In the WSJ blog: The Numbers Guy, by Carl Bialik: Now Much is this Blog Post Worth? Addressing how in the rush to measure things, quantitative measures are often assigned to things that are just not quantifiable. Here discussed are advertising value equivalents: '... the longstanding but controversial public-relations practice of converting media coverage into monetary figures by assuming the exposure was worth as much as similarly placed advertising .... '. Once you have assigned a number to something, it is assumed that all the usual arithmetic and even statistical manipulations can be performed. The inanity of the original measure is forgotten once the values are recorded. Beware.
I noticed this post when I saw that a former colleague of mine was quoted: “Ad equivalency is great for sound bites but not substance,” said Charlotte Otto, strategic advisor at the PR firm Weber Shandwick. “They are generally ‘made up’ numbers and highly dependent on liberal assumptions used to calculate equivalency.”. Made-up indeed, but then often used to justify all sorts of other things. Read the full post for some examples.
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