AVE comment in PR Week

Good to see that our fellow CIPR Partner PR Week has run an item on PR Measurement this week which has told us that 74% of PR people now use evaluation compared to 38% two years ago (research from Metrica). The catch is that the use of AVE’s has increased - by 10% in two years and is not far off being used by half of the respondents.

I really feel this is an issue which needs to be sorted out – is it healthy for the industry to use a metric so widely discredited?

There are times when I just want to say that as this is the most widely recognized and adopted measure which reflects the many quantitative factors associated with media coverage, why don’t we just hi-jack the whole data stream and rename it PR value?

Unfortunately many of the PR and measurement grandees have gone too far in the opposite direction leaving almost half the industry to feel ostracised with their ‘flawed’ practices.