• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 14, 2009

In an effort to upgrade the role magazines have in Madison Avenue's media mix, publishers are making a play for the marketing mix. Specifically, they are releasing new research and data that is expected to prove how magazines perform in so-called marketing mix modeling systems, which many in the industry believe have had an undue bias toward television.

For more than a decade, such models have emerged as a major way many marketers - especially those in consumer packaged goods - determine the impact various aspects of their marketing, including advertising and media buys, have on their sales, but they are generally believed to have favored certain media that have better, more continuous, and more granular data that can be used to compute how they contribute to the models. But beginning this month, magazine audience researcher Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI) will release the beta version of a new syndicated database that will enable magazines to be compared alongside the kind of local market TV audience data the models have used to determine how effectively television advertising impacts product sales.

The new, as-yet-unnamed research service is an outgrowth of the Audience Accumulation Study MRI has been offering to the industry for free over the past several years to allow magazine audience delivery to be compared directly with the reach and frequency of television buys. By making it available to marketing mix modelers, advertisers and agencies, MRI effectively is taking the data from the realm of theoretical to applied research, and could dramatically effect the way some big advertisers think about the role magazines have vis a vis other media in their mix.

"Marketing mix models can't fully measure the ROI of advertising without accurate weekly issue- and market-level audience data, a situation that has disadvantaged all media but television," stated Jim Spaeth, founding partner of Sequent Partners, the consultancy hired by MRI to figure out how its data could be applied to the models. Spaeth, a former president of the Advertising Research Foundation, and a highly respected research thinker on Madison Avenue, started by surveying big marketers and agency executives on how they currently use models, and what magazines needed to do to have more of an influence on the process.

His conclusion was that many agencies and marketers have been modeling the role of magazines in the marketing mix, but they have been using "less than optimal data" to do that, and the result has masked the actual role magazines are playing.

When Spaeth shared these findings with MRI executives, they pointed out that the optimal data already existed - the data being generated by MRI's magazine audience accumulation studies - and they simply needed to be provided in a way that enabled advertisers, agencies and modelers to input them in a way that is similar to Nielsen's local market TV rating points data.

The new service, which MRI has been referring to as a "schedule-based audience builder," does exactly that, showing how magazine campaigns - even those based on monthly or weekly magazine schedules - contribute to audience reach on a weekly basis in local markets.

The release of the MRI system coincides with the publication of two important white papers during the industry's recent Worldwide Readership Research Symposium, backing the method up, and a big push by the Magazine Publishers Association to make advertisers and agencies aware of those findings.

It also comes as other media are seeking comparable metrics and research that improves the way they are factored into marketing mix models, which are believed to have had a significant bias toward television. Earlier this month, a consortium of radio broadcasters and researcher Arbitron announced plans to improve the "analytical methods used by advertisers to evaluate the tangible impact of radio advertising on product sales." Arbitron said the consortium planned to develop better methods and data streams that could be used by marketers and agencies to model those effects. No timeframe was announced, but the companies said they had coincidentally retained Spaeth's Sequent Partners to "guide and coordinate their effort."