Is AVE Still Relevant?

by Phil Shirley on 31-01-2012

Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion unless it’s a crime against logic (and then, of course, the now inane ‘everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion’ becomes a fallacy).

Such is my view of those PR professionals who have recently, and quite vocally, described Ad Value Equivalency (AVE) as irrelevant because it allegedly “does not account for sentiment, credibility or any other measurement that fits around it.”
AVE aims to show the value of media coverage if that same coverage had been a paid ad rather than earned media. According to some, AVE violates the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles, which many PR firms have endorsed.

I heard a PR person recently talk about ‘smaller, less sophisticated clients with modest budgets” benefitting from a form of evaluation that includes AVEs. I know some mega-blue chip, ultra switched on clients with huge budgets not only benefit from AVE, but demand it, because it makes sense and withstands scrutiny in the board room and, before the aforementioned PR person gets too excited, our work is focused on the bottom line and we do build PR evaluation in at the planning stage. We set clear goals and differentiate PR outcomes from business outcomes, tying our activities back to business objectives, and measure against that using an array of relevant metrics i.e. we don’t just use AVE because we have nothing else to offer.

AVEs may be deceptively simple, but even on their own they can be highly effective as a form of measurement and clients continue to choose to use them and are happy doing so. These are not ignorant clients and we (and many other agencies continuing to use AVE) are not ignorant either. PR should be careful not to fall into the trap of being too measurement driven, not customer focused enough, not entrepreneurial enough, too inflexible, and too prone to navel gazing.