Resetting CMO expectations is PR’s new leadership test
PR has unwittingly taught CMOs to value noise over impact … it's time to reset expectations with fewer, harder, more trusted measures.
In 2018, I presented the results of a hugely successful quarter to a B2B fintech client. After about 10 minutes, the CMO, flicking through her printout of the presentation deck, paused, looked up and interrupted me. “Nice coverage,” she said, “but which of these headlines helped more mid-market CFOs shortlist us?” Around the table, the sales lead stopped scrolling on his phone. Finance leaned in. I had a pristine chart of hits and share of voice. What I did not have was an answer that changed the budget conversation. Two weeks later, our retainer was trimmed, not because the work was bad, but because the scoreboard they were watching didn’t show the goals they needed to see.
That moment isn’t unusual. When money tightens, PR is often first on the chopping block. Harsh as it sounds, we’ve played a part in that outcome. We know what “good” looks like, that is, outcomes over outputs and KPIs that ladder up to business results; yet, too often, we report what is easy to count - media hits, backlinks, and “opportunities to see”. Our own research found 97% of practitioners agree that measuring the impact of PR is hard. After a decade competing with the neat decimals of performance marketing, we’ve learned to make our dashboards look busy. In doing so, we’ve taught CMOs to value noise over impact.
How did we get here? By my count, three major forces pushed us onto this path.
- First, legacy dashboards. Templates built when our tools could count activity better than they could capture effect. They still circulate because they’re tidy, familiar and repeatable.
- Second, stakeholder expectations. Leaders asked for simple graphs for the board pack, and we obliged. Over time, neatness was mistaken for truth.
- Third, tool bias. Most platforms optimise for volume because volume is abundant. What’s easy to log becomes easy to value, and then, fatally, easy to defend.
How do we align PR and marketing?
The fix isn’t a cleverer version of the same thing. It’s a different conversation altogether; one that resets expectations with the CMO around fewer, harder, more trusted measures. That shift does more than improve reporting. It brings PR and marketing into genuine alignment, which is good for everyone involved: the CMO who must allocate scarce capital; PR teams who want their work judged fairly; sales who need momentum in the funnel; finance who require auditable logic; and, crucially, customers who benefit when the brand shows up consistently and meaningfully.
Outcome measures earn trust because they use a language that executives already speak. When we track prompted and unprompted awareness, message recall, consideration and preference, then connect these to behaviours such as qualified traffic from priority audiences, inbound enquiries, conversion lift in assisted journeys, and improvements in deal velocity, we’re not arguing for PR as a nice-to-have; we’re showing where it changes the odds. I admit, none of these are perfect. But all of them are better than counting headlines for their own sake.
Yes, this approach has a cost. You need baselines, tagging and taxonomy, access to analytics and CRM, and a way to isolate PR’s role where you reasonably can. Brand pulses, lightweight trackers, agreed attribution rules and one or two experiments a quarter take time and money. But this is exactly why the CMO pays attention: you’re stepping onto the same field as your performance peers, asking to be judged by outcomes. Credibility accrues when finance can follow the thread from activity to effect without taking your word for it.
The alignment dividend shows up fast:
- Shared language, fewer arguments. “Awareness lift among senior buyers” and “consideration shift in named segments” mean the same thing in PR, marketing and finance. You stop debating whether a spike in mentions ‘must’ have helped and start showing where perception and behaviour moved.
- Better planning means less waste. When outcomes are the scoreboard, channel choices get clearer. A prestigious mention that doesn’t reach buyers stops winning by default. A niche analyst quote that correlates with faster deal cycles earns its place.
- Stronger cross-functional trust. Sales stops seeing PR as a distant storyteller when they can point to deals where third-party endorsement was the confidence nudge. Marketing ops becomes an ally because your definitions match theirs.
- Resilience in downturns. Budgets survive scrutiny when line items map to levers of growth. If you can show PR’s role in opening markets, protecting price, or accelerating adoption, you’re no longer optional.
- Better customer outcomes. Outcome-driven communications are customer-driven communications. You focus on the moments that matter in real buying journeys, not the moments that stroke egos and make good slides.
This isn’t about making PR smaller or drier. It’s about making it legible to the people who decide where growth capital goes. When you present a breakthrough article, you don’t celebrate the logo; you show its effect on mental availability in the buying moment. When you land employer-brand coverage, you connect it to senior applicant quality and time-to-hire for hard-to-fill roles. The narrative becomes simpler and stronger: here is how communications changes what people know, feel and do … and here is what that’s worth.
There is risk in this approach. Outcomes expose what works and what doesn’t. But the bigger risk is continuing to train executives on vanity metrics and expecting them to protect your budget. Resetting expectations with the CMO is not a courtesy; it’s a leadership test. If we hold that line, choosing fewer, harder, more trusted measures, PR stops performing for the dashboard and starts performing for the business. And when the next planning cycle hits, that’s the difference between being a discretionary spend and being a brand-critical growth driver.
Alan Duncan is managing director at Agile Comms, an agency that helps scaling enterprises in the UK & Ireland translate communications into commercial outcomes.
Further reading
The three principles that could save a CMO their job