PATRICIA THORP, President and founder,
Thorp & Company
AVE can be credible if used by intelligent people who understand both
the strengths and the weaknesses of the system. CEOs and CFOs will see a
significant amount of money in the budget for PR, and they'll want to
see something in black and white to see PR results. For those types of
people, the bean counters, it's good to have a number. You can show them
that they've spent a lesser amount than they would have for advertising
for coverage in a more credible medium. The fallacies in the system are,
for example, one insurance client found a trade journal article that
only reached 2,000 people was the single most effective piece of the
whole year. The answer is the circulation may only be 2,000 readers, but
every single one of those readers had the right title and
decision-making power to purchase the insurance product. That's why the
sheer numbers of AVE are also its weakness.
BRENDA NASHAWATY, Co-founder and principal, Chen PR
Determining how much editorial coverage generated by PR work would cost
in paid advertising is an interesting measurement. But since buying an
ad is an event and PR is a process, it's more relevant to measure how
the PR program works in terms of reaching a client's audiences. The
question is: Do potential customers, investors, and employees have a
more favorable opinion of a client's company than they did before the
beginning of a PR program? My co-founders and I also believe that
editorial coverage generated by PR efforts can be more successful than
ads in influencing opinions because editorial content is written by
objective third-parties, and can have more credibility than a
client-sponsored ad.
JACK BERGEN, President, Council of PR Firms
I think AVE is totally inadequate measure for what we do. It's
inappropriate for the unique credibility building power of PR over
advertising. I think, ultimately, we need to build a capability to
measure business outcomes stemming from PR programs. We don't have such
a measure now. In the interim, we need to measure the outputs in PR
terms rather than in advertising terms. That means, how much of my key
audience have I reached in a highly credible message? I can measure that
credibility whether the messages came from third party endorsements,
where those messages were placed in the article, and ultimately by which
reporter writes the article, whether it's a credible journalist and
publication, or whether it's an easy hit, which to me is not going to be
credible. The last thing I want to do is measure myself against a medium
whose power is not credibility, but rather frequency and reach.
DAVID MICHAELSON, Managing director, head of research, Ogilvy Public
Relations Worldwide
To claim that advertising equivalency can be determined for PR
activities is one of the greatest urban legends of our industry. The ad
equivalency concept fails on a number of different fronts. The most
important failure is the presumption that advertising and PR activities
are designed to achieve the same goal. While PR often supports
advertising, it has a distinct role that cannot simply be reduced to
advertising equivalents. As part of the communications mix, PR needs to
be measured on its own merits and not the standards of another
discipline. A better and more credible measure is one that determines
the impact of PR on the target audience, rather than how much the
activity might be worth.
