Time to bury AVE?

The call to end AVE or advertising value equivalency in public relations and to codify ways to measure ROI has been growing shriller in recent years. The primary reason AVEs exist is that PR practitioners are pressured to prove the value of what they do, and quite often they are asked to describe the impact in financial terms. The problem is, AVEs have little to do with the impact public relations creates. Hence the need for research-based methods to determine true return on investment

Evaluation methods will become more scientific and holistic: Dilip Cherian

HAVING WATCHED the industry evolve over the last two decades, I have consistently maintained that new media and techniques should ideally integrate in a complementary manner and not remain exclusive to earlier used approaches.

In PR this has been amply demonstrated in the way corporate communications and PR consultancies have embraced and restructured their approach to address changing dynamics, especially so in these 'digital' times. Evaluation methods have changed over the years. The 80s and 90s reflected the efforts of the industry to bring credibility and instil its permanence in the marketing mix and thereby in the marketing budgets. The AVE was born out of this need to tangibilise its role and bring about a mechanism to standardise its offerings. The AVE was not without its constraints though - the biggest drawback being that it was a static tool.

Because of new media, emphasis is now on a more perceptual method of evaluation. This led the PR industry in a knee-jerk manner to develop models involving statistical analysis combined with qualitative features that mapped tonality of news coverage to distinguish one brand's impact vis-a-vis its competition.

Mind you, the AVE has still held some of its ground amidst this new din. Impact measurements were followed by Word Cloud Analysis that tried to mimic word associations in news coverage with messages that brands/corporates were trying to send out.

Both these innovations have been challenged by traditionalists with having statistical inaccuracies and innuendo effects. But one can't take away from the fact that they have made public relations evaluation more scientific and holistic. Another interesting development was mapping a company's reputation over a range of desirable attributes. This involved assessing the entire stakeholder chain, including influencers, using both traditional and digital metrics for a 360 degree view.

The industry has been on a dynamic journey wherein evaluation, as with all other aspects of this sector, has developed as a result of foresight and continuous adaptation.

Dilip Cherian
Consulting partner, Perfect Relations

PR is finally taking baby steps beyond the world of AVE: Nikhil Dey

LET'S BEGIN by saying AVE is just a tool: other than that a host of additional options related to media metrics such as message delivery, tonality and comparative share of voice can add depth while building a robust media metric.

Social media offers a whole new dimension to build in measurement. If PR is a catalyst of behavioural change, the metrics of perception studies will come into play. Finally the true test of efficiency of a campaign would be to find a way to establish direct linkage between PR and business impact. For example, one of the television channels for whom we run a PR programme measures effectiveness by our ability to influence ratings of the programmes we promote and by our ability to monetise their advertising space at a premium as we also run a direct contact programme with the advertising fraternity.

AVE puts a monetary multiplier value to what PR ostensibly brings to the table. The old story that you spent Rs 2 lakh on our fee and we deliver Rs 2 crore worth of advertising value sounds good. Unfortunately this analysis does not ensure desired outcome for clients. Budget constraints don't allow for more robust measurement tools and hence AVE still stays in vogue. That said, a host of companies globally are now moving towards new measurement parameters. One example of this is to use a representative sample of the larger media universe and work with professional third party monitoring and measurement firms to develop and index that factors in a host of qualitative and quantitative factors delivering an industry benchmark. Follow this by pegging the top ten companies in that space to see how they stack up.

The other discipline that is finding steady acceptance is message testing pre-campaign to understand how the target audience will be likely to respond. So, PR industry is finally at a stage where it is taking baby steps beyond the world of AVE.

Nikhil Dey
president, public relations, Genesis Burson-Marsteller

Measurement tools based on storytelling can work: Ashim Mathur

MEASURING THE impact of PR campaigns has been one of the biggest challenges for all of us in the marketing domain. The limitations of AVE are evident. Advertising and PR are two different marketing instruments: advertising messages in the media are controlled by and refer to those who commission them, while PR messages that appear as editorial content are not similarly controlled. As a result, PR messages have more credibility with their intended and targeted audiences. While I think that AVE can continue to be a measurement tool, we need to explore more effective ways to measure the effectiveness of a PR campaign.

The explosion of social media platforms and the ever-increasing number of communication channels require our industry to have more direct conversations with consumers. Today PR must use storytelling as its new method and measure how strongly the narrative resonates with audiences. The quality of storytelling has to supersede the quantity or size of ads. Similarly, across social media, effectiveness is not measured in the number of tweets, re-tweets, likes, or shares, but in the quality of conversations. It is important for the brand to analyse the sentiment of all the conversations around it, gather consumer feedback, and evolve .

PR is not just about the number of clippings that appear about your brand; an integral part of PR is to build and cultivate long-term relationships among diverse business stakeholders.

Ashim Mathur
Head, Marketing, Dolby India