Every year over 300 practitioners in the field of communication measurement and public relations get together for the annual AMEC Summit. There are providers, clients, corporates, NGOs, government representatives and more. It is a global festival where professionals from all over the world get together to share, learn and party. Some of the companies here are fierce competitors in their own markets but this is a “fun and learn” zone.
“What do you do to continue to learn and update your knowledge?”, we get this question from prospects and clients in almost every interaction. I tell them I attend the AMEC Summit. I have not missed a single AMEC Summit in the last 15 years.
2022 AMEC Summit happened in Vienna, Austria. Not only was I fortunate to attend it, I was also fortunate to get elected as the Chairman of AMEC and run my first Board Meeting. It was filled with new learnings. In this article, I wish to share my three key take aways from this year’s Global AMEC summit.
1) Clients are not looking for measurement, they are looking for solutions to their problems. And this needs to show in our language/ proposals.
This was a very good reminder from the CEO of Omnicom PR, Chris Foster. We often tend to focus on our metrics, our methodology, our measurement. Client is not taking our help to get good measurement, S/he is looking for results; to solve a business problem – grow sales or change customer knowledge/ behaviour. We ask our clients to approve spends on data analytics as a separate optional line item. If we can’t do our job well without data and analytics then why is it an “optional” line item in our proposal. We need to stop asking for budgets for data analytics and build measurement into the core of our PR campaigns.
2) Showcasing failure can also help you to earn more business especially if you highlight the learnings based on data and market insights.
Darryl Sparey, Managing Director and Co-Founder, Hard Numbers, made a super charged presentation on how they failed to help a client sell newly minted NFTs; how they applied the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework for planning their PR efforts. His team tried helping a client use paid, earned, owned channels to try and sell 10,000 jpegs of cherryade addicted aliens on the internet. They could only sell few hundreds. Darryl documented each step, failure (or success) and the learning in his blog and it helped his firm get more business. You can read his blog here. He presented this failure case study at the AMEC Summit and it was one of the best sessions (this is one presentation that you should not miss as the sessions are available on demand as well).
3) Yes, latest technologies are not mature, but you better start embracing them. Lesser than 100% accuracy is no reason to wait.
Summit had several sessions where speakers presented examples of how they used technologies to crunch data that would have taken us years to crunch manually. Sometime I was struggling to understand how they did it. They mentioned that results are not 100% correct but the speed with which such results were available made it worthwhile. It helped them take directionally correct decisions. Thus, we may not understand how some of the latest technologies work but its time to embrace these technologies and invest in learning or hiring experts who understand them.
The views and opinions published here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher.
Director- International Board, AMEC
Aseem, a dog lover, is currently the Chief Executive Officer at Impact Research & Measurement Pvt. Ltd. He is also a Director at The International Association of Measurement and Evaluation of Communication. In 2017 he was honoured with the AMEC Lifetime Fellowship Award for his contribution to the Industry. Aseem spends his free time playing with new electronic gadgets/ softwares; helping friends choose the right gadgets; listening to music; or connecting with old friends.
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