When I finished my PR degree five years ago and stumbled dazed and confused into my first agency role, I found AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent) an odd concept.

After three years spent studying the theoretical side of PR and debating its value as a management tool, I was surprised to find that measurement was the responsibility of an account assistant (me) with a ruler and some highlighter pens. It seemed too easy and too amateurish to form the basis of reporting on the success of such professional and complex campaigns - and it seems I'm not the only one who thought so.

Last week, PR Week announced that its industry awards will no longer accept AVEs as a method of measurement. The trade magazine explains that this move "reflects the growing industry consensus that AVEs are outdated and insufficient".  Last year, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) conducted a five-month review of AVEs with the intention of finding a replacement measurement tool. Prior to this, in July 2009 the Central Office of Information (soon to become the Government Communication Centre) undertook a project to create a set of mandatory core standards for PR evaluation, signalling a move away from using AVE in the public sector.

AVE measures the value of coverage generated by a PR campaign simply by calculating the value of the column inches it achieves. Some agencies then multiply that by three, an "accepted industry standard" representing the increased integrity of editorial coverage versus advertising. It's popular because it's straightforward to work out and explain, and also because it looks good! However, much of the controversy around the method stems from one fatal flaw - PR is not advertising, so how can it be measured in the same way? On top of this, it places no value on tone or relevance, and is increasingly extraneous now that such a large proportion of PR coverage appears online.

The problem of course is that to do away with AVE, we need to be able to replace it. Entrants to the PR Week awards will almost certainly look to measurements like reach, opportunities to see (OTS) and frequency to demonstrate the success of their campaigns, alongside qualitative measures such as favourability. Indeed these are the tools recommended by the COI's Standardisation of PR Evaluation Metric report.

However, the bottom line is that none of these measurement tools do quite the same job as AVE - namely, providing a monetary value which can be used to demonstrate return on investment. For many clients, this is the measurement that matters, particularly if their own management have only a top-line understanding of PR. Until an equally simplistic measurement tool is developed, PRs have little choice but to soldier on with AVE regardless of its many faults.

How do you think PR value should be measured? Have you found a suitable alternative to AVE yet?

Rebecca

Image courtesy of Matsuyuki's photostream on Flickr