The same PR results do not mean the same performance — divide by how easy the story was to begin with

Measuring public relations performance has long been contested. Agencies use proprietary formulas as a point of differentiation and so resist common standards, while clients fall back on familiar numbers such as AVE — pricing coverage at what the equivalent advertising space would cost — which has been criticised for years yet is still used by around half the industry. The paper asks how an evaluation system could be designed so that both sides agree on it before the work starts.

A conceptual, methodological paper with no empirical data collection. The authors review the standing criticisms of AVE and of the assumptions agencies build into their own formulas, then propose a set of indicators with worked examples.

• The central proposal is a “news-hook potential coefficient” agreed at the planning stage, not at the reporting stage — an assessment of how much media pull the story carries on its own.
• The coefficient runs counter to intuition: the higher the potential, the lower the number. The illustrative values are high potential = 0.5, medium = 1.5, low = 2.0, because a strong story generates coverage by itself while a weak one takes more work from the agency.
• It is applied as a multiplier on quantitative indicators. The paper's own example: 100 invitations sent and 20 accepted gives 20/100 × 1.5 = 0.3 for a medium-potential story, but 0.4 for a low-potential one. The same output scores differently because the difficulty differed.
• The second component is a jointly agreed, argued media list ranked by priority — a local title may matter more than a national edition for a regional event, which a raw count of placements ignores.
• The third is content quality, and it can only reduce. If one of four intended key messages appears in the coverage, content quality is no more than 0.25.
• The authors state plainly that this does not make measurement more accurate. Its purpose is to align the expectations of agency and client, not to make evaluation more objective.

What an organisation can use immediately is not the coefficient itself but the sequence: settle the measures and assess the difficulty of the story *before* the work begins, rather than arguing about it when the report lands. Most disputes over PR results come from never having set an agreed, measurable target in the first place. And separating “what the agency did” from “how much pull the story had anyway” is a useful way to think even without adopting this formula.