Stop pretending PR is worth the same as advertising space
In this guest posting, Millward Brown’s Sarah Emerson says the old-fashioned PR formula of adding up column inches and equating it to what the ad space would have cost needs to be killed off.
Last Sunday’s ‘Crave Sydney’ Breakfast on the Bridge event in Sydney was supposedly worth up to “$10 million in overseas publicity” according to media reports quoting the NSW Premier Nathan Rees. To use a tourism turn of phrase, ‘where the bloody hell’ do these numbers come from?
The continuing use of advertising value equivalents (AVEs) to predict and measure non-paid for media exposure and tout the results as a definitive measure of success is frustrating. There are many, at best shortcomings, at worst fundamental flaws, with the creation of an “advertising value equivalent”.
Traditional AVE creation utilises a straight multiplier of full page rate to percentage of page. As a result, small appearances generate very little value which means they don’t acknowledge the achievement of getting publicity and reaching your audience in the first place, whereas multipage items overwhelm all other achievements – even if the coverage is neither favourable nor on message.
Surely the industry is mature enough to move on from ‘finger in the air’ predictions of media value and AVE measurements? PR is valued by clients – that’s why they pay the big bucks – so let’s give them alternative means to evaluate media coverage that will help them communicate the outcomes and justify PR expenditure to their stakeholders.
This means concentrating on measuring to what degree we gained good quality exposure – that which conveyed the right messages to the right audience at the right time. Of course, we should always monitor and evaluate the content delivered, but the focus should be on quantitative evaluation.
So, when it comes to PR, the “sweet spot” of return on investment should be the acknowledgement of a single piece of coverage or publicity being published in a medium appropriate for the target audience and communicating key messages, irrespective of size. Then as the article size increases, added, but diminishing value, can be applied.
It’s time communications professionals and media professional alike challenge brands or organisations who want to use outdated, inaccurate methodology to evaluate PR efforts, and start educating them about the alternative metrics that can be employed or reported.
- Sarah Emerson is regional director of Millward Brown Precis
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Nicely said Sarah. People buy publications to read the stories not the ads and hence they should be treated differently when evaulating their impact on the target audience.
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Agree on some points, but frankly the reasoning behind PR reporting being based on editorial value vs. advertising value is because, majority of the time, we are presenting to a client, who only understands and appreciates a $$ value!
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Thanks for the article it is always good to have the debate on AVEs and measurement.
The PRIA does not recognise AVEs as a valid measure and it is important that we as professionals all work closely with clients to help them understand what are valid measures that meet their needs.
You can find the PRIA position statement on AVEs here: http://bit.ly/qaxR0
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Had a client which insisted on AVE measurement and even though the PR proved to be positive, in right media and at a fraction of the cost of paid advertising we still got dumped due to lack of budget.
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This entire debate is anachronistic. It was over ten years ago. Not to mention that traditional publicity work is a fraction of the work most PR agencies do on a daily basis, and becoming less so as traditional media becomes less and less relevant.
And frankly, study you would care to read puts peer-to-peer word of mouth, social media endorsement or yes, expert journalistic comment, light-years ahead of traditional advertising in terms of achieving any sort of business outcome for a client. So why would PR want to measure against it?
Maybe marketers should be re-evaluating spending $25M on TVCs nobody watches and banner ads that nobody notices – let alone believes – and $25K on “PR” when they don’t understand what they’re buying.
Anyone who requests an AVE clearly has no idea how to measure marketing spend [not advertising spend] and probably shouldn’t be in charge of a marketing budget.
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Hi,
I am in the midst of a national campaign for Wacom (via M&A) and have to report on efficacy of the campaign so have been giving this a bit of thought.
Our problem is compounded by the fact the we are using Blunty3000 to run the campaign and want to use impressions, time on site, positive brand mentions, reach, etc.
I am considering adopting bits from this method found here:
http://www.mrpdata.com/
Has anyone had any practical experience using this method and/or opinions on it in general?
Cheers,
Geoffrey
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Unfortunately, some clients just want something quantifiable such as AVE which, though ridiculous, is all they understand. And while we can try to educate clients, sometimes they just don’t want to know, and it’s not worth firing a client over!
One way we used to get around using AVE was to create a system in which AVE was only one element (isn’t it worth more than ad rates though, so in other countries they triple it), but also creating a points system as to the positivity of the story, the number of press release information points used etc. But the most important aspect to this was prioritising media (including social) based on what was the most targeted and important to the client’s audience. So this meant that trade media and specialist magazines (especially important for say, motoring clients) were more important than wide-reaching consumer publications.
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I can’t believe that people still use that archaic formula. Measurement, as you say, is far more sophisticated these days. It should take into account not only messages but things like: tone, position, audience reach, size, themes, third party endorsers, media footprint compared to competitors, quotes from company spokespeople, frequency and the like. This takes time, effort and more often than not these analytics don’t rest with the PR company but with a specialist supplier.
Unfortunately too few clients are prepared to pay for this type of in-depth analysis and fall back on the old ‘thump’ factor – the noise the clippings book makes when it hits the table.
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I don’t believe in valuing coverage and I strongly discourage it with ALL of my clients as I completely agree with Sarah. However as Julia says, it is further up the ladder that this needs to be conveyed!
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I have to agree with Julia. While I can only speak from working in an agency and representing clients (both retainer and project based), the main reason I feel AVE continues to be used is that it is what clients expect. Despite efforts to incorporate more analytical elements into reports on media coverage such as reach, positive vs negative, share of voice and other insights most clients in my experience are only interested in one thing: “what return have I gotten on my investment, in dollar figures?”
Is it an archaic and inaccurate representation of the work that we do as public relations and communications professionals? Yes. What we do and the results we foster for our clients extends further than column centimeters in a publication (although this is definitely a part of what we do). How do you place a dollar value on your client being invited to play golf with a large electrical retailer and their guests in the USA as a result of a media article featuring said client? How do you place a dollar figure on the lobbying we may do on behalf of a client to facilitate a meeting with a political representative. As public relations professionals we wear many hats and achieve a diverse range of results for clients – some of which just cannot be simplified into an AVE.
Of course, there is no denying there needs to be an education process with clients about other and more accurate measures of results but until such time as there is a shift away from seeing ROI as a $ equivalent I fear that clients, particularly given economic shifts this year, will still want the hard and fast AVE reporting.
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OK, I don’t work in PR so maybe my question is dumb… but surely the real measure of “value” and success is how opinion and/or behaviour is actually changed in the target audience? I’m talking things like “How many more people now have a positive impression of Sydney as a holiday destination?” or “How many more boxes of muesli did we sell?”
That of course would be very hard to measure. You’d presumably have to survey a real representative sample before and after, and also survey a control group who weren’t exposed to the campaign at all so that you could factor out other influences.
That sounds every expensive, but to me — being sorta trained in this Science stuff — everything else sounds like wankery that’s measuring the sizzle not counting the steaks.
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Thanks Sarah for putting a piece out about a much discussed topic however I think you need to be careful about your quals and quants, third last para reads the focus should be on quantitative. Isn’t your article advocating qualitiative.
Anyway in a former life we used to send our media monitors reports each month to a company called Publicity Ratings who gave us Editorial Rating Points, which the Board did understand, so clients should too.
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I i think editorial measurement using any method is a waste of time and money better spent getting editorial coverage. If as a comms professional you need to rely on this to obtain budget, keep your job or prove your worth, it’s probably a sign you need to work on your internal political and persuasion skills, or change jobs where they ‘get it’ and you dont have to spin your wheels on this kind of thing
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PR should be measured by objectives achieved – not ‘column inches’ achieved …
Measuring a potential target audience will always be relevant in a promotional campaign. However, PR in its truest sense is far broader than media outcomes or publicity. On some occasions the best outcome on a brief might be contained in a sentence within a story – or be invisible.
These objectives will always be different for every client and every brief.
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Pretending? Who ever said PR was worth the same as advertising? The only argument I’ve heard it that is worth more (which is flawed as it depends on so many things)!
Any smart marketer knows that integrated strategies work best and trying to compare editorial content to advertising is ridiculous. With the right results — one can be far more powerful. Isn’t is the objective that is important?
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re:
I am considering adopting bits from this method found here:
http://www.mrpdata.com/
Has anyone had any practical experience using this method and/or opinions on it in general?
Cheers,
Geoffrey
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This is a Canadian online PR measurement tool and working with it when practicing in Toronto provided me with the best form of PR measurement I’ve seen. It was started by the CPRS if I’m remembering correctly, and its database was / is developed through submission of audited readership data from participating (read: pretty much all the ones you needed to track) publications and media outlets.
At the beginning of a campaign you agree upon 5 key measurements with your client against which to measure each clipping — and it really depends on the program and what you’re / they’re looking for e.g. use of key message, spokesperson quote, tier 1 publication, inclusion of event photo etc. You set up a campaign report by completing a form in which you enter those criteria, then fill out a quick and easy online form for each clipping and tick the boxes. A report is provided that takes the 5 criteria into account, plus a positive / negative / neutral rating, as well as the reported readership. I honestly cannot remember the formula it uses to figure it all out, but the report provides you with a numeric representation of the success of the PR campaign / program — and MRP score and related dollar value in the form of ROI / Cost Per Contact — and MRP also provides you with an industry standard against which to compare that score.
When not using MRP, I’ve continued to incorporate the 5 criteria aspect into measurement reporting I’ve done for clients. But it was so great to have a quantifiable score to provide at the end of a campaign because – as many of you know – so many clients want to put a number / value against the measurement of their campaigns.
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Ah yes, the vexed and time honoured question of putting a dollar value on editorial coverage.
Measuring editorial coverage with AVE’s is like comparing apples with oranges.
We recently handled a high profile national PR launch for a not-for-profit client and I asked three buddies in the media game to give me their rough “back of the envelope” calculation on the advertising equivalent.
The calculations came in at between $200K and $320K AVE, which I duly reported to the client as requested.
But so what? The content wasn’t an ad, but a complicated series of divergent news and current affairs reports covering an initiative which our client sponsored. Some of it made terrific, positive reference to our client as the sponsor (scale up the AVE) and some of it did not (scale down the AVE). Our talent did a great job getting key messages out in some national TV interviews (positive loading?) and in others was a bit tired and distracted and missed opportunities (negative loading?) So how do you value all that?
Anyway, so here’s what I reckon.
People know there is a significant commercial value to being part of the daily news discourse – whether that is online or via more traditional media. They have a sense of the commercial value that is delivered from credible, independent, scrutinized, editorially reported support for their brand.
They know how to (roughly) value it from their experience in paying for ad space, watching the phone ring when it happens, hearing their colleagues say they saw it, measuring the smile on their bosses face, watching web traffic reports, checking positive sales correlations, hearing the feedback from the reps in the field, ticking the boxes on their editorial targets, speaking to journalists who want more and monitoring the longer term dialogue it triggers.
People who know the game have a pretty good idea.
And so when the estimate arrives from the PR agency, and they’ve got confidence in the agency to deliver the editorial outcomes as described, they know what they’re comparing.
They’re comparing the dollar number on the estimate with the dollar value for the editorial outcomes they are confident will be delivered.
So in their mind, they’re comparing apples with apples.
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Hey Rex … you left a few things off the list in your third paragraph … “Maybe marketers should be re-evaluating spending $25M on TVCs nobody watches and banner ads that nobody notices – let alone believes – and $25K on “PR” when they don’t understand what they’re buying. “.
You left out “reams of column inches of rehashed PR that if anyone bothers to read it no-one believes.”
By the way, I buy into my last statement as much as I buy into yours.
Do you REALLY think that clients are stupid nough to spend $25m on TV that “NOBODY” watches and that gets no demonstrable result? Park you prejudices and give your clients some credit for knowing what works and what doesn’t work for their brand.
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As a PR professional, I understand that companies want to quantify the value of PR. However I believe that applying a multiplier to the PR coverage is unethical. In my 20 years of working in PR I have never seen any study that can prove PR is more credible than advertising. Raw AVEs I understand, but multipliers are dodgy.
I believe that multipliers are devised by agencies who simply want to make themselves look better.
Worse, using this as a benchmark doesn’t address any of the central tennants of PR – did it reach the target audience; were the key messages carry.
We all know that PR and advertising achieve different outcomes for clients. PR needs to be brave enough to drop the ‘multipliers’.
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@ John Grono, well said. I’m getting a bit sick of people bashing other media because they a) don’t work in that area, b) don’t understand but most likely both. In closing, I would just like to say that all media should be spent purely on digital. Thank you.
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Thanks for all your comments. Isn’t it crazy that this topic is still giving us such a headache? I think most PR professionals recognise an AVE does not represent the achievements of media relations work. Send this thread onto your clients or bosses and show them how united we are in our opinions on AVEs (I’m sure Tim would love the extra views)! We live in an age of accountability and shouldn’t be afraid to evaluate our work – so long as the methodology is appropriate and the objectives realistic. Like Kate said, many clients do understand there are better ways to evaluate media outcomes and [gratuitous plug] Millward Brown Precis works with a number of global and local organisations who get this.
And just to clarify Kate’s other point, I meant this particular discussion is focused on quantitative measurement as this is where the heinous crime of using AVEs is seen!
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A couple of comments:
If all your clients want is a dollar value because that is all they understand then there are much more senisitive ways of of creatingone than a multiplier effect. Base it on audience reached, cost per thousand that is relevant to your sector and audience rather than on flat rate dollar fees than publications charge, but may be totally unsuited to your campaigns. MB Precis can provide this, but it is just a much more robust data source and then becomes a strategic tool. It would still have an underlying basis in what you need to know not some farcical number.
As for the ‘online is the only thing that matters’ people. We all appreciate that this a growing area and could be hugely important for PR, but until it becomes more measurable from a PR perspective then its true value can’t be accurately assessed. However, just posting an article about a product or topic online doesn’t cut it. Agencies are giving the value of tiny blogs on sites such as Yahoo! as the value of the whole site, or the whole section. Both of these numbers can and almost always do hugely overvalue the prominence. They are interesting relative scores to other sites, but until websites/blogs/etc become more accountable and transparent about their traffic and help PR practitioners understand how effective their sites are for transimitting this type of info, there will be a lot of guesswork and assumption.
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re: “This is a Canadian online PR measurement tool” — by that I meant the tool is accessed online, not that it measures online PR campaigns. 🙂
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@Richelle – Thanks for responding to my post, I really like the idea of a set of pre-defined criteria that both you and the client agree on.
I think I am going to incorporate that, online metrics such as page views, and some sort of qualitative review of comments and brand messaging.
Interesting debate, I think it might be time for a industry body like the PRIA to adopt a framework similar to MRP and get some real consensus across the industry what really works.
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Nice peice, and well written… certainly evocative!
The reality is – the client wants an ROI so he/she can evaluate success/failure. AVE does it in the same language as the PR’s above the line cousins. Like it or not, most senior marketers need a base metric for comparison and AVE is it… I personally think it undercalls the true value of 3rd party endorsement. We’re all guilty of spending (other peoples money) way too much on traditional ads – we’ve built an industry out of it!
Its similar to the financial markets – risk vs return. Above the line has low risk, owing to complete control of the message. PR has high risk owing to a lack of control of the final message. It stands to reason therefore that PR coverage has a higher return (or loss if negative)…
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The great thing about this debate is that virtually everyone agrees that AEVs should be killed off. We simply refuse to report on them to clients and have developed a simple tool that they can use themselves using their own media clippings. You can view it at http://www.creativeterritory.com/itrack
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Hi Creative Territory,
I suspect one reason there’s a fair bit of consensus is that those who use the methodology with clients know that it’s a steaming crock, but they’re keeping their heads down.
I know of large Australian agencies who do use it.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Good piece Sarah – I think the bigger picture is less about AVEs per se and more to do with the fact the business world is spilling in to two different camps when it comes to PR. Dovetailing from your post above, I’ve blogged about it here: ‘Column Inches’ Argument Gives Weight to Another Dilemma: the True Role of PR http://tinyurl.com/ykh3swv
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I agree with Fleur. If you use AVE you assume that churning out press releases and getting coverage in publications is the only important thing PRs do. In my opinion it is about so much more than that. Having said that, I can see why it is an easy way of ‘proving’ value to a client and that a lot of clients would struggle to accept a different way. Let’s face it, most of THEM think the most important thing is column inches, totally missing all the other stuff that goes with it.
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The simple fact is the AVEs are not recognised as a legitimate measurement of the work of public relations practitioners in Australia by the national institute, nor by any other national professional institute around the world, let alone the Global Alliance of all the institutions. Any work that is put forward for an industry award using AVE will be rejected out of hand. Practitioners using it do themselves a disservice. There are plenty of other methodologies available to reflect the quality of work to clients.
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I must say, I’m a little surprised coming back to this thread, and reading the comments which range from complete support of banishing AVE measurement, acknowledgement that it is not the best form but still if the client wants it, through to support for AVE.
As Fleur says quite eloquently, public relations (or in this post, media relations) should be measured by objectives, not column inches.
There are recognised methodologies in measuring and evaluating media coverage which practitioners can easily translate to a client environment, including http://www.pria.com.au/resourc.....evating-pr and http://www.pria.com.au/resourc.....s/l/layout
What I haven’t seen (?) is a recognition that we can be more strategic with our measurement, including proving ROI and an impact on sales and the bottom line. Surely, in terms of convincing a client that the ‘job is done, and done well’ it starts at the beginning – identify your objectives and a strategy to achieve them. Do you want to achieve a change in sentiment? Perhaps profile a service/product/CEO? Well, proving success of these is not through column inches! It’s qualitative and quantitative.. did people actually read it or are you assuming circulation rates are accurate/adequate?
A good place to read more is over at the PRIA website: http://www.pria.com.au/resourc.....ving-value
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It’s certainly not just PRs who often ineffectively evaluate results the advertising industry is renowned for it. Look at the Australian Tourism and Carlton Draught’s Big Ad commercials. These were lauded as great successes due to the number of people viewing them. What a crock! THe ATC ad did not result in an increase in international visitors and the Carlton ad did not result in any real increase in sales. Advertising is notorious for not caring about the clients objectives, usually sales, but instead producing a creative piece that will get them, the agency, recognition. Yet it’s the ad industry who has criticised PR for not being able to evaluate results.
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I say pity the poor marketing people who have to fill in their spreadsheets to hand to their bosses. Sure, you can ‘Add Comment’ to a value cell saying “it was really positive” or what have you, but they have to decide where to spend the money next year.
If other marketing channels like media, DM etc are being measured in a Cost vs Value scenario, i.e. only in dollar signs, then it’s only fair they should seek to measure PR the same way.
I’m not a PR person and I can tell the formula is flawed, but there HAS to be a formula that spits out a $ value at the end. After all $s are what they are spending, not fluffly platitudes.
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