This week one of our site editors received an email from a junior PR person asking for the site’s ad rate. The reason for the email dawned on me only after a while: this publicist was determining the ad value equivalent of a recent PR campaign, one component of which was a successfully pitched story on our site.
Advertising value equivalency (or AVE) is one of those things I’d read about, and even written about a bit, but had never seen in the wild. I’m sure I’ve been complicit in many a PR scheme, though no publicist has ever asked me for my publication’s ad rate. The fact that it’s happening in 2010 is mindblowing. PR, after all, is on the way up. Among the constant reminders that we live in a media-made world are the facts that Britain’s new prime minister is a former PR executive and more and more corporate activity seems to be judged by the amount of PR — or earned media — it gets. That goes double for the corporate activity known as advertising.
So to try and develop a correlation between the two just seems strange, all the more so when you look under the hood of ad equivalency. How the metric is applied varies wildly, but it’s generally based on a simple concept: What would news coverage have cost if it were purchased as an ad buy of comparable space (or time.) For years, the metric’s had PR people measuring column space in newspaper clippings mentioning their clients, counting seconds of TV news broadcasts, and, now, guesstimating online impressions in an effort to determine a reach. That reach is then multiplied by ad rates plucked from media kits. It doesn’t matter for the sake of the exercise that in practice those rates get discounted in negotiation. As you can imagine, this kind of conjuring results in inflation that Zimbabwe would look at in awe.
