Just when you thought you had seen everything... Here I was, just going about my Monday...Catching up on e-mail and my Twitter stream when my good friend
Heather Whaling sent me a link. Now, I think the world of Heather, and the work she does for her clients so naturally I clicked on the link. If only I could hit the rewind button and NOT click on that link. I spent the rest of my Monday trying to calm down after reading this post.
What post is that you might ask? Ragan's PR Daily
posted an article written by
Jessica Epperly of
The Wakeman Agency on measuring the value of editorial coverage. This post starts off innocently enough comparing and contrasting the role of advertising and public relations within organizations. Advertising is paid and media placements are earned...Yada yada yada... We've all heard that song and dance a million times.
Where this article really comes off the tracks, at least for me, is in the discussion of how we measure success in PR and advertising. Yes, my friends, you thought right: We're back in the world of advertising value equivalencies. Ugh..and here I thought we were well on our way to moving beyond these ridiculous metrics. Perhaps we are and this is an isolated case? One can only hope, right?
I don't want to go too deeply down the path to discredit advertising value equivalencies as a metric, but if you wanted to read more on the subject I'd suggest you check out the works of
Don Bartholomew,
Katie Paine and
Sean Williams. All of them have done EXTENSIVE work to discredit the value of AVE's as a metric to evaluate success in PR. Much of their work can be found on their blogs, but I'd also encourage you to check the work from the
Institute for Public Relations on this subject. It's all great, and it all, pretty much, tells the same story - advertising value equivalencies are a scourge on the PR profession.
As I said, I don't want to go much down the path of discussing the science (or lack thereof) behind AVEs. However, there are a couple of things that have me very concerned after reading this article:
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This is what makes measurement hard to talk about with companies - There is no doubt that Ragan.com is a reputable site. I read PR Daily myself, quite often, when it comes across in the stream. However, publishing an article like that is pretty reckless. We already know there is great misunderstanding about measurement in the marketplace, and by posting something that's so egregiously wrong you only serve to feed that beast. Similarly, there are going to be a lot of companies out there reading that article, looking for a measurement solution and using it as sort of a "bolt on." This will only lead to companies measuring the wrong thing more often than they currently do.
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For the 400th time, advertising and PR DO NOT carry the same value - I'm not getting into which one of the disciplines is better than the other. I truly believe that a successful communications mix incorporates all elements of paid, earned and owned media. That being said. there hasn't been any research that I believe that would suggest advertising and PR deliver the same value to organizations. The answer, in most cases, is it depends. Some companies get more mileage out of advertising, while others get more out of PR. It depends on where you sit.
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Page rank is so bogus I think I want to vomit - As if the discussion of AVEs in this article isn't enough, we go down the page rank path?! Oh, for the love of... "Whether your story appears at the beginning or the end of a magazine can impact the media value," says Epperly. Well, no shit! However, are you sitting over the shoulder of someone reading said magazine to know if they are making it to the end of the magazine? The answer is no, and the math behind trying to apply some sort of figure to those kinds of situations is less than ideal.
Listen folks, I'm all for integration. I want an integrated approach to communications and measurement. Unfortunately, blending PR and advertising by using advertising value equivalencies is a recipe for disaster. The better approach is to come up with a list of metrics that are reasonable measures of success for PR, and run with it. If some happen to be influenced by advertising, then great. Have that conversation.
Until then, though, DO NOT USE AVEs. THEY ARE A SCURGE ON THE PROFESSION. CAN I GET A WITNESS?
