By: Arleigh Galant Vasconcellos, Principal at The Agency | @ArleighGV
Public Relations is a service. For most industries, services can be measured and therefore ROI can be easily quantified. This is not the case with PR. PR measurement has become a point of contention even to those within our industry.
Because of the quickly changing media landscape, many communications professionals have begun to call for the death of Ad Value Equivalency (AVE). They say it is no longer relevant, or truthful, when it comes to actually giving value to media outcomes. What is frustrating is that they stop short of offering a new solution. Or, like this recent article in PR Daily, they offer intensive measurement processes that completely bypasses the fact that time spent on measurement means time away from pursuing PR opportunities. I agree with the anonymous commenter’s points, speaking from the agency side, that there is a lack of understanding of what it means to take the time to measure PR efforts the way that the author is calling to do.
In the days of print/TV/radio when I started my career in the industry, i.e., before online media, AVE was pretty much the main key performance indicator for PR. AVE was about as straightforward as you could get. However, there is still much debate about how much more value should be given to editorial space over advertising space. Some say it’s three times more valuable, and some say it’s up to five times more valuable depending on the outlet. This divide has weakened AVE in the eyes of some professionals as an effective metric because there is no one way to calculate it.
So how else can we possibly give value in a way that proves the worth of our work, but also isn’t a huge sink of time (which if you’re agency side, your clients are rarely willing to pay for) to calculate? I still think that AVE is a decent metric for PR, but I do NOT feel it is the only metric. As I’ve learned over the years in dealing with various CFOs and COOs at companies that I’ve worked on PR projects for – they understand dollars and numbers. They like it when we are able to quantify our work in their terms. Thus, when relevant, we still need to be able to put a dollar sign on the outcome of our work.
Perhaps it is time to consider a straight-up comparison: What’s the cost versus expense of the two scenarios below? Paying $20,000 for advertising (which doesn’t include the budget and time you still need to spend with designers, consultants and writers), versus paying $20,000 for the time of a PR professional to gain earned media coverage. Which comes out to more in the end? I’ll let you do the math. If the CFO sees that the company pays, for example, $60,000 per year in PR, but they earn $100,000 worth of good will and good messaging about their company to their target audiences, not through advertising (paid media) but in write-ups in relevant outlets (also known as earned media), to them, that makes sense.
Before I seem too old school, let me be VERY clear. AVE isn’t the end-all, be-all metric of our work.
Check out Part 2 of ‘PR Measurement: One Size Does Not Fit All’
What are your thoughts on measuring PR efforts? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter at @PRTheAgency.
