intelligent measurement

Say No to AVEs as a communications measure

July 6, 2017 at 7:24 am Leave a comment

A new campaign has been launched by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication – AMEC to stamp out the use of AVEs – “Ad Value Equivalents” as a measure of communication and PR success. If you don’t know what an AVE is, it is basically where you look at how much coverage you have received in the news media (usually print) and then you estimate how much this coverage would have cost if you paid for it as advertising.

I think it’s a useless measure, as if we look at where “coverage” is happening today, it is a lot more fragmented than in just mainstream print media – and you can’t compare paid advertising with coverage. But still it persists. I recently saw a media monitoring dashboard of a major monitoring company that had AVE as a measure it offers its clients – that’s too bad. In the past 30 years of working in communications and evaluation I’ve never felt the need to use AVEs – there are so many more meaningful measures we can look at.   Read more from the academics and industry as to why we need to say No to AVEs.

Entry filed under: Communication evaluation, Media analysis & monitoring, PR evaluation.