AVE – the ‘Dodo’ of PR measurement?

Don't get in a twist with your PR measurement

PR measurement. A subject guaranteed to get the debate juices flowing. Although there are dozens of areas I could discuss, I think it would only be right to focus on the one metric that has resurfaced in the past week.

Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) seems to be drawing its last breath as a PR measurement tool. Although up to a year ago 37% of PR agency’s surveyed by the PRCA admitted to still using AVEs, those that stand by it must be running out of reasons why.

AVE is definitely not without its haters, as my friend Pritesh Patel covers in his blog. I agree with Pritesh when he says that AVE doesn’t communicate a benefit to a business, mainly because the AVE formula is based on flawed logic – media rates change (particularly when you can pick up trade adverts in this media climate for £5 and a box of Jaffa Cakes – OK, not entirely accurate, but you know what I mean), different agencies use different multiples (sometimes not entirely truthfully) and the measurement is based on comparing PR coverage to advertising, which we should have stopped doing a long time ago.

But to come at this from a different angle, I can see why AVE has been and is still used. Not one to gloss over this, I still use it, but in a very specific and deliberate way (and one will be changing). In my opinion AVE measures one thing, PR output. It tells you nothing about the sentiment of your coverage, nor if any of your key messages were included, which in B2B and trade PR particularly is vital. In this respect it’s no different to measuring column inches (although I’d suggest editorial ‘pages’, column inch figures look inconsequential – I can’t remember the last time I thought of media space in inches). Both measure output without any consideration for the quality of the coverage.

This is where you need a holistic approach to your PR measurement that utilises a number of metrics to measure both volume and quality. If you’re only looking at one of those elements, then I’d suggest you’re not seeing the full picture. Although the PR industry has become much more sophisticated at measuring its activity in recent years, it still generally boils down to how much coverage you generate and how good / bad it is, with varying levels of detail depending on how deep you dig, and there are plenty of third party applications and software to help you do this…for a fee, obviously (which my clients have tended to prefer to spend on their activity, rather than a media monitoring service).

The PRCA survey I mentioned above stated that ‘only 2% (of the 37%) used the evaluation model in isolation’. This is absolutely the way to go. Let’s be honest, AVE is a rubbish metric, but if part of your evaluation is to measure the volume of coverage then AVE will do just fine if that’s what you’ve been using previously – it means you can continue to benchmark your coverage volumes whilst you make the decision regarding whether to change metrics. As long as you support your output evaluation with more in-depth analysis (mentions in your tiered media for example) then you’ll still get a clear picture of what quantity of coverage you’re getting. However, this shouldn’t take up more than about 20% of your evaluation time – quantity isn’t really that hard to measure.

What about the remaining 80%? Well, I’d use that to focus on the quality aspect of your PR coverage. Track your key message mentions, build up an understanding of what types of coverage include them (colour separations can be tightly edited for example) and then analyse what the uptake is across your PR coverage. I use a simple, aggregated scoring system that enables me to work out key message references as a percentage against PR coverage volume. I can then plot the figures in a graph and chart key message performance throughout the year (I can tell already that this is sounding much more impressive than a lowly AVE figure, haha).

So there we go. Yes, AVE should be a dead metric, but the focus should be on a combined effort to measure your PR activity. If you’re still using AVE in isolation, then you should probably start learning Dodo.