AVEs are AOK!

Rethinking our attitude
towards Advertising Value Equivalency

Years ago at the Boston Herald, a wonderful columnist named Michael Ryan wrote a column about why we should all hate baseball. Now Mr. Ryan was a huge baseball fan and the Boston Herald is a newspaper that counts an enormous number of sports fans among its subscribers. He was, he admitted later, just "seeing if there was anyone out there." Needless to say, he got mail from a great many people, and most of them hated him passionately, for at least a week.

So, with this article I'll either get a response like Mr. Ryan did, or I'll find out that the subject of Ad Value Equivalency—which has caused passionate debate for years—is as exciting as listening to a cricket match on the radio. (I can't wait to see what kind of letters I get for that one!)

First of all, however, let me be very clear that I write this as a seeker of knowledge, and as an editor of a newsletter about PR measurement—not in my role as the Chair of the IPR Commission on Research and Evaluation, or even as a former researcher.

Let me also be extremely clear that the notion of counting column inches and comparing the cost of "placing" those column inches to the cost of placing an equivalent-sized ad is simply bad research and should never be allowed in any PR firm or organization. In the words of Dr. Walter Lindemann, renowned researcher and PR measurement pioneer, "It's the equivalent of putting a new bathroom in, and then calling up an electrician and asking how much he would have charged to do the plumbing." The two disciplines are not comparable, and there is no evidence anywhere that indicates an editorial column inch is the equivalent of a column inch of advertising. So don't do it. (This month's Measurement Menace Award goes to a PR firm that makes conspicuous use of AVEs.)

While I don't endorse Ad Value Equivalency (AVE) as a measurement tool, I will now concede that there are situations and methodologies in which ad rates can be useful. Since ad rates are an indication of relative credibility, an argument can be made for using ad rates as a factor in analyzing media. How much a publication charges for advertising is a reflection not just of its circulation, but also of its reputation versus its peers. So for example, in Canada, the Globe & Mail and the National Post have identical circulations, but the Globe & Mail can charge considerably more for ad space because it is the more credible publication. While some would argue that an eyeball reached is an eyeball communicated to, Surveillance Data has looked at this issue and believes that when you factor in ad rates you get a higher degree of correlation with ensuing customer behavior.

The purpose of AVEs has been to try to compare PR effectiveness with advertising impact. One way to do this without using AVEs is a rating scale developed by Delahaye Medialink for a major consumer products company. Delahaye Medialink tracks the percentage of the population in a given geographic region that has the opportunity to see brand benefits, brand recommendations and/or brand visuals. Essentially, articles that contain one or more of these factors are considered the "equivalent" of an ad. Thus if you have a population of 50 million and 25 million or 50% see articles that contain brand benefits, brand recommendations or brand visuals, you have achieved the equivalent of a 50 GRP (Gross Rating Point). You can then factor in the cost spent on the campaign or PR effort in that time frame. So if your PR budget for the quarter is $100,000 and you achieved a 50 GRP, your cost per rating point is $2000. Your CPM (cost per thousand) is $4. That would compare favorably to CPMs of $33 and up for typical advertising programs.

Ultimately, any comparison to advertising is essentially unfair to either discipline. Advertising can be shaped to say exactly what you want it to, unlike PR, in which messages are filtered through those pesky editors. PR is meant to improve relationships with your publics, and if successful, has a much broader impact than advertising.

The bottom line is that people are always looking for easy answers to the difficult question of how to demonstrate the effectiveness of PR over other disciplines. ###