Somewhere in the GCC region, this month, a communications team is presenting results to a client. Slide after slide of coverage, and then the figure everyone has been waiting for: the AVE, or Advertising Value Equivalent.
A big number with a currency sign in front of it, built by measuring the space a story took up and pricing it as if the brand had bought an ad in exactly that spot. The client nods. The team exhales. And everyone in the room, if they are honest with themselves, knows the number is invented.
Why AVE still gets applause
I write this as someone whose agency has spent years winning AMEC awards, the global benchmark for measurement done properly. So this is not a note from the cheap seats. It is the opposite. I’ve grown tired of watching an industry I love keep score with a metric the rest of the world has already retired.
Here is the uncomfortable timeline. In 2010, AMEC, the global body for communications measurement, published the Barcelona Principles. The very first thing they said was to stop using AVEs. Not soften them. Stop.
That was fifteen years ago. The Principles have been revised three times since, most recently to version 4.0 in June 2025, and every single edition has had to repeat the same line, because we still have not listened.
Principle five, today, reads plainly: invalid measures like AVEs should not be used, measure outcome and impact instead. The fact that it still needs saying is the whole problem.
The habit that flatters everyone
So why does the Gulf, a region that genuinely wants to lead global communications, cling hardest to the one thing global communications agreed to bury?
Part of it is how we buy and sell the work. When agencies compete mostly on price and volume, a fat AVE is the easiest way to look like value for money. So we hand it over.
Part of it is training. A marketing director who has seen an AVE in every report for a decade will ask where it has gone the moment it disappears, and its absence feels like you are hiding something.
And part of it, the part nobody says out loud, is that the number flatters everyone in the room at once.
The agency looks effective. The manager looks justified in the spend. The client looks smart to their board. A metric that makes four people happy is very hard to kill, even when all four privately suspect it is nonsense.
Some teams still multiply the figure by three or five for "PR credibility," inventing value on top of invented value, and we all keep straight faces.
Agencies need to own their role
I want to be fair about where the fault sits, which means being unfair to my own side.
Agencies are complicit. We keep AVEs because they win pitches and pad reports, and then we blame the client for wanting them. We taught the client to want them. If we are serious about measurement in this region, that is where the honesty has to start, at our own end of the table.
Moving away from AVE
None of this is hard to fix. It is just uncomfortable, and comfort is what has kept the number alive.
Here is what it actually takes to move a client off it:
1. Start before the campaign, not after
Agree what the work is for while you can still shape it. Version 4.0 calls these SMARTER objectives, but strip the acronym away and it is four questions:
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What should change
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For whom
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By when
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How will we know
If nobody in the room can answer those, no metric invented afterwards will save the report. Most AVEs exist precisely because that conversation never happened.
2. Replace, do not just remove
You cannot take away a client's comfort number and hand them a lecture in its place. Give them something better to hold: whether your actual messages pulled through, your share of positive coverage among the audiences you were trying to reach, movement in perception, actions people took.
Outcomes, not centimetres of print.
3. Prove it small
Pick one campaign and measure it properly alongside the old way, just once. Show the client where the AVE said one thing, and the outcomes said another. You will almost always find a piece of coverage that scored huge on AVE and did nothing, and a quiet placement that moved the needle.
Let that gap make your argument for you. It is far more persuasive than anything you can say.
4. Name the trade honestly
Measuring properly costs time, and sometimes money. Say so. A client who understands they are paying for the truth instead of flattery will usually choose the truth, but only if you actually give them the choice. Most have never been offered it.
The region has the ambition, that has never been in doubt. We host some of the biggest campaigns in the world and we want to be judged among the best who do this work. You cannot claim that seat while reporting on a metric the rest of the profession threw out in 2010.
Winning awards taught me something simple and slightly deflating: the agencies that measure honestly are the ones that get braver over time, because they can finally see what works and what only looked like it did. The number that flatters you is the number that keeps you from getting better.
It is long past time we put it down.
Kate Midttun is Founder and Managing Director of Acorn Strategy, an Abu Dhabi-headquartered integrated communications consultancy with offices across the UAE, Australia, and the UK. Founded in 2010, Acorn has grown into a multi-award-winning firm serving sovereign wealth entities, energy giants, tech disruptors, and cultural institutions across the Middle East and beyond.
With over two decades advising multinationals and public sector organisations, Kate specialises in reputation, stakeholder trust, transformation communications, and AI integration. Acorn Strategy was named Independent Agency of the Year at the Australian Marketing Institute Awards in 2024, and Large Agency of the Year at the Middle East PR Association Awards in 2021. Kate serves as Governor of Future Communicators Foundation and Board Member of The Marketing Society.
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