PR has mastered getting seen, but is it any closer to being understood?

Measurement in the PR industry has always been a hotly debated, discussed and deliberated topic. This has only further intensified with media fragmentation and the use of AI. 

For years, Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) has been widely used to benchmark success. The metric offers a simple way to quantify earned media. However, as digital platforms reshape how content is consumed, many continue to question its relevancy.

In our many conversations leading up to PR Asia, some practitioners brought to light conversations around attention-based frameworks such as Attention Cost Estimates (ACE) while aim to measure not just whether coverage exists, but whether it captures meaningful audience attention. Yet, others have bashed it wholeheartedly saying it still doesn't get to the crux of the many issues facing measurement around communications - and can sometimes be rather shallow. 

Opinions remain debated and divided on how far attention cost estimates go in reflecting real business impact.

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Jeremy Seow, APAC chief operating officer and head of client experience at Allison, who has also held roles at Zeno Group, WE Communications and Ogilvy & Mather, said the industry has historically measured what was easiest to count - rather than what actually mattered.

AVE, he explained, emerged from a need to quantify PR in familiar business terms, but ultimately only proved that coverage existed, not whether it resonated. In today’s landscape, that distinction is critical.

“There is no shortage of information competing for people’s time. What’s scarce is attention,” Seow said, adding that the more relevant question is rather, what happens after a story appears, and whether audiences pause, engage, and absorb the message.

From this lens, measurement frameworks should ideally close the gap between visibility and impact. Rather than asking if something was published, communicators now must ask if it actually landed.

Delicia Tan, CEO of Edelman Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, echoed this shift. She said attention sits at the top of Edelman’s A3 framework, "Attention", "Attitude" and "Action", serving as the first signal of whether communications are breaking through. However, reach no longer guarantees impact.

Tan noted that algorithms, creators and fragmented consumption habits have fundamentally changed how content is experienced. In this context, attention-based metrics might simply be gaining traction because they address a more pressing client question: did anyone actually pay attention, and was that attention worth the investment?

What is clear is that attention alone, on its own, should not be a metric PR and communications professionals should chase.  Jacob Puthenparambil, CEO at Redhill, offered a more critical take. He views attention-based frameworks as one which incentivises "wrong behaviour".

"When you optimise for attention capture at the lowest cost, you inevitably skew towards media stunts, viral gimmicks, and sensationalism — tactics with extraordinarily short shelf lives that rarely compound into lasting reputational equity or commercial value," he said. Living in an influencer-driven, algorithmically mediated media environment where attention spans are compressed and social platforms already offer highly efficient paid solutions for grabbing fleeting notice, PR should not be competing in that arena, he added. 

The question we should be asking is not how cheaply we captured a moment of someone’s gaze, but whether we shifted perception, influenced a decision, or advanced a strategic business objective.

“The discipline of public relations earns its seat at the leadership table when it demonstrates impact on outcomes that matter to the C-suite, not when it produces a favourable cost-per-attention metric,” he said.

Measuring minds instead of eyeballs - and the challenges that presents

Shouvik Prasanna Mukherjee, EVP global creative innovation and chief creative officer APAC at Golin, said the shift from “counting eyeballs to measuring minds” should fundamentally reshape how communications is valued.

For Mukherjee, the issue with traditional metrics is not just their limitations, but their implications. By relying on volume-based indicators, the industry has often presented “vanity metrics dressed as business outcomes,” undermining its own strategic relevance. He added: 

The cumulative shift is significant: PR evaluation moves from ‘how much did we publish’ to ‘how much did we move'.

He added that attention metrics require genuine integration across earned media monitoring platforms, web analytics, social listening tools, and client-side CRM data. In APAC, that complexity is amplified - what works in Singapore doesn't map to WeChat ecosystems in China, Line in Thailand, or the distinct platform behaviours across Southeast Asia.

"Attention based framework models must be regionally calibrated from the ground up, not imported from Western markets and retrofitted. Our Creative Intelligence Unit has been building these integrations deliberately, but it requires sustained investment and technical architecture that many teams aren't yet resourced for," he said.

Speaking about the barriers, Mukherjee client education and buy-in is equally significant - and it's as much a change management challenge as a technical one given many finance and marketing directors have spent years receiving large AVE numbers. Moreover, industry standardisation remains the unresolved systemic challenge.

“Paid media attention measurement has MRC accreditation and platform-level reporting standards. Earned media has no equivalent yet, which creates real risk: Agencies defining ACE on their own terms, making cross-agency and cross-campaign comparability impossible,” he said.

Edelman's Tan similarly noted that attention-based metrics can change the client conversation by translating earned media into a language senior decision-makers understand, cost efficiency, without equating it directly to paid media.  Like Mukherjee, Tan also highlighted adoption challenges given the familiarity of AVE

"As Richard Edelman has consistently argued, trust and relevance are harder to earn in today’s media environment. Measurement frameworks must reflect that reality. [...]The real power is unlocked when attention-based frameworks sit within a broader framework, one that shows how earned attention shapes perception and drives action,” she said, adding: 

That’s when PR stops being measured by what it generated and starts being judged by what it changed.

Despite its promise, adoption and integration of attention-based measurement is far from clear cut answer. Seow too pointed to habit as a key barrier, with organisations and executives accustomed to familiar metrics such as reach and impressions. Moving towards attention requires not just new tools, but a shift in mindset, one that embraces more complex, and sometimes less tidy, ways of evaluating impact.

"In the end, measurement shouldn’t be about defending a methodology or producing a tidy number. It should help organisations decide what to do next. Are we being heard? Are we being understood? And does that insight help leadership make better decisions?" he said, adding;

Being mentioned in the media is not the same as being heard, understood or trusted.

Be part of #Content360 Singapore, 22–23 April 2026, where creativity and culture collide. Explore how AI-driven storytelling is shaping the future of content, gain practical insights, discover new tactics, and learn how the best in Asia are creating campaigns that truly resonate. 

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