Clip News attended the annual global summit of the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) held in Sofia, Bulgaria, 21-23 May 2024.
Executives from renowned brands, academics, representatives of communication, public relations, media monitoring, and technology companies, participated in this annual celebration of the sector, aiming to promote international standards for proper and effective communication measurement in the modern digital world. Clip News, as a member of AMEC, attended the event with VP Media Intelligence, Katerina Kechagia, and the company’s Marketing Associate, Konstantina Stavropoulou.
Best Practices in Communication Measurement & Evaluation
Emphasis was placed on the necessity for a more qualitative analysis of communication and on training communication professionals to understand enhanced reports and complex data visualization dashboards. As highlighted by the speakers, communication measurement in all its facets (advertising, social media, events, campaigns) needs to combine quantitative metrics with more qualitative analyses to make truly data-driven business decisions. At the same time, there is a need to pre-link final goals with appropriate quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure the effectiveness of actions taken in the direction defined by the goal-setting.
In this context, extensive references were made to publicity analysis, which is gradually detaching from the calculation of the advertising cost of each publication, known in the market as “AVE”, a metric more suitable for the era dominated by print media. Additionally, the overall measurement of Volume and Share of Voice (SoV) in publicity reports is combined with more qualitative metrics, such as sentiment evaluation, source significance (overall and not just based on impressions), and user comments on social media.
Examples from the real market include advertising campaigns, e.g., on YouTube, that have gone “viral” and were deemed successful based on the number of video views. However, further study of public response on social media, through social listening tools, often reveals a plethora of judgmental comments of negative sentiment, a fact that needs to be considered by the respective brand in the final evaluation of the action.
AI: Integration, Concerns, and the Necessary Human Touch
A significant part of the conference naturally concerned global concerns about the further development and use of artificial intelligence. Reference was made to lawsuits against generative AI technology development companies on the issue of rights, as well as to increasingly frequent incidents of online misinformation. Various countries are gradually starting to work towards creating a legal framework aimed at protecting content creators, as well as the data of businesses and individual users.
At the level of integrating AI and machine learning technologies in the field of communication, it was emphasized that this is a rapidly developing process, providing new capabilities to industry professionals. In addition to content creation, they upgrade media intelligence services, which involve the collection, analysis, and visualization of thousands of publicity data from different sources (print, internet, social media) with the ultimate goal of identifying actionable insights.
However, along with leveraging these capabilities, the need to “filter” the information provided by artificial intelligence, either by individual users or by businesses, was highlighted. Especially for the latter, it remains necessary and crucial to combine AI tools with human critical thinking and empathy to ensure the correctness and reliability of the results.
Clip News as an Ambassador of AMEC Principles
As an official member of AMEC, Clip News always ensures to stay informed about industry developments and applies international standards in the media monitoring and media analysis services it provides to the Greek and Cypriot market. Additionally, the company’s services are based on the “AI-analyst” pair, ensuring their reliability.
As Ms Kechagia stated: “Clip News’ participation in this year’s annual AMEC Global Summit was a significant opportunity to get informed about the latest trends in the field of communication and media intelligence, to meet our international partners in person, and to exchange views with industry professionals from other countries”.
Finally, Ms Stavropoulou pointed out: “Among the highlights of the speeches were goal setting along with actions and measurement planning, evaluating the authenticity of information in the online and AI environment, and market training aimed at adopting a more qualitative approach to communication measurement and evaluation”.