Measurement Maven of the Month

Measurement Menace of the Month

As readers of the clipping resources Buyer’s Guide in this issue will gather, more and more publications are going online and more and more of what traditional clipping services have done is being automated. To compete, they have been struggling to add new services and new value to keep their customers. Durrants has come up with what might be the most egregious and is certainly the most misguided “added value” we’ve ever seen.

Under “Media Evaluation” on their Web site, they describe an Advertising Value Equivalency service that purports to measure the value of PR efforts. Regular readers of The Measurement Standard will know that we hold AVEs in very low esteem. See this article, for instance.

Adding insult to injury, Durrants claims that AVEs are a “PR Industry standard measure.” Durrants seems to have missed the fact that both the Institute for Public Relations in the US and the Institute of Public Relations in the UK, as well as many other standard-setting bodies, have categorically advised against the use of AVEs. Countless professional and academic papers have explained why they are a misleading and inaccurate method for evaluating PR efforts.

Let us repeat once again for Durrants’ benefit the basic problem with AVEs: There is not a shred of hard evidence to show that one column of editorial coverage elicits the same outcome from a member of a target audience as a comparably sized column of advertising. Anyone using this assumption is both perpetuating a fallacy and risking their personal credibility.

Durrants doesn’t even make the obvious effort to weed out the positive articles from the negative. Nor do they include only articles that contain key messages. Thus they are essentially equating a negative front-page story with a paid advertisement in the same place, in the same publication. Perhaps Enron’s or WorldCom’s board would buy such bogus logic, but I can’t imagine many others that would. Well, then again, there’s always Tyco.