Ethical Reporting

When a student nears the end of their university degree, there is always that question of just how similar real life practice will be to the material learnt at university. Interestingly, a lot of what we learn at uni does go on in the real world. Do you like report writing? I hope so, because if you enter the PR industry, you will be writing reports, particularly in consultancy. One of the tasks I had to carry out was write a report for one of Devahasdin’s clients. The purpose of the report was to demonstrate the work carried out and the results achieved by the consultancy in a media relations campaign. Now cast your mind back to our consultancy unit. We were taught that we had to demonstrate to clients the return on their investment (ROI). This is the focus of my blog post.

The report contained an overview, objectives, a section on targeted media channels and whether publicity was obtained, a publicity value table and press clippings. The publicity value table describes where media coverage was achieved as well as the estimated value of publicity. You may remember this as being called “advertising value equivalency” (AVE). Although through our study of consultancies we learnt that AVEs are an invalid form of measurement with questionable ethics, clients using PR services love them. AVEs provide a numerical figure which makes it easier to quantify ROI. As we all know, ROI is quite difficult to determine in a PR context. The unethical implications of using AVEs result from PR practitioners adding ‘credibility’ multipliers. For example, say media coverage was secured in the West Australian. The PR company would determine the cost of the space if it was an advertisement and then multiply this figure to take into account that publicity is viewed as more credible then advertising etc. Some consultancies multiply by 3 to 10!!! I am proud to say that my organisation does not engage in this practice. They merely provide the value of the press clipping dimensions if it were a paid advertisement as there is a pressing demand from clients.

AVE can be used to calculate print and electronic coverage. It must be remembered and communicated to clients that AVEs measure costs of an ad, not the dollar value of publicity. AVEs do not take into account factors such as whether the editorial was positive or negative. Furthermore, AVE can underestimate the value of the exposure due to the credibility provided because the publicity is endorsed by a third party. Here is a very interesting argument by the Digimarketing Convo Blog http://digimarketingconvo.blogspot.com/2010/01/debate-eav-what-is-it-actually.html

Prior to discovering that organisations in practice do use AVE to demonstrate to clients the success of a publicity campaign, I thought of this approach to be unsuitable and unethical. However, after witnessing the use of AVEs in action, I believe there is some value in the adoption of this measurement. At the very least, it provides clients with the figure that they demand. Furthermore, I don’t see a problem with this measurement as long as there are no credibility multipliers. Clients should be informed that certain factors lead to AVEs overestimating or underestimating the value of publicity. As long as AVEs are used in conjunction with other reporting measures I think they are helpful in aiding the clients’ understanding of publicity and its value. I will likely adopt the use of AVEs in my future as a PR practitioner.

Kind regards,

Suzi Petkucevska