Rescoring a PR Report That Leads With Ad Value Equivalency

Marketing Academy · Field Work●PR & Communications

All projects·From: Measuring PR Impact: Beyond Vanity Metrics

MiniAudit· 30 minutes

Warby Parker

Objective: Given an agency's quarterly PR report that leads with clip count and AVE, rebuild the same quarter's story using share of voice against a real competitive set paired with sentiment, correctly separating relevant coverage from noise.

You're the marketing analyst at Warby Parker, the DTC eyewear and omnichannel retailer, reviewing your PR agency's quarterly report before it goes to the exec team. The report leads with '$2.4M in Advertising Value Equivalency' from 40 clips.

Strip out the AVE number, re-sort the 40 clips by relevance, then compute share of voice against your two real competitors, paired with sentiment.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets

FreeFilter clips by relevance and compute SOV with sentiment

Free, sufficient for a quarterly report of this size

Google Alerts(optional)

FreeCatch mentions the agency report might have missed

Free ongoing monitoring for your brand and named competitors

The process

2 steps

Step 01 of 02

Retiring AVE and raw reach as headline metrics

AMEC's Barcelona Principles explicitly reject Advertising Value Equivalency: it prices editorial coverage as if it were a paid ad, ignores that readers trust the two differently, and can't be benchmarked consistently across outlets.

The report's 40 clips include 12 from eyewear-specific trade press and 28 from general 'roundup' blogs that mention Warby Parker in a list of 10 brands. Which of the 40 clips should actually count toward this quarter's PR story?

Google Sheets— Import the 40-row clip export, add a 'relevance' column, filter out AVE and total reach columns entirely.

Procedure

Import the 40-clip export and delete the AVE and total-publication-reach columns
Tag each clip: 'dedicated coverage' vs. 'listed among competitors'
Keep only dedicated coverage from outlets your actual buyers read
Recount: how many of the original 40 clips survive the relevance filter?

Sample output

Original report: 40 clips, $2.4M AVE, 6.1M 'reach'
After relevance filter:
  Dedicated coverage (eyewear trade press): 9 clips
  Listed among competitors (general roundups): 3 clips worth keeping
  Discarded (irrelevant or duplicate): 28 clips

Healthy

The exec summary now says '12 relevant placements' instead of '40 clips worth $2.4M,' a defensible number instead of an inflated one.

Unhealthy

Reporting '$2.4M in AVE' to the exec team, who will ask why paid media spend didn't produce equivalent results next quarter, a comparison the number invites but can't survive.

What this means

A clip count only means something after a relevance filter; the AVE number was never real money and should never appear in the summary at all.

So what do I do about it?

Symptom	Action	Effort
A PR report opens with an AVE dollar figure	Delete the AVE line before the report reaches an exec deck	5 min

YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Step 02 of 02

Share of voice paired with sentiment

Share of voice (SOV) is your mentions divided by total category mentions among your real competitive set, and it must always travel paired with sentiment, since SOV can rise for bad reasons too.

This quarter Warby Parker had 12 relevant mentions against Zenni and EyeBuyDirect's combined 30 mentions in the same eyewear trade coverage. What's the SOV, and does the sentiment column change how good that number actually is?

Google Sheets— Build a 3-row SOV table: your mentions, competitor mentions, sentiment split for each.

Procedure

Count your 12 relevant mentions and competitors' 30 combined mentions
Calculate SOV: your mentions / (your mentions + competitor mentions)
Tag each of your 12 mentions positive, neutral, or negative
Write one sentence on whether rising SOV this quarter is a real signal or a false one

Sample output

SOV = 12 / (12 + 30) = 28.6%
Sentiment on your 12 mentions: 9 positive, 3 neutral, 0 negative
Verdict: SOV rose from 21% last quarter to 28.6% this quarter, and sentiment held mostly positive, a real signal, not a recall-driven spike.

Healthy

SOV rises alongside stable or improving sentiment, meaning you're winning more of the conversations that matter, not just generating more noise.

Unhealthy

SOV rises while sentiment turns negative, e.g. a product recall generating mentions, which looks identical to a win on the SOV number alone.

What this means

SOV without a sentiment column is not a finished metric, it's half of one.

So what do I do about it?

Symptom	Action	Effort
A report shows SOV with no sentiment breakdown	Add the sentiment split before presenting the SOV number to anyone	5 min

YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Final deliverable

A rescored one-page PR scorecard replacing AVE and raw clip count with relevant-mention count, SOV against real competitors, and sentiment.

See a reference example

Sample output

ThredUp, Q2 PR Scorecard (rescored)

RELEVANT COVERAGE: 15 of 52 total clips (37 clips discarded as irrelevant or duplicate)
SHARE OF VOICE: 31% vs. Poshmark + The RealReal combined (up from 24% last quarter)
SENTIMENT: 11 positive, 4 neutral, 0 negative
VERDICT: Real signal, SOV growth paired with stable positive sentiment

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

Correctly separates dedicated coverage from listed-among-competitors clips
Calculates SOV correctly and pairs it with a sentiment read before calling it a win