The Québec-based founder of a high profile, world spanning entertainment colossus hired a PR firm to calculate the value of his recent junket off planet. (He spent 11 days at the ISS after blasting off from the Russian spaceport at Baikonur.)
The trip cost him $35 million USD but generated $592,425,679 in terms of earned media according to today’s report in the Globe and Mail (Monday November 16th, 2009). Now that’s a pretty good ROI.
But how did they calculate that?
If you do a search with Google using the search term ‘Bruce Firestone’, you will find there are about 729,000 mentions of moi on the Internet. Typically, an ad agency might value these mentions using a CPM (cost per thousand) of around $15*. So after fooling around on the Internet for 15 years, building my own (10 cent) websites (about 20 of them) and doing lots of stuff, the GM of Bruce Firestone is worth a princely total of $10,935. Pretty measly, wouldn’t you agree?
(* Media buys range from a low of around $5 for bus boards to $15 for a major newspaper or magazine to as high as $40 or $60 for targeted Internet ads. Direct mail (depending on national postal rates) range from about $120 to $150 per thousand drops.)
The formula is trivial:
V = (n/1,000) x CPM,
where,
V is the value of mentions,
n is the number of mentions.
Obviously, we can invert the formula to determine the number of mentions when you know the CPM and value, viz:
n = (V/CPM) x 1,000.
That means this trip to the International Space Station had to produce almost 39.5 billion mentions (in just 4 months) to generate this type of return. We have to assume that the Montreal-based PR firm that was tracking all this knew how to do it properly.
But as simple as the calculations are, it is a highly useful thing to be able to determine the value of the work you do to generate earned media.
Prof Bruce
Postscript: here are my calcs:
GM and Bruce Firestone
Mentions of Bruce Firestone on the Internet 729,000 (Google Nov. 16, 2009)
CPM $15
Value of these mentions $10,935
Value of mentions of Guy Laliberté, Founder of Cirque du soleil, going to ISS $592,425,679 (G+M Nov. 16, 2009)
CPM $15
Number of Mentions (over 4 months in 2009) 39,495,045,267