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14, October 2011

Is your PR working?

What’s an AVE? Well it’s an ‘advertising value equivalent’. You take a press cutting; multiply the number of columns across by the number of centimetres down and times that by the single column centimetre advertising rate (SCC) of the publication in which it appeared. It’s a measure, in other words, of how much that space would have cost if you had bought it as an advertisement.

But everyone agrees that PR is more valuable than an advertisement because it has the apparent added value of third party endorsement. So, you take the AVE value and multiply it by 3 to discover the true PR value.

The advantage of this system is that it almost always produces an impressive return on investment. But what if you get a full page of really dreadful news? It will produce an impressive AVE or PR score but the headline reads…‘XYZ killed my Grandma!’

To get round this problem, the figures can be tweaked according to whether the message was broadly positive, negative or whether it included key messages or phrases. Is your head hurting yet?

Now, the industry is turning away from AVEs on the grounds that they can’t measure success because they’re not closely related to objectives. No one is sure about what’s coming next, and the great and the good of the industry are playing their cards very close to their chests.

I attended a client’s sales meeting a few weeks ago to discuss the results of our four month old media relations campaign. We’d issued a handful of news releases to their industry’s key magazine. We had established a good working relationship with the editor and we’d secured good coverage. But was it working asked the MD of his team?

Collectively they’d received 12 new sales enquiries, amounting to £2M of new business. One reported that a lapsed client had got in touch to ask him to quote on something else. Another believes that he got past the PA of a target that he’d never been able to track down because she had seen the article and knew the product was something they needed. Another said that she found it really helpful to be able to send the press cuttings to her customers as a way of keeping in touch.

Was PR working for them? Yes – because the objectives were clear, the audience tightly targeted and the message interesting. We were thrilled that we had been able to make such a difference in such a short space of time.

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