Measurement experts have been decrying AVEs as taboo metrics for years, yet AVEs have somehow managed to stay on the PR radar—but a new initiative from the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) is seeking to knock them off for good.
The firm is inviting the support of public relations and communications organizations to join a global initiative to eradicate fully the use of Advertising Equivalency Value (AVE) and all of its derivatives as metrics in public relations work.
AMEC is inviting support in a number of practical steps that form part of a long-term industry education project. Initiatives include:
- Adopting a “Don’t Use AVEs” campaign logo
- Inviting all international trade associations to stop the use of AVEs in national PR awards schemes. AMEC is asking its partners to use this wording in the Terms and Conditions of Entry in Award schemes and in briefing notes to judges: Entries must not use Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) as the sole means of showing measurement for a campaign. Entries that use AVEs will be disqualified.
- To join together through training programs and events, to continue to push the message that by using AVEs it demeans the credibility of the PR company or internal comms team involved.
AMEC has already made improvements to its free-to-use Integrated Evaluation Framework to make it an easier-to-use replacement for AVEs. AMEC is now working to create a global online educational resource center to show why the metric is invalid.
Richard Bagnall, AMEC Chairman, said AMEC’s Global Summit on Measurement, held for the first time in Asia in May, had ignited the need to take decisive action to eradicate AVEs.
“It’s time AVEs stopped being a talking point in our industry,” said Bagnall, whoi is also a global strategy consultant with Prime Research UK, in a news release. “The way forward is to work with other friends and partners in the worldwide public relations industry to eradicate this derided metric.”
Bagnall said new industry research showed the client demand for AVEs had dropped from 80 percent in 2010 to just 18 percent this year. “Now is the time to kill it off completely once and for all,” he declared.
AMEC’s new and updated Integrated Evaluation Framework offers a new way for campaigns to be planned carefully and measured effectively, he added.
“The Framework makes sense of the complexities of working across the PESO channels and shows how to shift the emphasis of evaluation from counting outputs to proving value via the critical outtakes, outcomes and organizational impact of our work,” Bagnall said.
The AMEC Framework is interactive allowing users to be guided through the process while also saving their work as they go and is already available in 15 languages, including Chinese.
