COI overhauls measurement of digital, direct, ad and PR spend

The COI is encouraging suppliers to form partnerships with other companies, as it considers the project highly complex.

"Unlike the private sector, government can not measure return on investment in terms of sales, market share and profit as our campaigns aim to change behaviour," said Mark Cross, the COI's communications planning director.

"While the HEI is necessarily complex, the public benefit is potentially enormous. Get it right and we'll help save taxpayers' money by providing actionable insight that helps deliver successful policy outcomes in a much more efficient and effective way."

The new system will build on the COI's existing response and conversion measurement database, Artemis and help set targets and allocate budgets.

In the year 2008/2009 the COI boosted its advertising and marketing spend to £540 million – a rise of 43% – an increase fuelled by major national campaigns such as Change4Life to tackle obesity and road safety campaigns.

One person familiar with the HEI project said: "In the current climate, when there's so much pressure on money being spent, it's clearly in the interests of the COI to show the value of what they're doing. There's a potential change of government in the offing and the Tories are talking a lot about too much money being spent on marketing."

Marc Michaels, the COI's director of direct and relationship marketing, who led the development of Artemis, told Marketing Direct that HEI was "a big overarching initiative - evaluating all our media and marketing investment".

He added that the COI needed "to evaluate across the piece - not just research, response and conversion but also understanding effects of PR, buzz, events etc."

Michaels said that measurement of COI marketing spend "has always been important but the recession has made people realise, from a hard economics point of view, that you really have to justify the contribution that marketing makes to outcomes of government policy initiatives".