Advertising Value Equivalent in the AI Age
Few metrics in public relations provoke as much debate as Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE). Long criticised and formally rejected by industry bodies, it nevertheless persists, requested by boards, expected by procurement teams, and relied upon by organisations seeking a simple way to express the “value” of PR.
That persistence is not accidental. AVE emerged to answer a legitimate question: what did this communication activity deliver, and how can that be expressed in terms decision-makers understand? In the absence of better tools, it became a proxy, albeit imperfect, but familiar.
Today, the conversation is shifting again. The rise of AI in measurement and analysis has made AVEs appear newly tempting. Automation, scale and increasingly precise data create the impression that long-standing flaws can now be solved with better calculation. But while AI changes how PR can be measured, it does not resolve the core limitations AVEs were built on.
What AVEs were really trying to solve
At their core, AVEs were less about value and more about translation. They attempted to bridge the gap between communications activity and commercial decision-making by borrowing the language of advertising. Space, rate cards and notional equivalence were used to make PR feel legible within financial reporting frameworks.
The problem was not intent, but assumption. Editorial influence, credibility and narrative impact cannot be meaningfully equated to paid media exposure. AVEs reduce complex communication effects to surface-level presence, rewarding visibility rather than influence.
Why AI makes AVEs look attractive again
AI has transformed the measurement landscape. It enables faster processing, broader content analysis, automated classification and large-scale pattern recognition. In this environment, it is understandable that some organisations believe AVEs can be “fixed” through better data and smarter models.
However, AI risks reinforcing the same flaw that has always undermined AVEs: precision without meaning. A more accurate calculation of an invalid premise does not make the premise valid. AI can improve how efficiently numbers are produced, but it cannot change what those numbers represent.
What AVEs still cannot show
Even in an AI-enabled environment, AVEs remain blind to the dimensions that matter most in modern PR. They cannot show:
Who coverage actually reached, beyond outlet circulation
How messages were framed and interpreted
How narratives evolved over time
Whether communication influenced understanding or behaviour
How performance compared meaningfully to competitors
These are the factors that determine impact and they sit outside the logic of equivalence altogether.
What replaces AVEs in the AI age
The AI age does not require better AVEs. It enables better evidence.
Rather than compressing communication into a single proxy number, PR teams can now demonstrate impact through a combination of signals that reflect how communication actually works. These include:
Share of voice and competitor comparison, to show relative influence
Audience alignment indicators, such as age, gender and social class
Volume and consistency over time, to establish momentum
Narrative and message movement, to understand framing and resonance
Geographic distribution, to assess local versus national impact
Individually, these metrics are incomplete. Together, they form a defensible, decision-ready picture of performance that is far more informative than a single notional value.
A pragmatic reality check
For some organisations, AVEs will continue to be requested often due to legacy reporting expectations or procurement requirements. In these cases, the issue is rarely technical; it is governance-led. What matters is ensuring that any proxy metric is clearly contextualised and supported by evidence that reflects real communication outcomes.
The most effective PR teams do not rely on AVEs to justify their work. They use richer insight to reduce dependency on them shifting conversations from “what was this worth?” to “what changed, and why does it matter?”
The real shift
The AI age does not signal a revival of AVEs. It signals their redundancy.
PR now has the tools to demonstrate impact on its own terms through audience relevance, narrative insight and comparative performance over time. The challenge is no longer data availability, but the discipline to use that data responsibly and credibly.
For communications leaders, that shift represents an opportunity: to move beyond equivalence and toward evidence.