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Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Katie Paine invents a new PR metric
Mention AVE (advertising value equivalence), and you’ll get eye rolling from any PR practitioner worth his or her salt. The idea of equating column inches of media coverage to the value of paid advertising is ludicrous, so much so that the Institute for Public Relations considers it unprofessional. So when one of Katie Paine’s most important (and favorite) clients asked for help developing a standard AVE calculation everyone reporting to him could use, she found herself in something of a dilemma. The way out was to invent a new metric, the PR Value Ratio (PVR).
Katie describes the PRV on her blog, explaining that it’s based on the notion that assessing the value of an earned media article is noble even if the AVE approach is not. She starts with the assumption that the goal of getting ink is to promote the company’s agenda or deliver key messages.
So for example if the annual PR budget is $100K and the ad budget is $1 million and both deliver the organization’s key messages to 5 million eyeballs a year, PR delivers the same output for a tenth of the cost so the value ratio would be 10:1.
This is, of course, a quick overview of Katie’s concept, which deserves a full reading. Of course, measuring the number of eyeballs that saw your message is far less important than assessing the impact that message had on the audience. But management needs to understand that there is value to public relations as compared to advertising, and Katie’s PVR could offer that kind of evidence fairly painlessly. Katie’s firm offers a “Do It Yourself Dashboard” to its clients, and the PVR is now included in it: “Simply enter your budget numbers and the PRV will be automatically displayed.”