A cut too far?
Whilst the methods PR professionals have at their disposal to measure the success of a campaign or story are many, varied and evolving all the time with digital and social media, the use of AVE as a core metric still remains relatively common place.
AVE stands for Advertising Value Equivalent and is a measure the PR industry has traditionally used to evaluate coverage – in simple terms it’s based on calculating the cost of buying advertising space equivalent to the coverage achieved through editorial.
Undoubtedly there are a number of benefits to using AVE. The first is that it demonstrates simply and quickly how much coverage a client has received within a given time frame. In a tough economic climate where financial departments are often leading MD’s, this is indeed increasingly important as it serves to present clients with a clear return on investment.
AVE also can be used to open up a dialogue with those who might not be familiar with how marketing and public relations works day to day. When, for example, justifying the cost of a campaign, a managing director might not be concerned with the number of magazines that the article appears in, but they will be impressed when they discover that a quarter of a page in Vogue has earned the in excess of £30,000 AVE.
The reverse of this is no matter how impressive it sounds PR is not to all intents and purposes advertising and as such shouldn’t be equated in the same way.
AVE does not present the full picture and doesn’t focus on a lot of the real value of PR and the kind of issues that matter even more than ever right now. It doesn’t give any indication of whether the right key messages have been communicated to the right target audience group(s) and it doesn’t take into account the tone of the coverage or indeed who has seen it and where it has appeared.
The introduction of digital and social media into the mix has also added to the complexity around AVE as whilst everyone rushes to Twitter and Facebook to post a story or a link to a campaign, it is not yet possible to advertise on Twitter and as such there is no comparable measurement. How then do we equate this, as surely we need to be adding social media to reports if we are to paint a fair picture of the coverage we generate?
We could however tie ourselves up in knots looking for just one solution to this age old question. The solution is to look at AVE as only one part of a much larger puzzle that also sees us measuring website statistics (and not just ‘hits’), changes in public perception, OTS (opportunity to see) figures, increases in product sales, audience feedback and other analysis. This involves evaluating PR in a full and detailed context, which in turn takes time and effort to be invested by both client and agency.
In the pressure of the current climate it may be tempting to head for AVE as a simple, easy to produce and easy to grasp measure of success.
But it is only by looking beyond these relatively crude measures that organisations will start to see the bigger picture and gain an understanding into the true value of PR. Right now that value needs to be understood more than ever before.