Advertising Value Equivalents at work
I recently counseled against writing off AVEs, Advertising Value Equivalents, as way of evaluating public relations and have now come across a great example of where AVEs make for a reasonable measure of an initiative’s success.
Over on Buff the Banana with Paul Dacre, I’ve poked fun at Daily Mail writer Paul Scott who is ever so upset with how easily Peaches Geldof makes her money. Among Scott’s claims is that Peaches received £15,000 for modeling Ultimo lingerie.
It’s fair to assume that Ultimo booked Peaches Geldof over more experienced, but lesser known, models because they knew newspapers like the Daily Mail would snap the resulting photos. It’s also fair to assume that this initiative had a fairly simple aim: raise awareness of Ultimo lingerie.
Ultimo could have bought a page of advertising in the Daily Mail, for which the rack rate is £45,612. Giving the Daily photos of Peaches in her underwear led the tabloid to set poor old Paul Scott the task of annotating the photos for readers which were used nice and large. Scott’s copy speculates titillatingly on what Peaches’ father, Bob, might make of it all, but Ultimo won’t have been too concerned about the words. They just want their lingerie well exposed in the tabloids.
Using AVEs as a measure of success seems perfectly reasonable and at £15,000 Peaches Geldof comes off as something of a bargain. But this obviously isn’t a measure that more sophisticated clients could rely on.
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