There is a meeting I have had more times than I can count. It happens at the end of a PR campaign, usually in a boardroom with a lot of PowerPoint slides. The PR team presents reach figures, coverage volume, AVE calculations, and a beautiful collage of press clippings. The CFO in the corner looks vaguely uncomfortable. The CMO nods politely. And then someone asks, ‘But what did it actually do for the business?’
Silence.
I am going to be blunt: the PR industry’s relationship with measurement has been, for most of its history, borderline dishonest. We have hidden behind proxy metrics — reach, impressions, advertising value equivalents — that sound impressive but tell you almost nothing about whether the work moved the needle on anything that actually matters.
AVE — advertising value equivalency — is perhaps the greatest scam ever perpetuated on a client community. The idea that you can assign a monetary value to editorial coverage by calculating what an equivalent advertising space would cost is not just methodologically flawed — it is conceptually absurd. Editorial coverage is not advertising. Its value is in credibility, not space. And yet this metric has survived in our industry for decades because it makes our work look cheap to evaluate and expensive to replace.
The Barcelona Principles, which the global communications community endorsed over a decade ago, were a genuine attempt to fix this. They said: measure outcomes, not outputs. Measure impact on behaviour and attitude, not column centimetres. Measure against business objectives, not media coverage targets.
The profession agreed in principle and then largely carried on as before.
It has to stop. Not because measurement is a nice-to-have best practice, but because if PR cannot demonstrate its value in terms that business leaders understand, it will continue to be the first budget cut in every downturn. Invest in measurement frameworks. Set up proper baseline studies. Track sentiment shifts. Connect media coverage to web traffic, lead generation, and conversion. Do the hard work of correlation analysis.
The PR professionals who can do this will never fight for budget. The ones who can’t will always be asking for it.
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