity, that can hurt or publicity in the wrong places. In fact, one of the things I discovered is a thing that could hurt sales the most was not business press coverage, business press coverage was a trailing indicator. They would always report on how you did the previous quarter. What could croak your sales faster was trade press coverage because that could impact your sales this quarter. That's not a lesson, most PR people learn, bigger is better not focused is better. But I want to share it with you because again, this is another bogus metric AVE. If you have anyone on your team who is trying to measure success using advertising value equivalency, well, first of all, riddle me this, it turns out GRPs was a bogus metric and measuring your PR based on a bogus metric is a double bogus metric. Don't do it.
