by Alan Duncan, Director at Agile Communications
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: in 2025, too many PR teams are still reaching for a tape measure to weigh something you can’t see. Our new study shows one in five (19%) teams still use Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) to measure PR’s impact. Once the star of every quarterly report, AVE was debunked years ago as an antiquated, inaccurate relic with no place in modern PR. So when one client asked us to include it last year, I was surprised. When a second, unrelated client did the same a few months later, I started to worry. Are we going backwards? The data suggest the answer is yes.
This isn’t merely a measurement debate; it’s a leadership test. AVE persists because it’s seductively simple. It converts earned coverage into a pound sign that looks reassuring on a slide. It placates stakeholders who want one tidy number. And it flatters volume over value. But simplicity is not strategy. The industry has been clear for years: AVE has no role in credible evaluation, and outcome-based measurement is the standard we should hold ourselves to. The AMEC Barcelona Principles were updated precisely to emphasise outcomes, impact and organisational results, not output counts or ad-rate equivalents. Interestingly, our research also revealed 67% of PR and comms leaders are unaware of the Barcelona Principles. AMEC may want to review its comms strategy.
Our research also reveals a paradox. The metrics PR pros rate as least effective are often the ones they use the most. Why? Cultural inertia, stakeholder pressure, and the false comfort of comparability. If you’ve reported “big numbers” for years, it’s hard to tell a CFO you’re moving to fewer, better metrics. Dashboards don’t help either; when a platform can spit out an “equivalency” with one click, it’s tempting to include it. But that convenience carries a cost.
And the cost is credibility. Any comms leader who has sat in a budget meeting knows that the wrong metrics undermine confidence faster than a bad headline. When we treat attention like advertising and conflate circulation with readership, we invite scrutiny we can’t answer. Considering the growing pressure on marketing to show a return on spend, clinging to AVE is not harmless. It risks your budget, your seat at the table and, ultimately, your team’s mandate.
So what should replace AVE? First, let’s define success like adults. Start with measurable, business-relevant objectives: what behaviour do we want to change, in whom, by when? The Barcelona Principles are explicit – set goals, identify outputs, outcomes and potential impact, and measure against those, not against the rate card of some obscure blog that’s completely unrelated to your business or industry.
Second, modernise your evidence. Track real people, not theoretical eyeballs. For earned media, prioritise verified article readership over circulation estimates; for owned and social, instrument journeys so you can attribute visits, time on task, content downloads, demo requests or sign-ups back to coverage. Where possible, use control groups and pre/ post testing to understand lift. Measurement should be a blend of quantitative signals (readership, search lift, branded traffic, lead quality, pipeline influence) with qualitative insight (message pull-through, spokesperson credibility, issue salience).
Third, be more strategic in your reporting. Use it to show what moved. How we shifted the conversation and which messages unlocked downstream actions. Better still, bring accountability into it by sharing what was learned, and where improvements can be made. The point of measurement isn’t to prove activity, it’s to illustrate impact and guide strategy. By showing how communications map to business outcomes, such as demand generation, reputation lift, talent attraction, or policy influence, you position PR not as a noise-maker, but as a growth driver.
For PR leaders, this shift is as much about courage as craft. It requires us to re-educate stakeholders who’ve been trained to expect big numbers, to invest in better data, and to be comfortable saying, “We don’t count that anymore.” But the reward is authority. When your metrics line up with how the business creates value, you don’t just win the measurement argument; you win the budget argument.
AVE belongs in the past. If we want PR to sit closer to the centre of growth, we must measure what matters, that is outcomes and impact.
