Opinion: Gut feel and AVEs should be extinct by now

Many years ago, before I jumped ship for a career in the media, I went through a comical ritual with one of my PR clients who would compare the weight of the cuttings file that month against the previous one. Never mind the content - the heavier the file, the more satisfied he felt that he had managed to extract maximum value from his consultancy. Given the sophistication of evaluation tools now on the market, I presumed that this kind of farcical scenario was a peculiarity of an earlier phase in PR's development. So it came as something of a sobering surprise when a recent PRWeek survey unearthed the fact that much of the industry is still relying on that old standby, gut feel, to assess effectiveness.