PR industry must ‘consign AVE to the graveyard’

I was extremely irritated by a recent piece published here on PR Daily, justifying ad value equivalency (AVE) as a valid public relations metric.

I mean, what the fried fish is PR Daily doing publishing a piece like this?!

I was so irritated that I tweeted publisher Mark Ragan about it … who, to his credit, invited me to write a point-by-point rebuttal post for PR Daily.

If you haven’t already seen it, Chuck Hemann has already done an excellent rebuttal post (so go and read it). And there are some outstanding comments on the original post, notably from Sean Williams and Mark Weiner.

So instead of repeating their arguments, here are a few additional points (quoting from the original post, with my reactions italicized):

1. “Editorial is third-party opinion, so the impact is considered three times that of a paid advertisement.”

How exactly? Because, as implied here, you’re basically counting how many times someone is removed from the “original” opinion, and coming up with an equation for it?