“Did our promotional campaign work?” sounds like a simple yes-or-no question.
But it isn’t.
I recently taught my Media and You students at East Tennessee State University that researchers who study media effects for a living don’t ask that question at all.
Instead, to determine if a campaign actually worked, researchers first break “effect” down into five characteristics. Here’s how to borrow that same framework to add some gravitas to your own PR, marketing or advertising campaigns.
1. Targets – Who or What Actually Changed?
This is the who or what exhibiting the effect. Most research focuses on individuals, but effects also show up on macro targets, including:
- groups (ad hoc collections of people)
- organizations (formal groupings with a shared purpose)
- institutions (organizations with formal structures that persist over time as different people cycle through them)
- society (a very large, diverse collective sharing only a few characteristics)
A campaign that moves individual purchase intent is doing fundamentally different work than one that reshapes an institution — like changing how an entire industry talks about a topic — and each requires its own kind of measurement.
2. Timing – When Did It Show Up?
Timing is whether the effect is immediate (appears during or right after exposure) or long-term (shows up only after repeated exposures).
Immediate effects are easier to notice and easier to link causally to a specific message. Long-term effects are the ones that actually move institutions and culture, and they’re much harder to prove, which is exactly why they get underweighted in campaign reporting that only tracks short-term lift.
3. Valence – Positive for Whom?
Valence, when it comes to communications, is whether an effect is positive, neutral or negative, and from whose perspective.
From a media business’s point of view, a message is “positive” if it attracts an audience and gets them to come back for more. It’s completely independent of whether it’s good for the audience member. From the consumer’s point of view, a positive effect helps them meet a personal goal or need.
The same message routinely scores positive on one scale and negative on the other, because the two perspectives are measuring different things.
4. Type – What Kind of Change Was It?
Type is the form the effect takes.
Behavioral effects are the ones everyone defaults to talking about, but there are at least five nonbehavioral types as well that matter just as much and get credited far less often:
- Cognitive – Acquiring factual or social information, arguably the most pervasive, least-credited effect of all, since every exposure teaches you something whether you notice or not.
- Belief – Constructing faith that something is real or true, usually built slowly by watching how real people and fictional characters are rewarded or punished for their actions.
- Attitudinal – An evaluative judgment, which media can create by presenting something attractively, reinforce by showing respected people share it, or trigger fresh by introducing something new.
- Physiological – Automatic bodily arousal, mostly outside conscious control.
- Emotional – A feeling triggered by exposure, closely tied to physiological arousal.
One long-term emotional effect worth flagging on its own is desensitization. This is where years of watching violence that rarely shows victims suffering, and instead glamorizes perpetrators, gradually erodes the ability to feel sympathy for victims, both on-screen and in real life.
5. Function – How Did It Actually Happen?
Lastly, function is the mechanism by which the effect gets produced. This falls into four groupings:
- Acquiring – Picking up a content element, a pundit’s stated attitude, an app’s homepage design, a sequence of images, during exposure, or acquiring beliefs, attitudes and behavioral sequences through memorization over time.
- Triggering – Setting off a multi-step process, like reconstructing a knowledge structure when new information doesn’t fit what’s already there.
- Altering – Changing an existing belief, attitude, mood or standard, which can be instant or take years, and can be fleeting or permanent.
- Reinforcing – Repeated exposure gradually adding weight to something that already exists, making it harder to change. Rigid knowledge structures about people the news covers constantly, entrenched attitudes, and calcified behavioral patterns are all reinforcement at work.
The Part Most Reporting Skips: Proof
This is what ties this all together. None of the above counts as an “effect” until it’s manifested (i.e., becomes observable). Plenty of real change, especially attitude formation, happens purely inside someone’s head with no observable trace.
Researchers deal with this by eliciting a manifestation directly, usually through a questionnaire, and treating the answers as evidence of the underlying attitude. Every brand-lift survey and sentiment score any business will pull in their reporting is doing exactly this, eliciting a manifestation of something that has no other observable form. It’s a legitimate way to expand what can be studied, but it’s worth remembering that the tests used to elicit these manifestations vary enormously in how valid they actually are.
Next time a client or supervisor asks whether a campaign worked, resist the flat yes or no. Instead, ask what target you were trying to move, over what timeframe, whose definition of “positive” you’re using, what type of change you were actually after, and what mechanism was supposed to produce it.
Only then does “did it work” become a question you can actually answer.
The 3 Big Takeaways
- “Did it work?” isn’t just one question, it’s five: who or what changed; when; is the effect positive, neutral or negative; what type of change occurred; and by what mechanism.
- Behavioral change is only one of six effect types. A campaign can shift beliefs or attitudes and still look like a failure if you’re only watching for clicks or sales.
- An effect isn’t provable until it’s manifested. Surveys and sentiment scores exist precisely to surface change that would otherwise stay invisible.
Ready to rethink how you evaluate your next promotional campaign? Do share!
Stay authentic — and know exactly what you’re measuring before you decide whether it worked.
Jeffery E. Pizzino, APR (seen here in a vintage photo circa 1983 serendipitously doing a Clash impersonation in a since-forgotten location) is a spin-free public relations pro who is passionate about telling the why of your story with clarity, impact and authenticity. He began his PR career in 1987 at Ketchum Public Relations in New York City but has spent the majority of his career as a solopreneur. He’s the Chief Authentic Officer of the Johnson City, TN-based public relations firm, AuthenticityPR. He also functions as the fractional CCO for his clients.
Jeff has an MBA in Management from Western International University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications — with an emphasis in PR — from Brigham Young University (rise and shout!). He’s also accredited in public relations (APR) and an adjunct media and communication faculty at East Tennessee State University. This Milwaukee, Wisconsin native holds an Italian citizenship and plans to live and work there someday. Jeff and his storyteller wife Leticia have four children and four grandchildren. In his extremely limited nonwork hours, he studies Italiano, practices guitar, writes songs, gardens, works out, disc golfs, reads, listens to New Wave music, serves as an assistant communication director in his church, watches BYU football, enjoys watching the original Mission Impossible TV series, and plays board games (mostly Dominion and Seven Wonders). No, this guy’s never bored and looking for something to do. Email Jeff.
