Barcelona Principles 4.0 in the age of AI and rethinking PR impact

What does meaningful PR measurement look like in an age of AI, fragmented media, and real-time data? At IPRCCC 2024, that was the central question tackled by a panel of communications leaders, who examined how organisations are rethinking effectiveness through the lens of the evolving Barcelona Principles.

Bringing together perspectives from both business and communication strategy, the panel, moderated by Aseem Sood, CEO of Impact Research and Measurement, featured Neeraj Aggarwal (RuralShores Skills Academy), Abhi Mahapatra (Independent Consultant), and Deepa Dey (Integrated Communications, Advocacy & Sustainability Specialist).

Opening the session, Sood provided context around the globally recognised Barcelona Principles, which were introduced in 2010 as a professional benchmark for communication measurement. “Just like chartered accountants or consultants have their codes, we in communication measurement established the Barcelona Principles to bring in structure and accountability,” he said.

Sood explained that the latest version, Barcelona Principles 4.0, was launched just two weeks ago in Vienna. “Version four is an evolution, not a revolution,” he said. “We haven’t completely overhauled the framework, but introduced key refinements to keep up with changing environments, including AI integration and big data usage.”

He elaborated on three major updates in the new version. “First, we’ve added clarity and practicality. Now, for every principle, you have actionable steps on what to do and what not to do to ensure compliance,” he said. “Second, we’ve aligned the principles with other frameworks such as the Integrated Evaluation Framework (IEF). And third, we’ve modernised the relevance by incorporating considerations around data governance, ethics, and audience fragmentation.”

To bring theory into context, Sood shared a preparatory exercise he conducted with the panellists ahead of the session. “I had sent them a questionnaire to assess whether their existing measurement frameworks comply with the Barcelona Principles,” he said. “Deepa and Abhi, being communications professionals, immediately got started on the responses. Neeraj, coming from the business side, called in his PR team for a discussion.”

He recounted a similar exercise conducted earlier in the year with 25 corporate communicators. “Each of the seven principles was a point on the questionnaire. Yet, 70% of the respondents scored three or less,” he said. “These principles have been around since 2010. If they’re so basic, why aren’t we compliant? Why are our PR campaigns still falling short?”

Sood then posed a question to the panellists to initiate the discussion: “When you were taking the questionnaire, did you come across any principles that made you think, ‘this one we’ve really nailed, we do this exceptionally well?’”

In response, the panellists reflected on how the Barcelona Principles were being implemented in their respective organisations, often without consciously realising it.

Aggarwal admitted he had not encountered the principles before the session. “Aseem mentioned I was from the business side, and I hadn’t come across the Barcelona Principles earlier,” he said. “But once he introduced them to us, we spent time understanding them and realised that the first one, about articulating clear objectives, was something we were already doing. As a training organisation, defining objectives is foundational to our work.”

He shared that as they progressed through the questionnaire, they recognised more principles that aligned with their practices. “We realised this is a set of principles we will now apply consciously to our work going forward,” he added.

Sood elaborated on the first principle Aggarwal referenced. “It emphasises that before starting any campaign, you must articulate your objectives clearly, and in a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) format. It also encourages you to share those objectives with every member of your team,” he explained. “Often, when we’re in a room with a new client team, we ask each member to write down the campaign objective. Then we have them exchange those slips. More than 70% of the time, people have written different objectives. That tells us something.”

He turned the discussion to how communication leaders ensure alignment on campaign objectives. “What steps are you taking to ensure the objectives are uniformly understood across your teams?” he asked.

Responding to the question, Dey reflected on her experiences at Hindustan Unilever and Airtel. “If you’ve worked in those organisations, you’d know everything starts with structure and principles,” she said. “We began every task with what was called the ‘job to be done’. That meant clearly articulating the problem statement and defining the objective before doing anything else.”

She explained that while this framework made internal alignment easier, cross-functional coordination was the real challenge. “You’re not just working with your communication team. In most organisations, the comms team is tiny,” she noted. “The real effort is getting marketing, brand, HR, and even the agencies to align on that same objective.”

She stressed the importance of bringing the entire ecosystem along. “It’s not just about setting the objective. It’s about ensuring everyone, across teams and partners, understands it and is working towards the same goal.”

Mahapatra echoed Dey’s point, citing his experience with Amazon. “One of the principles Amazon follows is being input-focused rather than output-driven. That really resonated with the Barcelona Principles, which also talk about outcomes,” he said. “At Amazon, we learned that inputs are controllable and outputs are not. It was a big learning curve for my team and me.”

He continued, “You often find yourself explaining to stakeholders that certain PR activities don’t always guarantee specific coverage or sentiment scores. But if your inputs are robust, the outcomes tend to align.”

Sood asked whether those inputs were linked to business goals. Mahapatra responded, “Absolutely. You start by defining the business goal, say, launching a new brand and achieving certain sales targets. Then you determine the inputs required to meet that goal. From there, you figure out what the communications campaign needs to do.”

He elaborated with a practical example. “If the goal is to take a brand’s index from 2.0 to 3.0 while selling a specific number of cars, then PR can support by creating awareness and driving purchase consideration. Sometimes, the focus might even be on internal audiences, who are often overlooked but are also your customers.”

Returning to his own work, Aggarwal shared a case study illustrating how objectives are aligned across teams. “We run a large project with about 100 trainers across 22 states, working in different languages. Whenever there’s a change in guidelines, which happens every quarter, we ensure that every single person understands the new objective and can implement it effectively. We’ve fine-tuned this delivery model to work within 24 hours,” he said.

He also discussed a smaller initiative. “In a three-person team, we often assume everyone’s aligned, but that’s not always the case. In one instance, we made it a point to check that not only the team but also the learners understood the project goal. That kind of clarity makes a big difference.”

As the panel progressed, the conversation turned to one of the key Barcelona Principles: the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative metrics to assess campaign effectiveness.

Mahapatra emphasised that traditional metrics like share of voice or volume of coverage hold limited value without understanding the quality of that coverage. “It really doesn’t mean much if you don’t measure the quality of exposure,” he said. “Right from my days at Ford, we made it a point to first assess what messages should be crafted, how they should be delivered, and whether they actually resonated with audiences. Pre- and post-campaign audits were essential.”

Recalling the 2012–2013 launch of Ford’s EcoSport, he said, “We introduced a small SUV. Now, every car’s an SUV. Back then, even coining that category was new. We needed to test whether it struck a chord with the consumer. And it did. That kind of sentiment analysis gave us insight we couldn’t have gained from raw coverage numbers alone.”

However, Mahapatra also highlighted the limits of data. “There was a time we were working with an insurance company, trying to convince the CEO and marketing head that our work had driven awareness for ‘bancassurance’. We had the numbers. But without insights, we couldn’t move the conversation forward,” he said. “We were data-rich, but insight-poor, and that was a critical lesson.”

Dey built on that, recounting a past experience at Unilever during a period of intense public scrutiny around sugar content and labelling in food products. “One of our products fell into the same category being criticised,” she said. “We were obviously concerned from a business standpoint.”

But when the team conducted consumer research, the results were unexpected. “Despite the media storm on Twitter, YouTube, and news outlets, our consumers didn’t even register it as a concern,” Dey noted. “They associated the controversy with another product entirely. That gave us the confidence to proceed with a low-key outreach strategy. Nothing too loud. It turned out to be successful.”

The panel then addressed a timely question about how AI is being used in the field of communication measurement.

Dey shared her personal use of AI tools. “When I was with Unilever, we wrote global creative briefs with complete transparency. We were just beginning to integrate AI into our processes, still very much a pilot phase,” she said.

She added that she now uses AI regularly for fact-checking. “There are plenty of tools out there. My current favourite is Complexity for WhatsApp. I run every message through it to understand the level of complexity. I also use GitHub a lot,” she said.

Dey pointed out how the role of communications professionals has changed over the years. “When I started 22 years ago, there were five newspapers and two television channels to worry about. Today, it’s an overwhelming media landscape. The question we need to ask ourselves is, are we going to be fact-checkers or fiction-makers?”

She concluded, “If AI can help you navigate that chaos, then start using it. It helps you sift through the noise and allows you to respond more intelligently to the half-truths out there.”