New Mag Data Comes To GRPs With TV, Enables Reach Comparisons

Years after playing second fiddle to television in the media planning process, the magazine industry is finally getting the kind of dynamic audience data that will enable advertisers and agencies to compare how the print medium builds audience reach. While that's good news for many magazine publishers, it comes ironically at a time when Madison Avenue is beginning to back away from raw audience reach as its preeminent media metric and is starting to replace it with something magazines have always been good at demonstrating: engagement.

"This is the first time we have real, continuous data on how people read magazines," boasts Rebecca McPheters, a highly regarded magazine audience researcher who has officially launched Readership.com, one of two new services that are beginning to provide so-called audience accumulation data for magazine readership.

"Basically, are doing for magazines what Nielsen has always done for television," says McPheters, who last week announced the beta release of the first batch of data from Readership.com, which utilizes a combination of online and print-based surveys to continuously measure how, and how quickly people read the 200 top consumer magazines, the major newspaper magazines and the carrier newspapers that distribute them.

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The official launch of Readership.com coincides with a similar system being tested by magazine research biggie Mediamark Research Inc., which last month began conducting weekly Web-based consumer surveys to supplement its massive twice-a-year printed surveys that have long been the currency of the magazine advertising buys.

But while MRI has cautiously couched its effort as a trial to "find out how quickly consumers read individual editions of magazines," Readership.com is preparing for a full rollout of its service.

"This experiment is not intended to replace MRI's national Survey of the American Consumer," MRI President-CEO Kathi Love said when the project was unveiled April 19. Instead, she said it is ancillary research designed to glean deeper insights about the exposure of specific print advertising campaigns.

Both efforts speak to the need for greater immediacy of print audience estimates, and Readership.com's McPheters says they could also play an important role beyond simple media planning and research, serving as a vital missing component for marketers who utilizes sophisticated marketing mix modeling systems to measure the return on their marketing investments, including advertising.

Such models, which became popular among big packaged goods marketers such as Kraft and Procter & Gamble over the past decade, have grown more common and are routinely used by marketers in a wide variety of categories to determine the effectiveness of their overall marketing budgets. However, some critics of those models say they have had an inherent bias toward television because of TV's ability to plug so-called gross rating points (GRPs) easily into the systems. Without the equivalent dynamic, real-time audience data, other media were quite literally left out of the mix.

Recently, a collaboration of online researchers InsightExpress and Marketing Evolution developed a means to generate the equivalent of GRP data for online advertising campaigns, including local market estimates of GRPs, which can be plugged into marketing mix models, giving online the ability to be measured alongside TV to gauge sales effectiveness.

McPheters is among those who believe the new magazine audience data could also be used to give print a similar basis of comparison.

"Advertisers increasingly are looking at marketing mix models as proof of performance and print has been disadvantaged because there hasn't been timely, granular data," she says.

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