The standard industry measure of Advert Value Equivalent (AVE), is not regarded as an accurate or reliable method of online measurement. The industry finds that results are often inflated and there is no consistency or standardisation.
Recent intensive workshops and an industry survey (held in Johannesburg and Cape Town, facilitated by independent consultant Taryn Walker of Footnote15) has ignited the debate around the current metric for determining return of online brand coverage.
"The outputs from the workshop discussions revealed that many want a more accurate, more reliable metric that can be used for evaluation and benchmarking," notes BrandsEye's MD for South Africa, Angela Ferreira.
"We believe accurate measurement is absolutely critical in this space if we are to see earned digital media continue to grow, especially in strategic importance."
In response to the concerns raised around the calculation of online AVE, rising to the fore is the idea of a standardised single metric that evaluates a number of facets in a given digital campaign - including aspects such as quality and depth of engagement, total reach, sentiment, direct sales conversion and business impact.
This idea would be a benchmark that shows how a brand's campaign has performed in relation to the broader digital marketing industry average or a competitor's campaign.
Interestingly, the survey results showed that less than half (47.8%) of the respondents felt it is necessary to measure online marketing efforts in a rand currency format. In fact, a quarter (25.79%) of respondents said that it isn't even possible to do this accurately.
Firstly, using online AVE brings with it a host of traditional problems - in that it measures pure scale without considering targeted reach campaigns, that it does not reflect return on investment, does not contain sentiment analysis and does not reward 'crises averted' (orchestrating no coverage, where negative coverage could easily have occurred).
In the online world, using AVE has further challenges. It is difficult to implement - creating inconsistencies and potential for manipulation and, when applied to earned digital media such as tweets and blog posts, one realises these are fundamentally different animals to a newspaper or a TV station.
Trying to retrofit a classical value model into the new era of online marketing is extremely subjective and vague, "To be able to make this project happen has been a significant opportunity for us and our clients. The results were both anticipated yet still surprising. We look forward to seeing the solution developed and will do everything we can to assist further," continues Ferreira.
She adds that the company, which has driven online media monitoring forward with innovations such as crowd-sourced human verification of sentiment analysis amongst others, will continue playing a passionate role in encouraging a metric that is standardised and accepted industry wide.
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