Last week AMEC (the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), announced an initiative to finally put the proverbial wooden stake into AVE (Ad Value Equivalency). Richard Bagnall, Chairman of AMEC, made the commitment at AMEC’s Global Summit in Bangkok.
To understand how much support there is for the initiative, Mark Westaby, co-owner of Crescendo Consulting and Spectrum Insight, has created a survey which we urge everyone to take. It’s short and addresses what I see is the biggest hippocracy of the industry: board members and sponsors of organizations like AMEC that continue to offer AVEs to their clients.
Bagnall announced the following initiatives to help eradicate the invalid metric:
- Creation of a global online educational resource center to show why the metric is invalid. (That shouldn’t be hard, pretty much everything you need to know is already up on www.painepublishing.com. Just type “AVEs” in our search form and you’ll have more than enough to win any argument. Here, we just did it for you.)
- All AMEC members to sign an undertaking that they will not provide AVEs by default to any client. Any client that requests AVE as a metric will receive standard educational material explaining why the metric is invalid and should not be used. They will be offered alternative metrics instead.
- AMEC will make further improvements to the Integrated Evaluation Framework to make it even easier to use, and choose replacement metrics.
- There will be increased funding into AMEC’s Global Education Programme, to educate PR and communications professionals in best practice measurement techniques. (Or they can just send them here.)
- AMEC will work with PR award organizers around the world to introduce a zero-scoring policy for award entries including AVEs as a metric. AMEC members will not provide an AVE as a metric for any award competition entry.
- AMEC will work closely with academics and PR practitioners to help them help AMEC kill off the demand for the metric which is sustaining it currently. ∞
This post is reprinted from Katie Paine’s Measurement Blog.
