A client once called us the week after a nice mention in a regional business publication and asked a fair question: what did that actually get us? The agency handling the placement before MSGPR had an answer ready, a number with a dollar sign in front of it, arrived at by measuring the column inches of the article, checking what a comparable ad buy would have cost in that same space, and multiplying by three because, they said, editorial coverage is worth more than advertising since readers trust it more.
That number felt satisfying. It also meant nothing, and the multiplier at the end should have been the tell. Three is not a measurement. It’s a decoration on a guess.
This is the Advertising Value Equivalent, or AVE, and if you’ve been in business for more than a few years you’ve probably been handed one. It’s one of the most durable bad ideas in the communications industry, and it survives mostly because it produces the one thing everyone in a budget meeting wants: a single dollar figure that looks like ROI. The trouble is that it isn’t ROI. It’s arithmetic dressed up as evidence, and the professional body that represents PR measurement worldwide has been saying so, formally, for well over a decade.
Why AVEs are invalid, not just imperfect
Start with what an AVE actually does. It takes the physical space a story occupies, an article’s column inches, a segment’s airtime, a webpage’s suggested ad-placement rate, and prices it as if that space had been bought as advertising. Then, because editorial coverage is understood to carry more credibility than a paid ad, most practitioners tack on a multiplier, often somewhere between two and five, to reflect that earned trust. The result is a figure that a client can drop into a spreadsheet next to their media buy and their PPC spend and feel, for a moment, like everything is being measured on the same scale.
It isn’t, and AMEC (the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, the field’s own professional body) has published a direct, unambiguous position on why. Their explanation, “Why AVEs are Invalid,” lays out the core problem plainly: AVEs measure the wrong thing entirely. They price the space a story occupies, not what that story communicated, whether anyone believed it, whether it changed a mind, or whether it moved a customer, a donor, or a voter one inch closer to a decision. A glowing 500-word feature and a single damaging sentence buried in an otherwise critical article can occupy nearly identical column inches and therefore produce nearly identical AVE numbers, even though one helped the organization and the other hurt it. The multiplier compounds the problem instead of fixing it, since it’s an arbitrary number bolted onto an already arbitrary base, with no consistent methodology behind either. AMEC’s position, echoed by PRSA, the Institute for Public Relations, and effectively every serious measurement body in the field, is that AVEs should not be used at all, not adjusted, not caveated, retired.
Here’s the plain version, worth saying once and remembering: AVEs measure the size of the box your message came in, not whether anyone opened it.
If your current PR reporting still includes a dollar-equivalent-to-advertising figure, that isn’t a harmless bonus stat sitting alongside the real analysis. It’s a number the field’s own standards body has explicitly disowned, and leaning on it in a board meeting or grant report is a credibility risk in front of anyone who knows the space.
The Barcelona Principles: what replaced it
The AVE problem didn’t go unaddressed. In 2010, AMEC convened the field’s leading measurement practitioners at the second European Summit on Measurement in Barcelona and produced a set of principles meant to give the industry a shared, defensible standard. They’ve been revised twice since, most recently as Barcelona Principles 3.0, and they now function as the closest thing PR measurement has to a professional consensus, the framework referenced by AMEC, PRSA, ICCO, and most credentialed measurement training worldwide.
The Barcelona Principles rest on a few ideas that are worth understanding individually, because each one corrects a specific bad habit the AVE era normalized. Goal setting and measurement are fundamental to communication and PR, meaning you set a measurable objective before the campaign starts, not a narrative to justify after it ends. Outcomes, outputs, and potential impact should be measured, but the outcomes matter more than the outputs. Coverage is an output. What that coverage did is the outcome. Measurement should identify performance across channels, not favor one over another simply because it’s easier to count, which is a quiet rebuke to the old habit of over-indexing on earned media hits because they’re the easiest thing to clip and forward. Advertising Value Equivalents are explicitly not the value of communication, stated as its own standalone principle because the field needed to say it that directly. And research and evaluation should be transparent, consistent, and valid, meaning your methodology should hold up if someone asks how you got the number, not dissolve under a follow-up question the way a multiplier does.
None of this is abstract theory imposed from outside the industry. It’s the field’s own practitioners, gathered specifically to fix a measurement problem they recognized in their own work, agreeing on a floor below which no credible PR measurement should fall. When an agency proposes AVEs to you today, they are proposing a method their own professional association has spent more than fifteen years actively campaigning against.
The PESO model: a lens for where to look
If Barcelona Principles tell you what good measurement respects, the PESO model gives you a practical map of where to actually go looking for it. Developed by measurement consultant Gini Dietrich and now standard vocabulary across the PR and communications field, PESO organizes every channel a communications program touches into four categories: Paid media, the space and reach you buy outright; Earned media, the coverage, mentions, and press attention you earn through pitching and relationships; Shared media, the social and community activity where your content gets amplified by others; and Owned media, the assets you fully control, your website, your email list, your blog.
The value of PESO isn’t that it’s a clever acronym. It’s that it forces a specific discipline: no single channel tells the whole story, and the channels interact. A press mention (earned) that never gets shared, linked from your own site, or referenced in a sales conversation is a weaker result than a smaller mention that gets picked up on social (shared), linked from your homepage (owned), and cited in a follow-up ad (paid). PESO gives you a structure for tracking that whole chain instead of stopping the analysis at the earned-media clip, which is exactly where the AVE mindset used to stop, because the clip was the easiest thing to hold up and admire.
For a resource-constrained organization, and both a mid-sized manufacturer in Angelina County and a regional non-profit qualify, PESO also does something quietly useful: it keeps you from over-investing in the channel that’s easiest to report on while starving the ones that actually move outcomes. Earned media has always been the easiest category to brag about internally. It’s also, on its own, the hardest to connect to a business result unless you’re tracking what happens after the mention runs.
What to actually track: outputs versus outcomes
This is where the Barcelona Principles stop being philosophy and become a checklist. Outputs are the things PR has traditionally counted because they’re countable: number of placements, impressions, reach, social followers, press release pickups. They are not worthless, they tell you whether the work is happening at all, but they describe activity, not impact. An outcome tells you whether that activity changed something that matters to the organization: a belief, a behavior, a relationship, a dollar.
A few outcome-level metrics belong on every serious PR measurement plan, regardless of budget size.
Share of search measures how often people are searching for your organization’s name relative to your category and competitors over time, tracked through free tools like Google Trends or paid platforms with more granularity. It matters because a rise in branded search volume following a PR push is a genuine signal that coverage moved people to act on curiosity, something an impressions count can never show, since an impression only proves someone’s eyeballs passed over a page, not that anything registered.
Referral traffic tracks how many visitors arrive at your website specifically from a media placement, whether through a direct link in the article or a subsequent search prompted by seeing your name in it. This is measurable in any standard analytics tool, it costs nothing beyond the time to check it, and it directly answers the question “did anyone follow this coverage back to us.”
Review velocity, meaning the pace and sentiment of new reviews arriving on Google, Facebook, or industry-specific platforms following a PR push, is one of the most underused PR metrics available to a small organization. A spike in genuine reviews after a placement or campaign is a strong outcome signal, evidence that coverage reached real people who then took the trouble to act on it publicly.
Brand lift, the measurable change in awareness, favorability, or consideration among a target audience, is the most rigorous of these and typically requires some form of before-and-after survey or polling, which puts it out of reach for the smallest budgets on a campaign-by-campaign basis but is worth doing at least annually for organizations running a sustained PR program, since it’s the outcome that most directly answers the board-level question of whether the communications investment is working.
None of these require an enterprise measurement platform. They require deciding, before the campaign runs, which of them you’re going to check, and then actually checking.
Building a simple PR measurement dashboard
Here’s where this gets practical rather than aspirational, because the gap between knowing the right framework and actually using it is where most small organizations lose the thread.
Start with the objective, not the tactic. Before any pitch goes out or any release gets drafted, write down, in one sentence, what business or mission result the effort is meant to support: more qualified leads requesting a quote, more donors completing a year-end gift, more applicants for an open position, more attendees at an event. Barcelona Principle one exists precisely because skipping this step is how organizations end up measuring outputs by default; if you never named an outcome, counting clips is the only thing left to count.
Next, build a single tracking sheet, one row per placement or campaign push, with columns that map to the PESO categories: where the coverage ran (earned), whether it was shared or amplified (shared), whether it was linked or referenced from your own site (owned), and whether it was ever paired with paid support (paid). Add columns for the outcome metrics that matter to your specific goal: a referral-traffic number pulled from analytics, a share-of-search snapshot, a review count before and after, a donor or lead count tied to the campaign window.
A regional example makes this concrete. Picture a Deep East Texas non-profit running a fall fundraising push that earns a feature story in the local paper, gets shared by several community Facebook groups, and gets linked from the organization’s own donation page. A director tracking only the clip would report “we got great local coverage” and stop there, which is an output claim. A director using a simple PESO-anchored dashboard instead checks referral traffic to the donation page during the week the story ran, checks whether online giving ticked up over the prior comparable week, and checks whether the organization’s branded search volume rose on Google Trends. That’s three outcome data points, gathered in under an hour, using free tools, that tell the board something an AVE number never could: whether the story actually moved anyone to give.
Finally, review the dashboard on a fixed cadence, monthly for most small organizations, quarterly at minimum, and report the outcomes alongside the outputs rather than instead of them. Outputs still matter as a leading indicator of activity. They just aren’t the finish line.
This is, in miniature, the same logic behind MSGPR’s Position, Build, Amplify, Convert approach to communications work generally. Positioning sets the objective. Building and amplifying generate the outputs, the coverage, the shares, the content. Converting is the outcome stage, and it’s the stage most PR reporting has historically skipped, because it’s harder to measure than it is to count clips. The Barcelona Principles and the PESO model exist to make that last stage impossible to skip with a straight face.
Why this matters more at mid-year
August is a natural pause point for exactly this kind of audit. Budgets set back in January have had seven months to prove themselves, and most organizations are already thinking, at least informally, about what next year’s communications spend should look like. That’s the right moment to ask whether this year’s PR reporting has actually been telling you anything true, or whether it’s been telling you something comfortable.
A skeptical owner-operator reading a stack of AVE-based reports all year has every right to distrust the entire discipline of PR, because the reporting he’s been handed was never designed to survive scrutiny. A stewardship-minded non-profit director justifying a communications line item to a board of donors has every right to demand something more rigorous than a multiplier, because donors deserve honest accounting as much as any shareholder does. Neither reader is wrong to be skeptical of PR measurement as it’s traditionally been practiced. The fix isn’t to give up on measuring PR. It’s to measure the right things.
That’s the real value of adopting the Barcelona Principles and the PESO model together: they don’t ask you to trust PR more, they give you a way to verify it, which is a much sturdier foundation for a communications budget than anyone’s word for it, including ours.
If you’ve been handed an AVE number in a report this year, or if you’ve never gotten a number at all beyond “great coverage,” that’s worth a conversation. MSGPR measures PR programs against outcomes that matter, share of search, referral traffic, review velocity, brand lift, not vanity metrics dressed up as ROI. Call us at 936-637-7593 or visit msgpr.com, and let’s build a measurement plan for your next campaign that would actually survive being questioned.
Sources
- AMEC (International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) — “Why AVEs are Invalid,” the association’s formal position paper against the use of Advertising Value Equivalents in PR measurement.
- AMEC — Barcelona Principles 3.0, the current version of the profession’s consensus measurement standard, first adopted 2010 and revised twice since.
- PESO Model, developed by Gini Dietrich, the standard framework for categorizing communications channels into Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media for integrated measurement.
