The use of Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) as media measurement and a tool to value media placements is one of the most contentious topics in our business; the topic seems to emerge at nearly every professional conference. As you undoubtedly know, AVE is essentially the practice of assigning a “value”to a news story by equating it to advertising costs, with the implication that the news story is somehow “equivalent”to an advertisement in terms of probable audience impact.
The debate about AVE is healthy because it tends to move public relations practitioners beyond simple quantitative measures to more meaningful types of analysis of value. (The additional challenge of measuring the value of social media doesn’t make our jobs any easier, though.)
The Institute’s Commission on Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation meeting at our Summit on Measurement in Portsmouth last October voted overwhelmingly to reject AVE as a media measurement concept and practice. Although not a snap decision (the AVE debate has been raging with the Commission and profession for years), the Commission wisely also decided to first achieve some consensus around alternative media measures before vocally or publicly abandoning the practice. After all, many professionals still have bosses or clients who demand AVE data.
Now comes a new paper published by the Commission: “A New Paradigm for Media Analysis: Weighted Media Cost.”The authors regard it as an addendum to the 2003 Commission white paper, “Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE)” by Bruce Jeffries-Fox. The original Jeffries-Fox paper and other Commission documents discouraged the use of AVE in favor of other forms of media analysis such as story counts and audience impressions for quantitative scoring, and tone, message, prominence, dominance, accuracy, etc., for qualitative analysis.
The authors of the addendum to the Jeffries-Fox paper “agree with all the problems cited with AVE as it has been historically practiced. However, the question to be explored now is whether recent evidence warrants a fresh look at the metric itself (the cost of media space and time) as opposed to its historic use as an “equivalency”between news and advertising in terms of value.
The new paper presents evidence for the validity of using “Weighted Media Costs”in media analysis. The authors “encourage industry media evaluation, research and analysis firms (and our own Commission) to adopt this new method as a replacement for old Advertising Value Equivalency scoring, and as a replacement for, or addition to, story counts and audience impressions for quantitative scoring.
The authors hope that their research helps put to rest the “AVE wars,”and leads public relations practitioners toward clearer correlations of their hard work to real business results.
An admirable goal, to be sure. But dare I ask, what do you think?
Bob Grupp
President and CEO
Institute for Public Relations
There are a few things that I’ve noticed in the AVE wars and in the measurement space in general:
-There has been a lack of specific case studies used when debating various formulas, ideas…so this is great effort by the authors
-I believe clients are still somewhat stuck in outputs…most clients aren’t ready/willing to move to more strategic outcome-based measurement. Budgets and fear are likely the motivators here
-AVE or dollar-based measurements aren’t going away anytime soon
I’m not a big fan of AVE, but to be honest have been hard-pressed to move some clients away from it completely. As a result, for those who still want to use this measurement, I’ve tried to put a focus more on the benchmarking and trending opportunities with AVE–as opposed to worrying too much about the specific number/value of a story.
There are so many problems with purchasing media data, debate about the accuracy of purchased data, keeping them updated etc., that we need to help clients get beyond the value of one story and to focus on how the overall campaign compares to previous ones and competitors, by using +-%. As long as a consistent formula is being used with consistent data, people will benefit from those insights whether that is AVE, the proposed WMC, or any other formula.
With the combination of key elements being considered with this new formula, I think this is a step in right direction and I will for sure be looking at WMC in more detail to see how it might be a fit for clients who have still been using AVE based measurements.
On a final note, one area where there is room for much more emphasis is on the competitive analysis opportunities in this space. The ability to benchmark your organization and specific brands against others is one of the most powerful tools out there. Now that most content providers charge a flat-fee (versus cost-per-clip) there is no excuse not to monitor and measure all of your main competitors.
PS: I really like Angela’s point about just removing the $ completely.
It seems that in determining what’s “wrong” with AVEs, we have the ingredients for a measure that’s “right” or at least “more right.” The recipe looks something like this:
Four parts quantifiable objectives; one part circulation/audience; one part tone; one part target media/non-target media; one part key-message delivery; and one part visibility (headline or not/photo or not). To me, that’s good soup.
A simple spreadsheet could be used to compute the presence of these elements and one can easily compute the success-vs-objective. This would be universal and accessible, and given the degree to which media relations programs have different potential and different success factors, it is agnostic to budget and scope (in a way that ad values are not).
The difficulty, of course, is that even fewer PR people set measurable objectives than eschew ad values.
Katie is mistaken that the only way to get Media Cost Weighting data is through VMS services. I wish that were the case ;o), but alas, every clipping service or media analysis firm has equal access to negotiated media cost data from SQAD Inc., which is an independent firm that collects about $7 billion of actual media buys from agencies throughout the country and determines what folks are actually paying for it as opposed to ratecard rates. Then, SQAD projects forward what rates are likely to be, and most major media buying firms and agencies subscribe to this database and consequently argue down the prices to come close to the SQAD figures. Right now, Critical Mention uses SQAD for TV, and I suspect other firms do as well. Neil Klar, president of SQAD, would be more than happy to sell more subscriptions!
But the point is somewhat moot since whether or not one uses negotiated rates, the absolute ‘value’ of a story is never what matters. All that matters is that the same data is used consistently over time, against objectives or competitors, as a comparative index. Take the dollar sign off if you wish. It is meaningless as an absolute number.
As for measuring prominence and dominence, there’s no doubt these are steps in the right direction. But at some point, one needs an objective, market-driven data points for the best correlations to outcomes.
Good discussion, everyone! Appreciate the comments.
Katie Paine’s legitimate reservations aside, this is a step in the right direction. AVE is garbage, it has always been garbage, and it has only survived because people have found ways to make big profits from it by gulling executives who demand dollar metrics–no matter how shoddy their methodology or specious their research assumptions.
Second in speciousness (but ahead of AVE in use) is the use of media impressions as a measure of PR effectiveness. Strictly speaking “impressions” is an advertising term that is used to measure the size of a media audience multiplied by the number of ad exposures that appear. In other words, if an ad appears seven times in a publication with a circulation of one million, or a cable program with a rating of 1 (representing a million TV households, a rarity in cable), that results in seven million impressions.
However, all that really means is that seven million people had an opportunity to view the ad. It does not mean that they actually saw it, that it influenced them, or that they acted on it.
The proposed new WMC methodology is correct in subtracting negative coverage (as anyone who has ever done content analysis will attest) and using negotiated or “real” media costs instead of rate-card rates in creating the WMC index. Using rate-card rates in the past has only served to inflate the AVE numbers while at the same time demonstrating that the users know nothing about advertising.
Bill Huey
Strategic Communications
Atlanta
This series of papers seems to have laid out the recipe for anyone who wants to do this kind of analysis, so I have to ask: Why couldn’t any other vendor acquire or develop the necessary data to use this approach?
My first problem with this paper is that it advocates a metric that is ONLY available thru the vendor that published the paper. Until and unless Media Cost Weighting is available for free to everyone in PR, it is essentially an advertisement for one particular vendor. I also wonder whether accounting for what I would call prominence and dominance—essentially the amount of “ink” devoted to brand—wouldn’t yield the same correlatoins.