Golin’s Jonny Bentwood on why PR won’t move forward if it keeps measuring backwards

For years, earned media has occupied a peculiar position in the marketing ecosystem: Widely regarded for its credibility and influence, yet rarely equipped with the measurement infrastructure now standard in other parts of the industry. While performance and paid media have developed increasingly sophisticated accountability frameworks, PR has continued to rely on impressions, advertising value equivalency (AVEs), and sentiment analysis—metrics that offer limited visibility into commercial impact.

As marketing teams face intensified pressure to prove return on every channel, these gaps in PR measurement are becoming harder to ignore. The shift has prompted some agencies to re-examine their approach. Among them is Golin, which over the past 18 months has taken steps to integrate more predictive planning tools into its campaign strategy and expand its data and analytics capability across markets.

Among those steering this rethink is Jonny Bentwood, who leads Golin’s global data and analytics function. Having worked across the agency’s international accounts for more than a decade, he now oversees how data is used to shape strategy, planning and measurement across markets. His focus is on moving analytics upstream—away from wrap reports and into the earliest stages of campaign development.

"Too much focus has been on using measurement purely to show the results of work completed," Bentwood tells Campaign Asia-Pacific. "However, the real value comes from being data-driven and using measurement to inform what we should do and to anticipate trends and audience reactions."

This reflects a broader shift in client expectations. While visibility and brand awareness still matter, more clients are now asking whether PR work contributes to measurable shifts in purchase behaviour, intent or action. Bentwood argues that the industry needs to move past volume-based metrics and focus on outcomes that connect more directly to business objectives.

"We need to move away from vanity metrics like impressions, false metrics like AVE, and instead look at the correlation between the activity that PR creates and the outcomes of these," he says. "This could be sales, purchase intent, search behaviour, web visits, app downloads and more."

For agencies operating in Asia-Pacific, those expectations are complicated by market-level disparities in data access and platform behaviours. Golin’s approach has been to acknowledge this complexity rather than force global consistency.

"What data we have accessible in China is different to Singapore; the channels that audiences use in one region are different to others," Bentwood says. "It is important to not use the same vanilla metrics for each client in each country but focus on the specific needs."

To manage this, Golin has developed a regional analytics structure built around flexibility. At its centre is the Creative Intelligence Unit—a team combining analytics, insight and creative strategy—tasked with embedding data earlier in the campaign process. Earlier this year, that model was expanded with the launch of Spark, an AI incubator designed to support regional teams in integrating generative technologies into research and planning.

These frameworks are gradually informing client programmes. One example is ‘Lovin’ me’ a youth mental health campaign developed for McDonald’s Singapore. Launched on World Mental Health Day, the initiative aimed to support youth mental wellness through music, podcasts, and resources, tackling the growing challenges of emotional wellbeing among young people. Rather than building the strategy around existing brand messaging, the agency began by running structured discussions with students at Republic Polytechnic to better understand their lived experiences of stress, performance pressure, and identity.

"The magic came in very human focus group sessions where our team probed, mined and studied valuable insights into students’ struggles, pressures, and aspirations," Bentwood says. "This resulted in work that truly articulated the fears of folk at this vulnerable life stage and created resources that genuinely helped—with the toolkit accessed 17,000 times in the first 100 days."

The campaign is currently shortlisted for Best Campaign—Asia-Pacific at the PRWeek Global Awards 2025.

Beyond individual campaigns, Golin is also working with clients to improve baseline measurement infrastructure. For instance, Bentwood’s team is advising a major healthcare brand in the region on how to analyse social and owned media performance over time, with a view to moving beyond short-term content metrics and identifying what actually shifts audience behaviour.

"I like to say 'follow the data'," he says. "Some of the best insights I have found happen when I don’t succumb to confirmation bias—looking for a data point that backs up the finding I hope to show—or anchor bias, stopping after finding the first insight. That’s especially common when people use ChatGPT."

This emphasis on analytics as an input, not a retrospective, also informs Golin’s creative methodology. "The data informs the strategy and creative ideation—not the other way round," Bentwood adds. "I have seen other companies try and retrofit the data to validate a creative idea already made—it should never be this way round."

The same principles are being applied to influencer marketing. Although the category continues to grow across Asia, Bentwood says clients are increasingly interested in longer-term performance indicators rather than short-term spikes in reach.

"We measure true earned influence by looking at long-term impact metrics like brand loyalty, sentiment shifts, purchase intent, brand lift and conversion rates, rather than just immediate reach and engagement," he says. "Most importantly, we focus on ensuring we work with the most authentic influencers that speak directly to our client’s audience."

The evolution of generative AI also presents a new consideration: discoverability. As large language models influence how content is sourced, surfaced and cited, Golin is beginning to treat AI visibility as an earned channel in its own right.

"How can we make sure that gen AI is recommending them?" Bentwood says. "PR historically consisted of media relations and influencer relations. Now we have a third leg to our stool and have gen AI relations. Gen AI loves long-form content and the places it goes to help make its answers over 90% of the time is earned media—and who knows earned media better than a PR agency?"

Looking ahead, the challenge for Golin—and for the industry more broadly—will be to make data-driven planning scalable. While clients increasingly expect measurement to go beyond reporting, the infrastructure and fluency required to deliver on that varies by region, team and brief. Striking the balance between global consistency and local relevance remains a work in progress.

"You can throw fifty charts into a slide deck and still miss the point," says Bentwood. "Six words and a picture help give focus where 50 slides create confusion."