And of course Dodge wouldn't have any commercial interest in that would he

The key piece of the argument that is missing from both sides in all of this is MOE. I can give you MOP on flashy PPT slides all day long -- how many releases I put out, how many images were released, how much vision was fed to the networks, how many journos I supported etc. People like Dodge can do the same -- I got 60 mins on this station at prime time, my vision was syndicated globally on CNN etc.

What we can't do effectively is the MOE bit. What level of penetration did my key massages have in that product? Then if we start to get into 2nd and 3rd order effects how do I tell if my messages actually had any cognitive impact (either positively or negatively). Then to take it a step further how were those messages interpreted by the different target audiences. Then the impact on the unintended audiences etc. etc. etc.

I'm yet to find a way (short of employing a whole lot of grads to answer my dodgy survey that any ORSA in his right mind would run screaming from the room if he saw it) to do proper content analysis of media. And of course there's a big reason for this ... the whole marketing/PR industry is built around reporting MOP because they don't want to highlight any failings in their campaigns. Therefore any useful tool is only set up for hits analysis rather than content analysis.

To be honest most of the analysis of things we've done show we continue to disseminate only one of our current five key messages -- that Iraq/AFG is a dangerous place. Other than that we're pretty much sucking up to the egos of journos and that's about it.

To do this properly requires so much more in the way of funding and personnel that I'm pretty much back to my PPT with a couple of pretty pics ... people like it better.