Circ Bureau Refines Rules For Newspaper, Magazine Reader Profiles

The board of directors of the Audit Bureau of Circulations has taken steps to ensure it maintains control over the standards of magazine and newspaper reader profile studies that have become a critical basis for many print media plans. Among other things, the board voted last week to require board approval for any changes to standards for conducting and verifying these reports.

The move does not reflect in any way a lack of confidence in the committees previously charged with full responsibility for overseeing these standards, says Kevin Campbell, manager of marketing and sales at the ABC.

"Mostly it's because participation has grown to such large levels," he explains. "The board has final say with all other regulations, so really, all this does is bring [the committees] in line with everybody else."

Other changes approved for the subscriber profile program include requiring that the date of each study be noted on the front page of the report and that magazine publishers conduct a "second keypunch" to ensure accuracy.

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For the reader profiles, newspapers must now ask a Saturday readership question when Saturday circulation exceeds Sunday circulation. Also, magazine and newspaper publishers submitting profiles are now allowed to publicize the results before the release of the final audit document.

Any major changes to the subscriber profiles, in particular, could give magazine media planners major pause. They have come to rely on the profiles as a reliable source of information for the demographic characteristics of a publication's subscribers, and are an especially critical source of information about titles that don't subscribe to Mediamark Research Inc. or other suppliers of syndicated magazine audience data. The data has become an indispensable component of so-called magazine audience prototypes for unmeasured magazines.

While Campbell describes the program as "still in its infancy" and notes that it has a "far smaller universe of potential participants," he lauds the subscriber profiles for the positive effect they've had on confidence in publisher-supplied research. "They're the easiest, best way for advertisers to get comparable information," he notes.

As for the newspaper reader profiles, they're a lot further along in terms of adoption: 80 percent of the country's top newspapers are active participants. Whereas the subscriber profiles seek to verify research collected via mail methods, the newspaper reader profiles verify information conducted via phone.

Prior to their introduction in 1999, research from newspaper publishers suffered from a lack of common questions/procedures, and often presented data in a way that made it difficult for advertisers to find the exact information they coveted.

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