What does the Comms Industry utilize to crack the ‘measurement and revenue impact’ code and finally ditch AVE?
Finally, there’s light at the end of the old ‘dilemma tunnel’ of measuring impact of PR and Comms on the company’s bottom line…or at least, on getting ‘more leads.’
Measuring the impact of PR and communication outputs on the company’s bottom line has been an age-old catch-22 chicken-egg conundrum for the PR profession. Part of the ‘problem’ lies with the key tenets of the PR and Comms industry itself: managing public perceptions of the client, reputation, stakeholder relations, and building their brand, rather than hustling to measure the ‘impact’ of each PR output on the client’s bottom line. Another factor is the PR industry’s reliance on outdated measures such as AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency), which does not fully capture the effectiveness of Comms’ work.
Still, C-Suits have been demanding answers to the perpetual question posed towards PR and Comms: “What’s PR & Comm’s gravitas on our sales numbers?”
Correctly so! Given the short-term revenue focus of businesses in general and the pressure for short-term promotional activities over long-term brand building and reputation management, this catchphrase has become a staple in corporate echelons everywhere.
The real fallout occurs when communications professionals find themselves at a loss for a clear answer. “We have managed brand reputation by preventing brand damage with our Crisis PR work, which is as valuable as sales and promotions,” they would mumble.
With such PR impact measurement tools as Meltwater and Cision (along with in-house monitoring of social media engagement metrics, etc), this situation appeared to become manageable, though a real turnaround is still missing.
A recent study reveals the new enabler that could pivot this situation: AI.
The new survey by PR Week and CISION (310 industry professionals across the U.S. and Canada) “2025 Comms Report – Advancing: The Story” reports on AI implementation progress in the industry that is “beyond experimenting.”
The report states:
The sign that truly indicates an industry’s adoption of technology is when individuals and teams in that sector — inspired by widely used offerings from tech companies — begin to create proprietary tools of their own. When it comes to AI and marcomms, we asked respondents: Has your organization developed/created at least one proprietary AI tool for its use or its customers’ use? 37% respondents said “Yes” (63% “No”).
The report confirms the increasing use of AI in the industry:
AI is being used “regularly” much more so than last year in two key areas: “content review/optimization” (37%, up from 28%) and “brainstorming campaign ideas/strategies” (35%, up from 29%).
Then the good news for PR professionals:
When Cision and PRWeek launched the first version of this report in 2017, 75% of respondents said the sector can do better at measuring and proving its impact on business objectives. Today, more than two-thirds of pros (68%) report having the necessary tools to show the cause-and-effect relationship between their work and their organizations’/ clients’ bottom-line objectives.
In the survey report, Katie Tod, VP of marketing for CisionOne, says: “PR teams are no longer limited by basic volume or outdated metrics such as AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency) as a measure of success. The tools available now and the metrics they have to access offer a direct line of sight into the tangible outcomes of their work, indicating where their efforts are paying off and even where they are converting….When you can prove PR is directly driving business goals — whether increasing sales or mitigating crisis fallout — it speaks the C-suite’s language.”
The elephant in the room…how is AI applied in the Comms sector to achieve business objectives and to shift from a cost centre to a revenue-generating centre? By creating proprietary AI solutions for in-house use (if necessary, with the use of common software platforms such as Microsoft 365).
The report cites some examples:
A RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) tool (summarizes an insanely high volume of company IP and research content),
A “proprietary insights engine” that uses large data sets, tracks audience engagement with specific topics (in this case, healthcare), identifies key influencers, and integrates insights from media, organizations, and influencers to reveal their impact on discussions (this tool enables quick, tailored content creation and delivers valuable client-specific data in moments).
A “proprietary AI tool” to leverage customer growth and compare that to all investments of the Company and the ROI of what was invested in each application.
An “AI tool” that automatically pulls together slides, content, action items, etc., after a meeting for salespeople to send to their clients.
For the Comms industry, AI finally offers much-needed pathways to derive measurements with a line of sight to the company’s business objectives. This AI iteration in the Comms industry is still at an early stage, and its development appears to show a preference for company-specific (proprietary, ie, within a walled garden) solutions rather than for ‘off the shelf’ solutions that could be commonly adopted by PR firms across the board. It also signals the possible end of the market lifecycle for common industry platforms such as Meltwater, pressuring them to provide more customization options from one PR firm to another.
In short, we may be at the brink of the next ‘stage of tech’ in the PR and Comms industry…
…or the next iteration of the global PR and Comms industry itself!
