... and everyone else that ran
"Twitter Generates $48 Million of Media Coverage in a Month."
Recently, Ad Age ran a story that caused quite a stir in the blogosphere. Well-known and highly respected blogger Kami Huyse called the numbers cited in the story "rubbish" and explains why in this post.
VMS VP Angie Jeffrey defended her company's numbers on Twitter this way:
@kamichat @billsledzik @kdpaine @brandbuilder @commAMMO Sry for confusion. The $48MM is media cost of traditional media mentioning Twitter
@kamichat @billsledzik @kdpaine @brandbuilder @commAMMO Media costs correlate btr to outcomes than imps or # of clips; twitter has no costs
Here's what I know:
- VMS uses the cost of buying ad space in print publications as the basis of their "Media Value" -- call it what you like, it's still Ad Value Equivalency.
- There is no such thing as "equivalency" between PR and Advertising. There is no evidence that reading an ad about Twitter (which is impossible, because Twitter doesn't advertise) and reading a story about Twitter have the same impact on a reader. Much of Twitter's recent publicity has been about documents stolen from its offices and have been a source of embarrassment. We have no way of knowing whether those articles were included in the number, but I would question whether those would "correlate" to any outcomes at all. And I question whether anyone, other than perhaps Twitter's competitors, would be willing to actually "pay" anything for those stories.
- VMS says that "media value" correlates to outcomes. But, as far as I know, Twitter didn't inform VMS of its desired outcomes, so how would they know what to correlate to? According to the leaked documents and common wisdom, Twitter wants to generate profit. If VMS had correlated the $48 million to increased profits, there wouldn't be a controversy. As it is, they issued a press release with a big number in it, designed to generate a lot of press for VMS. I've issued similar releases myself. But when I do, I expect the editors at TechCrunch and Ad Age to do their jobs and fact check my release and to reveal the methodology behind my research.
Which
is why I'm naming the editors and not VMS, the Menaces of the Month.
--KDP ![]()

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