What should public relations do after being "raped" by KPI-ization?

In the PR industry, what you ultimately compete on is "human touch". It is your insight into the subtle depths of human nature, your grasp of the pulse of public sentiment, the perfectly phrased line you deliver at a critical moment, and the media friends you have nurtured for decades who will pick up your call in times of crisis.

At 11 p.m., in a low-key whiskey bar on Julu Road in Shanghai, I ran into Xiao Lin.

Xiao Lin was an intern I supervised in my early years. Now he is the PR director of a new consumer brand, managing a team of seven or eight people with an annual budget exceeding 10 million yuan. He should be at the peak of his career, but that night he held his wine glass with a bitter look on his face, looking exactly like a junior executive at an agency whose 8th version of the proposal had just been rejected by the client.

"Kai Sen, do you think our industry is dying out soon?"

I asked him what made him say that. He said that at the company's annual planning meeting last week, the boss made a final decision that the PR department will fully adopt a KPI system next year — the read volume of soft articles on Douyin, the completion rate of videos on WeChat Channels, the interaction cost of notes on Xiaohongshu, and even the open rate of WeChat official account posts will all be quantified to two decimal places, directly linked to quarterly bonuses. One of his junior team members, in order to hit the monthly "100,000+ views" target, rewrote a long article that originally told the brand's craftsmanship story into *Shocking! This Domestic Brand Secretly Did This Thing*.

"We hit 100,000+ views all right," Xiao Lin smiled bitterly, "but the brand's tone and reputation were shattered. Worse still, the actual conversion brought by that article was almost zero, and the comment section was full of accusations of 'clickbait'. But the boss doesn't care. He only looks at the reports: 100,000+ views are definitely better than 50,000+ views, and pretty data equals good performance."

After listening to him, I poured him a glass of wine and said, "This is not a problem unique to your company. The entire industry is going through a slow suicide."

From "Word Count Hegemony" to "Traffic Tyranny": The Evolution History of KPIization

When it comes to KPIization in the PR industry, people who worked in the era of BlueFocus know best about it.

More than a decade ago, the PR industry was still in its "classical era". Back then, the value of a communication plan was measured by strategy, creativity and relationships. A top PR professional had to understand the media ecosystem, know what angles the editors of *IT Manager World* and *China Business Journal* preferred, and be able to draft a statement that calms the public without offending regulators within the golden four hours after a crisis breaks out. Back then, plans were handwritten, relationships were built over face-to-face drinks, and value was intangible, just like air — invisible, but you will suffocate without it.

Later, agencies like BlueFocus brought "industrialization" into the industry. PR services began to be billed by word count, discounted based on the official media rate card, and assessed by the number of published links. How many press releases were distributed in a quarter, how many media outlets were covered, and the total word count in ten thousands of words became hard indicators written into contracts. Clients were finally "relieved" — the money they spent could at least be exchanged for a stack of A4 papers compiling all the published links.

I had just started my career back then, and witnessed an absurd scene: in the annual communication project of a Fortune Global 500 company, the contract explicitly stated that "no less than 500,000 words of in-depth articles shall be published throughout the year". What does that mean? It is equivalent to writing a whole copy of *Dream of the Red Chamber* within a year. To pad the word count, the PR agency stretched an 800-word press release into a 3,000-word "in-depth report", of which 2,200 words were just trivial accounts of industry background introduction and enterprise historical evolution. The media editor who received the draft directly asked the intern to cut it back to 800 words for publication, and the remaining 2,200 words stayed forever in the agency's closing report, becoming a nice footnote for "overfulfilling the KPI".

Most importantly, at the end of that year, BlueFocus calculated the word count for the client by measuring the printed text with a ruler, while for the media, they either paid the appearance fee for contributors or counted every single word to pay for the content. The price difference between the two was BlueFocus's profit. Back then, this business model was unbeatable, outperforming many international PR peers such as Ogilvy and Rud Finn.

We already knew back then that word count KPIs were absurd. But at least it was still wearing the coat of "professionalism" — it pretended to measure the amount of information.

Nowadays, short video and social platforms have pushed this logic to the extreme, and to the peak of absurdity. Follower growth of Douyin soft articles, play volume on WeChat Channels, interaction rate on Xiaohongshu, trending topic ranking on Weibo... These figures are more intuitive, more stimulating and more violent than word count. Bosses no longer need to look through a stack of link summaries. They open the backend data dashboard, and the red rising follower curve gives them a bigger adrenaline rush than any creativity.

As a result, PR has completely become a traffic-driven business. PR practitioners no longer study "public sentiment", but "algorithm sentiment"; no longer think about "brand trust", but "the password to high video completion rates"; no longer write "stories", but produce "click hooks".

But the point is, the essence of PR has never been something that can be measured by numbers.

What is more ironic is that KPI-driven PR is creating a large number of hidden dangers under the "prosperous data". Many teams, in order to meet the "zero negative news" KPI, follow the work principle of "deleting posts first and covering up problems first". They do not ease minor public opinions, do not respond to small disputes, and do not resolve small negative emotions, forcibly suppressing negative content through technical means. It seems that the KPIs are perfectly met, but public dissatisfaction keeps accumulating and hidden emotional risks are piling up. Once a large-scale crisis breaks out, the pent-up emotions will erupt in a concentrated manner, leading to an instant public opinion collapse, leaving the enterprise completely powerless to defend itself.

This is the fatal paradox of quantitative assessment: KPIs measure "surface calm", while what PR really needs to safeguard is "underlying trust". Surface calm can be achieved through data fraud and artificial suppression, but underlying trust can only be built through sincere communication and long-term accumulation. Cold numbers can never measure the warm hearts of people; mechanized assessment can never cover the essential value of PR.

The Essence of PR: Doing "Invisible Work" Deep in People's Hearts

Having worked in PR for more than 20 years, if I need to give the most plain definition of this industry, I would say: PR is the work of building bridges and paving roads deep in people's hearts.

It builds the bridge of trust and paves the road of public perception. Its deliverables are not thousands of 100,000+ view articles, but the "favorability" and "trust" that one person holds towards a brand, an enterprise, or even an entire industry. This kind of thing is invisible and intangible, but it determines whether the public is willing to listen to your explanation when a crisis hits, or directly nail you to the pillar of shame; it determines whether consumers will stay loyal to you when competitors launch price wars, or turn around and leave.

There is a classic case I handled that I still feel proud of when I think about it. More than a decade ago, a domestic home appliance brand encountered a severe public opinion crisis over product quality. Back then, public anger surged online, and some people even chanted the slogan of "boycotting XX brand". According to today's KPI-oriented mindset, what should we do at this moment? We would definitely send lawyer's letters, delete negative posts, hire trolls to offset negative sentiment, then produce several "positive energy" short videos to drive traffic and "sink" the negative content.

But we did not do that back then.

I led the team and stayed in that city for two whole weeks. We visited every affected user's home, apologized, repaired the products and paid compensation one by one; we invited a third-party testing institution to make the entire testing process fully public; we let engineers live-stream the product disassembly in the factory, explaining what the problem was and how to fix it. We did not plan a "plot twist" script, nor did we arrange any sensational plots that could "touch the public". We just clumsily, honestly, and bit by bit won back the trust.

During those two weeks, our "media exposure volume" was almost zero. No trending topics, no 100,000+ views, no pretty communication data. But three months later, this brand's local user satisfaction survey rose by 12 percentage points against the trend. One year later, its market share in this region even increased. More importantly, when the brand encountered a small disturbance again two years later, many local consumers who we served back then voluntarily stood up for it on social media — "I know that enterprise, they are really responsible".

Tell me, what KPI can be used to measure this? How much is the "zero exposure" in those two weeks worth? How many Douyin followers should the 12 percentage point increase in satisfaction three months later be converted to? And what kind of traffic formula can be used to calculate the "trust" of those consumers who voluntarily spoke up for the brand?

The real value of PR lies exactly in the fact that it is often "anti-KPI". It requires patience, restraint, and the courage to keep doing the right thing even when there is no applause. It requires you to choose to repair that invisible crack leading to people's hearts first, when everyone else is chasing traffic.

We Are Mass-producing "PR Laborers"

Xiao Lin told me that his biggest anxiety now is not failing to meet KPIs, but that the young people on his team are turning into a group of "data feeders".

They are proficient in DOU+ delivery skills, know what time to post videos to get the best traffic, are familiar with the formula for viral headlines on Xiaohongshu, and can judge within one minute whether a piece of content will go viral. But they do not know what "media relationship" means, have never written a real press release, do not understand what "agenda setting" is, and have never experienced the precious moment in a crisis where the media says "wait, don't publish it in a hurry" out of the personal connection and trust you have built up over time.

"They are like workers on an assembly line," Xiao Lin said, "staring at the backend data every day, getting anxious when traffic drops, and getting complacent when traffic rises. But no one cares whether those traffic sources are real people or bots."

This is the most terrifying part of KPIization — it turns PR professionals into PR laborers.

Under the guidance of KPIs, the talent structure of the entire industry is undergoing a terrible distortion. Strategy-focused talents are marginalized, because "strategy" cannot be quantified; creative talents are suppressed, because "creativity" carries too much risk, and copying viral content is much safer; relationship-focused talents are ridiculed for "living off past achievements", because "relationships" are not listed in the Excel sheet. Instead, data analysts, traffic optimization specialists, short video editors are taking their places — they are not PR professionals, they are part of the traffic industry, who just happen to be on the payroll of the PR department.

The far-reaching impact is that KPIization is systematically destroying the "long-termism" of the PR industry.

When the average tenure of a PR director is only 18 months, and he needs to deliver "pretty data" during his tenure to get his next job offer, how could he possibly invest in brand trust building that only pays off three years later? How could he allow his team to spend a month maintaining deep relationships with core media outlets, instead of producing ten short videos that "might go viral"? How could he stick to the right PR strategy in a quarter with no trending topics and no data growth?

KPIization is essentially a form of short-termist violence. It uses the certainty of numbers to cover up the inherent uncertainty of PR work; it uses the pleasure of instant feedback to replace the loneliness of long-term dedication. It makes the entire industry more and more impetuous, more and more eager for quick success, and more and more like a self-deceiving digital game.

The "word count hegemony" in the BlueFocus era at least required some writing skills, but today's "traffic tyranny" directly reduces PR to gambling — if one out of ten videos goes viral, the KPI is considered fulfilled; no one will hold anyone accountable for the resource waste and brand damage caused by the remaining nine videos.

Some Values Are Never Meant to Be Weighed

I know by now some people will definitely argue: without KPIs, how do you manage the team? How do you prove the value of PR to the boss? How do you prevent team members from slacking off?

This is indeed a practical problem. But it is exactly the problem of the boss's cognitive bias towards PR.

It is not because PR is more quantifiable. On the contrary, it is because PR is the least quantifiable, so bosses feel the most insecure, and need to use numbers to create an illusion of "controllability". The essence of this illusion is distrust of PR professionalism, and arrogance and ignorance towards the discipline of "understanding people's hearts".

I am not saying that PR does not need any evaluation at all. But evaluation and KPIization are two completely different things. Evaluation can be multi-dimensional, qualitative and long-term; while KPIization is usually single-dimensional, quantitative and short-term. The former is diagnosis, while the latter is a shackle.

A boss who truly understands PR pays attention to the change of public opinion trends, the response speed and appropriateness of crisis handling, the depth of the core media relationship network, the position of the brand in the industry discourse system, and the real emotional feedback of employees and the public towards the brand. These things require professional judgment, time accumulation, and a pair of eyes that have seen countless storms — not just a backend data dashboard.

Having worked in this industry for more than 20 years, I increasingly feel that in the PR industry, what you ultimately compete on is "human touch". It is your insight into the subtle depths of human nature, your grasp of the pulse of public sentiment, the perfectly phrased line you deliver at a critical moment, and the media friends you have nurtured for decades who will pick up your call in times of crisis. How can these things be KPIized? Should we set a rule that "three profound insights into human nature must be generated this quarter"? Or "complete soulful connections with five core editors before the end of the year"?

That is way too absurd.

Epilogue: In the Digital Age, the Courage to Be "Anti-Digital" Is More Needed

The whiskey bar is about to close, and Xiao Lin is already slightly drunk.

"Kai Sen, what do you think I should do? The boss wants KPIs, I can't just defy him directly."

I said: "You can meet the KPIs as required, but you have to keep a clear scale in your own mind. You have to distinguish which numbers are truly valuable, and which are just for checking the box. More importantly, don't let the young people on your team really believe that those numbers are everything. Teach them how to write press releases, teach them how to behave properly, teach them how to stay calm during a crisis — these are the things you can leave to them, and also the things that can preserve the dignity of this industry."

The KPIization of PR is essentially a battle for the industry's discourse power. When PR practitioners themselves accept the logic that "traffic equals value", they are personally handing over the last moat of this profession.

Back in the days when BlueFocus charged by word count, the words were at least written by real people; today, half of the traffic of Douyin soft articles may come from algorithm recommendations, and the other half from emotional manipulation. If PR practitioners are willing to be slaves of algorithms and tenants of data, then this industry is really not far from dying.

The PR industry has been going through a quiet "self-castration" in recent years.

Veterans in the industry all have a consensus: PR nowadays is less and less like real PR, and more like a piece-rate worker on an assembly line. Open the PR assessment form of any enterprise, and you will see nothing but uniform quantitative indicators: monthly press release volume, total word count of articles, number of media exposure entries, video play volume,