Opinion

Tourism Australia’s ad is the perfect reminder of why AVEs don’t work

Despite claiming its Crocodile Dundee Super Bowl campaign earned '$30 million in free media', Zendesk's Marissa Tree is here to offer a friendly reminder that no one in the PR industry has actually figured out how to accurately calculate such a number.

As a PR person, there’s something about ads generating earned (aka free) media coverage that has always made me chuckle quietly to myself, while also wanting to high five my creative cousins for making clever content that creates buzz.

I’m not alone – Malcolm Auld of The Content Brewery also gets a kick out of seeing marketers using good old-fashioned public relations to promote their ads.

However, this week, my chuckles turned to eye rolls when I read the ABC’s article on Tourism Australia’s hugely successful Crocodile Dundee Super Bowl ad, quoting trade minister Steve Ciobo saying that the ongoing $36 million campaign to double US tourists’ annual spending over the next three years represents value for money, with the 90 second ad alone watched by an audience of over 100 million Americans (the six official YouTube clips have amassed an additional 7.8 million views), and so far generated “$30 million in free media”.

I proceeded to Google “Tourism Australia Super Bowl ad”, and more than 16.2 million results popped up. Hit the news tab, and you see over 711,000 links to pieces of coverage from around the world – and that’s just online. By anyone’s standards, this is a Hollywood blockbuster-sized amount of buzz that any client would be rightly thrilled with.

The ad itself has been touted as one of the most successful amongst this year’s Super Bowl ad-lumni, and I agree. It’s a funny, sexy, on message, beautifully shot piece of work, and as a concept and storyline has more legs than a crocodile watering hole. But there are far more impactful ways to be measuring success than touting a mythical bunyip-like dollar figure of free publicity.

Advertising value equivalents (AVEs) are the bane of the PR industry. Many of us with more than 10 years’ industry experience will remember chasing down old copies of newspapers and magazines for tear sheets and calculating how much it would have cost to advertise in the same space against often outdated media rate cards, and multiplying that figure by three, five, seven, nine, 13 or whatever other number a client considered worthy.

It wasn’t long after I entered the PR world in the early 2000s that my colleagues were starting to talk about more accurate ways to evaluate the true impact of earned, word-of-mouth buzz. Fast forward to today, and we are still trying to find that silver bullet.

Last year, AMEC launched its “Say No to AVEs” campaign, which includes 22 definitive reasons as to why AVEs are not a valid communications metric.

Having sat on both sides of the agency/ client table, and therefore having reported both internally to the C-suite or a client team on the return on investment from a campaign, we are always asked to defend cost versus value.

This ask isn’t exclusive to marketing, advertising or PR teams. The ‘vanity metric’ of what is essentially the most basic of business principles – spend less, make more – is empty, and one that every function in an organisation is asked to justify.

AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework looks far more holistically at how to demonstrate the value of communications in an ever-evolving media landscape. The framework suggests a highly effective way of measuring outputs, outcomes and outtakes from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective to link back to organisational objectives.

For all intents and purposes, a significant majority of coverage is positive (other than the disappointed audiences who were hoping for a full feature film), brand recall is at an all-time high, and social engagement spiked higher than a porcupine riding an outback road train. There’s no doubt it’s already been a highly successful campaign. The proof will be in the longer term goal of seeing the desired boost in US visitor numbers and spend by 2020.

If we can evolve past tear sheets, surely we can start to scrap the single outdated metric that keeps holding the industry back from demonstrating it’s true value to the brands we work for. Ultimately, clients need to stop asking for it, and agencies need to keep up the good fight of showing there are far more effective ways of proving how great their work is.

Marissa Tree is director of international communications APAC for Zendesk, and her crush on Chris Hemsworth had absolutely no bearing on opinions and points of view shared in this article.

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