Has AVE had its day?

Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) has long been the industry standard for measuring PR, despite extensive academic rejection and criticism by more experienced practitioners, culminating in an explicit call to oust AVE at a European Summit of PR practitioners on Barcelona in 2010. Yet, AVE continues to permeate practice.

AVE simply measures the value of the space that PR occupies in media, traditional or new, calculating it in terms of what would have been paid for that space if it were advertising. Some agencies combine this with a spurious calculation of what the 'added' value is given that the article is more credible as 'earned' space, written by a journalist or blogger say, rather than 'paid for' space. But, as the Barcelona summit concluded, all this measures is the cost of media space, not the value of PR, and it does little to inform future activity.

Tom Watson's article, in press for Public Relations Review, sums this all up neatly, in an easy to read history of the 'orphan metric' that will really help support this module. You will need to access it via UWE library if you have access to it, but if you're not affiliated to a uni probably not worth the price as it's pretty simple.