PRIA position on AVE

Since writing my last post I have come across many articles about AVE or PR valuing. Most noteworthy were articles from the PRIA and its commitment to discourage and not recognise this from of valuing as a valid PR practise. The below is the Position Statement from the PRIA published in 2005.

http://www.pria.com.au/documents/item/2722

I think it's interesting to see the debate that goes on surrounding this topic and its validity and despite my own opinion, it seems most PR consultancies (or their clients) believe it is a necessary tool.

I'd love to hear what others out there think of the topic and if you've had different experiences of the value of PR in your internships!

To AVE or not to AVE?

While working at PPR, one of my main tasks is to do AVE’s, also known as Advertising Value Equivalents. In case anyone doesn’t know what AVE's are, it is a method of measuring the value of PR work done by a consultancy or consultants and how much editorial publicity gained is worth. The main clients I’ve been doing this task for are Perth Fashion Festival (PPF) and the Art Gallery of WA’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and while this is seen as an important task to do for the clients at PPR, there has also been discussion has to how effective it as a PR measuring tool.  Here I’ve listed the pros and cons I believe AVE‘s bring to PR.

PROS:

·         It’s a good way to measure how much publicity is being gained

·         It’s an effective evaluation tool, especially for strategies

·         It can help to increase profitability

·         A dollar value can be put on media coverage

·         AVE’s can measure PR output

CONS:

·         AVE’s imply that PR and advertising (or editorials and advertising) are the same thing

·         Publicity can be good, bad or neutral – these can’t be measured in the same way

·         AVE’s don’t take into account editorial positioning or demographics of the publication

·         AVE’s don’t measure the impact or effect of the content

·         AVE’s don’t acknowledge coverage of competitors

In all, I think if AVE’s were to be used effectively, they should only be used to measure PR output. But looking at this aspect, it’s very limited and possibly more time-consuming. If AVE's are used to measure PR in any other form, information wouldn’t be reliable or accurate. Many clients expect AVE’s to be done so they can easily see if the money they have spent on PR is worth it or not, but maybe clients should start looking beyond AVE’s and look at measuring PR in quantitative ways rather than qualitative ways.  

Sunset Evaluations

Hi guys, this will be my last blog for this unit but I doubt it will be my last ever! I have chosen to look at the topic of evaluating within PR.

At Sunset Events, evaluations were made with the use of media monitoring, surveys and various figures such as sales. I was able to get some experience with 2 out of 3 of these evaluation methods. Throughout my internship I did a lot of media monitoring (both print and online). This involved searching through publications such as The Wire, X-Press and Drum Media (which wasn’t very painful to do!) in order to find articles related to Sunset Events and their festivals. Once the articles were found, I needed to scan and upload onto a document stating the date, publication and page number. However, sometimes it was hard to find all articles as a lot of the time Sunset was mentioned on cover pages or in just a timetable stating when the event was taking place. According to my communications manager, these were to be included in the document also! They were sometimes mistakenly missed when scanning.

I also did some online monitoring. Sunset had an outside company ‘Meltwater’ that would send through its online monitoring for them, but this wasn’t entirely accurate, so I was left scanning through the internet trying to find articles (Google news was a great help!). When it was time to report on the results of the media monitoring at the end of the festival, AVE’s were determined. I worked on calculating some values for the work I did, however, once I had the values my communications manager thanked me but then informed me that in the evaluation report, the AVE amounts were usually just estimated at $1,000,000! Does this then therefore diminish the AVE amounts??? In my opinion, they are not very accurate for the media monitoring Sunset does, as like I explained previously, monitoring includes just the mention of the Sunset name or an event name. So this really has no advertising value.

The other evaluation method I worked on was surveys. An online survey was sent out to ticket holders of the West Coast Blues ‘n’ Roots festival via Sunset database after the event had taken place. This survey evaluated results such as experience, favourite acts, prices, sponsors, green initiatives etc. I then wrote up a report with the results of this survey. Well know that you know a bit about evaluations at Sunset, I’ll now evaluate my internship for you!

Overall, it was a great experience! I really enjoyed working for the team and it was a fun, creative environment. I gained a lot of insight when it came to web, social media and other forms of online communication. I also received some great experience in terms of how to run and promote an event (it isn’t easy!) and got some great contacts in the industry J I really enjoyed the event side of both Marketing and PR and was grateful to Sunset for taking me on! How did everyone else evaluate their internships?? Hope they were a great experience as I’m sure they were!

Signing off for now,
Melissa
Curtin Bentley Campus

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

Media Monitoring: No Laughing Matter

The first time we met, my Managing Director made sure I understood the importance of media clippings to our business. "I've come down very hard on interns, employees, who miss clippings," he warned. There was once someone missed a clipping on our client and he instantly demanded to know who it was.

Media clippings, quite simply, is the Return On Investment (ROI) of PR. It is how we demonstrate to our clients that we have done our jobs. Just as advertisements are the product of advertising agencies, media clippings are the "products" and the "results" of PR. This is because the information that led to these clippings usually originate from press releases produced by PR agencies.

But more importantly, media clippings allow us to track and understand how the press responds to our PR activities. If the press release is dull, for example, or if our press conference was not well attended by the media, we can only expect that press coverage will be minimal (and clients will be screaming!). At the end of the day, it is the clippings report that our clients will refer to when evaluating our performance.

It isn't surprising then that media monitoring is our first task in the morning when we arrive at work. There will be a stack of papers waiting for us, and each person has to grab at least two on the way to his or her workstation. Certain clients expect their clippings report in by 11am everyday, so we can't take our own sweet time.

The relevant articles will be cut out and pasted on a clippings template containing several details such as publication, page, date, and section. In addition, there is a specific way to quantify media coverage, called the advertising value equivalency (AVE) and PR value:

AVE = Height (cm) X Column size X Advertising rate + Colour surcharge (if article is in colour)

PR Value = AVE X 3

The reason why PR Value is three times that of AVE is because PR professionals believe that news articles are more credible than advertisements and thus worth more for the same amount of space. It should be noted, however, that AVE is a controversial measurement. We were taught in class that it is not a suitable formula for evaluating PR, and the US Institute for Public Relations (IPR) has formally rejected it.

AVE is deemed unethical as there is no scientific evidence to prove that news articles are more effective that advertising. If you have the time, click here to read the IPR's informative discussion of the various issues concerning AVE.

Nonetheless, there is no denying that AVE puts a dollar value on media clippings, not to mention that some clients actually demand it as proof of an agency's work.

Cheers,
John.