Stop Defending Your PR Budget. Start Proving It.
Every line in a marketing budget needs to defend itself. Paid media has CPC and ROAS. Email has open rates. Events tie back to pipeline on a set timeline. But PR gets propped up by a clip report and a quiet hope that nobody asks to connect PR to business value. Placements and impressions measure output. Yet output almost never ties back to what moves the needle. "We got covered in 40 outlets" is an activity report dressed up as a business case. That gap has more to do with measurement than performance. Brand authority can be quantified using the same frameworks investment bankers apply when they value a company ahead of an acquisition, and you don't need a deal on the table to start using them.
The metric that doesn't need a banker
There's a simple defensible framework that does something none of these other metrics do. Share of Voice against Share of Market is a forward looking metric with gravitas that guides decisions instead of confirming them. You likely already have both numbers. Share of Voice is your percentage of earned media coverage measured against your full topical or narrative landscape, not just the two rivals who come up in every meeting. Share of Market is how much of the addressable market you already own. Put them side by side and the relationship between them means more than either number alone. Les Binet and Peter Field's long-running research through the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) found that when a brand's Share of Voice runs ahead of its Share of Market, it predicts future growth. When it runs behind, a competitor (maybe even one you’re not monitoring) is quietly building the share that will eventually come out of yours. Every other metric, including revenue tells you what already happened, Share of Voice tells you where you’re headed. At Avaans Media, we recently worked with an e-commerce brand that held 9% market share in a competitive, regulated category while its earned-media Share of Voice, measured against its entire competitive set, ran closer to 14%. Nobody had put those two figures side by side before. Once they did, it read exactly where Binet and Field’s research predicts: a growth signal, not a vibe. That 5-point advantage changed the tone of every strategy and budget conversation about PR.
Why AI just raised the stakes
Are you rolling your eyes? Fair. But there’s a second reason this matters more than it did two years ago. AI platforms lean heavily on coverage from authoritative outlets when they answer questions like "who are the best companies in this category." Your Share of Voice now shapes more than what a person thinks reading a headline. It shapes the answer a buyer, an investor, or a candidate gets when they type your category into ChatGPT or Perplexity before they ever get on a call with your team. The math behind that shift is not small. Ocean Tomo's 2026 analysis puts 92% of S&P 500 market value in intangible assets. PPAnalyser puts more than 75% of what acquirers pay in an M&A deal toward goodwill rather than hard assets. We’re no longer in an economy where product is the strongest value driver. We are now in an authority economy. A raise, an acquisition, or just holding your ground against a louder competitor: all three are being decided, in part, on a number you may not have looked at yet. Two numbers worth knowing Closer to a raise or an exit, two other frameworks give you the same language an M&A advisor would use. Price premium measures what customers pay above a generic alternative because of your reputation. Royalty relief measures what it would cost a buyer to license the brand equity you've already built. Both start from data you already have sitting in a spreadsheet.
We built as a companion calculator to The Invisible Asset: Authority Is the New Valuation. Run your own numbers here: avaansmedia.com/invisible-asset-roi-of-brand-calculator Somebody is already putting a number on your brand's authority: a buyer, an investor, an AI model summarizing your category. The only open question is whether that number is yours or theirs.
About the author: Tara Coomans is the founder and CEO of Avaans Media, a boutique PR firm building authority for growth-stage and regulated brands. Avaans Media is an independently verified three-time Inc. Power Partner (2023, 2024, 2025) and the author of The Invisible Asset: Authority Is the New Valuation.
