The continuing debate over advertising value equivalency reached the pages of the New York Times 22 Nov., with a “Soapbox” piece saying Hollywood studios are cutting ad budgets and using public relations as an alternative. One anecdote:
Disney recently went so far as to develop a computer program to help it determine how much monetary value was coming from such publicity efforts. It can quickly plug in data — “Access Hollywood” had a 30-second interview with a star of “The Middle,” a new ABC comedy — and the program spits out what that same 30 seconds would cost to buy.
AVEs are a sore spot in PR circles these days. KD Paine, measurement maven extraordinaire, has campaigned against them for years as bogus figures that don’t quantify the value of media hits. The Institute for PR Measurement Commission (of which I am a member) officially condemned the practice in October, and PRSA has formed a blue-ribbon panel to address measurement generally — looking to a world without AVEs.
I believe there are certain circumstances where AVEs are useful — product publicity, for one, where features and benefits are the subject. But AVEs need to be net of cost, be based on actual charges, not simply “book rate,” and the publication has to be targeted to the specific business need. My example is Goodyear, the tire company. If they get a product review in Road and Track, it’s going to be relevant to their audience, include features and benefits, and in nearly all cases quite similar to an advertisement. What’s unaccounted for is the reader’s perception of value — AVEs are limited by an inability to include the weight of third party independence.
Look, notwithstanding this last paragraph, AVE is a bad metric 90 percent of the time, and there are other ways of evaluating media coverage that are better.
So, why does it appear that so many firms are stuck on this difficult metric? Well, AVEs are simple to understand. Here’s what it would have cost us to buy this time or this space — that’s a lot easier to grasp for a lot of people. There also is the pressure on PR agencies levered by their clients — “I understand you don’t like AVE, but I have to have a dollar figure to tell my CEO, so if you don’t give it to me, I’ll find someone who will.”
Still, I wish that more companies would stop using AVE. Oh, and that more people would understand that PR isn’t limited to publicity and press agentry. Perhaps the best reason not to use AVE is that it doesn’t measure the reputation work that represents most of what PR work is in business these days. For every stunt PR trick, there are months of quiet conversations with centers of influence, months of work on helping employees better understand their industries and organizations, and programs designed to help people grasp the significance of a company’s role in the community. There is more to our profession than being a low-cost replacement for marketing.
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Good post, Sean. AVE may be discredited in our world but won’t die easily. Disney is a top communicator but clearly has to use this kind of measure for the internal “sell”, and I can recall my AOR doing the same thing for exactly the same kind of publicity. Up to a point it is a compliment, as it demonstrates how PR generates the same value for much less $$, but it totally fails to address, as you point out, that PR can create a level of reputational awareness and understanding that no ad campaign can ever achieve.
This reputational understanding makes all the difference in a crisis (I see PR Conversations is now linking to Terry Flynn’s article about the CPRS-Leger study of crisis management at Maple Leaf Foods, complete with a useful new acronym), but is much harder to convey for , say, an appearance on “Access Hollywood” or product PR generally, as it slides so easily (esp. now) into the worlds of procuct, experiential and interactive marketing, which themsleves face their own ROI measurement challenges.
The related problem to this is measuring the PR component of an integrated campaign separately. Some firms have made real progress by integrating the measurement systems of a KD Paine or Reputation Institute, or even a homebrew equivalent, into their overall measures, which over time can demonstrate the value of the “months of quiet conversations” etc. But I fear it is still the exception rather than the rule….
Thanks, Jim == the marketing mix modeling stats do help us isolate individual components very well, but the expense of running such models is still out of reach for many organizations. Also, conceptually, the desire for a dollar-value metric is very strong — we will continue working on how to arrive at such a figure, but it again is likely to be expensive to muster up.
Thanks for taking the time to comment!