The Measurement Standard: Blog Edition

More on AVEs: Their true -- and very valuable -- significance.

For serious public relations researchers, the whole AVE and advertising-money-value debate is a red herring, a colossal distraction from the real significance and potential that AVEs represent.

In my previous post, I said that Advertising Value Equivalencies are porn for PR. And I also said that they can be an important component of useful and valid public relations measurement. This latter use is a specific case of a brilliant and powerful research technique that public relations measurement can benefit from.

At the recent 2009 IPR Summit on PR Measurement, Angie Jeffrey provided the most marvelous quote of the whole AVE debate. She said that she used AVEs in her research as "a measure of the perceived ability of media to deliver desired outcomes."

Brilliant. Notice that she did not say anything about advertising or money or value. (All terms that have given AVEs a bad name.) What she did say was that AVEs were used to infer something about human nature, and were used to apply this inference to public relations research.

The really important and valuable thing about AVEs is that they are an example of data from a unusual source being applied to shed new light on a research problem. This general technique is fabulously powerful. It's being used, for example, with great fanfare in economics. (Read Levitt and Dubne's Freakonomics if you want to know more. Actually, read my review of Freakonomics. It will be much quicker.)

Unfortunately, in real life AVEs are a research disaster (with, as I noted, some specific exceptions). Crude users of AVEs draw a direct-but-specious line between advertising and money and PR. Because they are based on the advertising market, AVEs present an irresistible temptation for those who want a quick and easy way to compare PR to advertising, and/or to provide a monetary value for PR outputs. 

Serious PR measurement people know that these uses are bogus, but many otherwise ethical measurement vendors provide their clients with crude AVEs because the demand for this sort of metric is huge. This whole mess is something that the IPR and the PR measurement industry seem to be working hard to sort out. 

--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, The Measurement Standard

More On AVEs And How To Use Alternatives To AVEs

For those who wish to learn more about the problems with using AVEs for PR measurement, and to discover several alternative techniques to compare marketing tools, here is a preview of Chapter 6 of Katie Delahaye Paine's upcoming book "Measuring Success: The Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Measuring Public Relationships." Download Chapter6Preview3-22.pdf (579.4K) You can learn more about Katie's new book and download other chapters as they are available over at KDPaine's Book Blog. She'd love to hear your comments.

AVE Gets A Makeover, But It's Still Just Tarted-Up Output Data

We were thrilled to see Erica Iacono's article on AVEs in PRWeek. Ms. Iacono has done her homework carefully and provides a nicely balanced and up-to-date summary of the AVE controversy. And now some of the other blogs are weighing in on the matter, including PRomulgator (who provides a copy of the article).

(As regular Measurement Standard readers know (see our newsletter here), we have not looked favorably on AVEs. Katie Delahaye Paine, TMS's publisher and probably the most prolific writer in the world of PR measurement, has written plenty about their evils, as have others, including Jim Macnamara, and Bruce Jeffries-Fox.)

The gist of new developments is that if you tidy up your media analysis data, "taking into account a media placement's reach, type and prominence of the story, and positioning," then use a conservative ad rate that reflects rates actually paid by advertisers, then what you come out with is a number that is somewhat more accurate and sports a sheen of respectability.

Our take:

1.) AVEs are popular because they appear to be an easy and cheap way to measure outcomes.
A number with a dollar sign in front of it allows somebody somewhere to believe that they can compare PR's results with those of some other marketing effort. They think they are comparing outcomes, but they are only looking at tarted-up output data. There are ways to make this sort of comparison, but for now they are usually much more complicated and expensive. That won't be the case forever. When tools come along that allow quick and easy direct measurement of the effects of any communications or marketing effort on sales (or whatever your preferred outcome), who's gonna care about AVEs?

2.) On the other hand, you can't argue with success.
Angela Jeffrey is one person who has found some darn good results correlating a type of AVE with business outcomes. Hey, if it works, it works. We don't care if your regression equation includes eye of newt and toe of frog: If it works, consistently, then it could be a valuable measurement tool. Here's the text of an article by Paul-Mark Rendon from Marketing Magazine with more on how AVEs can be useful.

3.) Why should PR waste its time using AVEs to mud-wrestle with advertising, when it could be sitting at the boardroom table doing some clean and serious strategizing?
Jim Grunig is the most prominent proponent of the view that PR should set its sights higher than just being a tool to produce sales. PR can provide extremely valuable services that are qualitatively different than those of other marketing tools, but unless we focus on measuring those, we'll never achieve our true potential. From this point of view, AVEs might very well be a costly distraction.

--Bill Paarlberg, editor