The question I hear most often is some version of this: how do you measure the success of PR?
It is a fair question and metrics matter. Sharp people, Sarah Evans, Meredith Klein and Brandon Watts among them, are doing important work to answer it well.
I value that work. I also think there is another part of the conversation worth naming. In more than a decade in healthcare and life sciences communications, I have come to believe the most valuable work often happens where a metric cannot reach: in the moment a company’s story becomes clear enough for someone else to understand it and act.
Not long ago, a health innovation founder asked me to review a deck a few hours before a high-stakes meeting with a major global tech company. It was 11 slides for a 30-minute conversation, dense with detail and internal logic. You could tell the founder knew the material deeply and felt the need to include every detail that led to the innovation itself. The result was that the actual innovation made its entrance late, the slide detail distracted from the broader impact and the reason this innovation had to exist was missing entirely. Beyond requiring attendees to choose between listening and reading, the deck did not tell a clear story.
In the short window we had, I cut the repetition, clarified the ask, surfaced the innovation earlier and moved the strongest proof toward the front. Those were the easy fixes. The harder one, the part no metric would have caught, was making the story itself land.
For the companies I work with, the science is rarely the weak link. What determines whether they break through is whether the people who need to understand it actually can.
None of that shows up in a metric.
There is no impression count for a story that finally makes sense, no engagement rate for a room full of people who can walk out of a meeting and confidently retell the mission, vision and impact of an innovation they just learned about.
Of course, measurable outputs matter. Press release pickups, social media engagement and strategic media placements are core elements of a PR campaign. But the underlying story must be coherent. If the foundational messaging is not set, if executives keep telling a fragmented story, if the investor deck does not land, if no one is educating the market on why a new innovation matters, then the numbers can be deceiving.
This is the work I have committed myself to: getting a company’s story right early, long before a high-stakes meeting forces the question. Do that, and everything after it is easier to win. The pitch, the raise, the partnership, the launch all begin from strength, not from catch-up.
When the story is clear early enough, a company does not have to win the room. The room is already listening.
