Fishburn Hedges

31.03.2011

I'm pleased PR Week decided last week to ban AVE as a measure of campaign success in its awards.  Advertising Value Equivalent is one of the most meaningless measures in our industry. 

Some of our clients are still under pressure to use statistics of this kind.  Another is OTS (if you don’t know what that is, trust me, you don’t need to).  The problem that we – and our clients – have is satisfying the demand of Board members in their organisations for statistics that tell them something about their investment in PR.

Philip Sheldrake from the CIPR makes the point better than I could: “The AVE approach to PR measurement and evaluation was simple – and utterly wrong. It’s a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier and only addressing a fraction of the PR domain – a greater waste of time and effort you couldn’t hope to find.”

I understand why some people have become hooked on a fantasy number.  There’s bugger all else out there that can be done as quickly and cheaply to show what impact our work’s had.  I was chatting to the research guys at Echo yesterday who agreed that there’s no silver bullet (thankfully in a whole hour we didn’t mention AVE).

That shouldn’t deter anyone from tailoring evaluation tools to the brief, and educating clients to the possibilities.  Yes, they cost money.  Yes, they take more time.  They won’t be off the shelf, but they will have more meaning and they’ll tell you about real outcomes.

The industry needs to be driving evaluation, and not be driven.  So PR Week’s decision can’t come soon enough, but we need to do more. 

Posted by Adam Keal