• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, March 15, 2006

Consumer magazines' main circulation tracking agency, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), announced a new rapid reporting service for magazine circulation during a conference call on Tuesday. The service will allow media planners and buyers to get precise circulation numbers within weeks of publication. The service, which comes online in July, will be free and available to all ABC members.

The service is a significant advance over ABC's traditional twice-annual FAS-FAX report. Media buyers complained that the old report offered only six-month averages, rather than week-by-week numbers that would allow them to track short-term swings in magazine readership. ABC hopes the rapid reporting service will remedy this complaint.

Early reactions from media planners and buyers were positive. Roberta Garfinkle of TargetCast tcm said: "It's a giant leap in the right direction... One of the biggest concerns of agencies on behalf of our clients is that the circulation information comes out so much later than it should. We know that magazines get their returns from the newsstand in a much more timely fashion than they release it, and we've been working with ABC and publishers for years to get something like this."

Neil Ascher of Zenith Media agreed: "It's great because it will allow us to determine if we're having any significant circulation dips that we might not see from the six-month averages."

At the same time, Garfinkle acknowledged that many publishers may be hesitant to make the step to rapid reporting: "I think publishers are always concerned that somebody may misinterpret the information, or that the preliminary news on circulation might not be good, because of a one-time blip." Striking a reassuring note, Garfinkle concluded: "If their circulation is good, if their circulation is clean, it can only give us more confidence in light of all the recent circulation issues."

Here Garfinkle referred to the climate of suspicion that followed the disclosure of distorted circulation numbers at Rosie O'Donnell's Rosie Magazine and a handful of major American newspapers.

Nonetheless, the choice to opt for rapid reporting is left to magazine execs--a possible future source of friction. Indeed, asked what should come next, Garfinkle said: "Now the onus is on all of us [media buyers] to encourage publishers to take advantage of [the rapid reporting service]." In fact, publishers who don't opt for rapid reporting of circulation numbers may fall under a shadow: "If a magazine says 'we're not going to do this because there's too much margin of error,' I think we on the media buyers' side will ask, 'What's wrong? What are they hiding?'"

In the same conference, ABC execs also promoted a new service, Agent Compliance Evaluation (ACE), that allows publishers to verify the reliability of magazine subscription agents--the sales reps whose records provide much of the data ABC uses to calculate circulation figures. This service, which also depends on the sales reps opting in voluntarily, will investigate areas including agents' record-keeping, transaction processing, and subcontracts.