• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 11, 2004

Seven months after the scrutiny of the Rosie magazine trial provided a rare public look into the questionable practices that sometimes surround magazine audience circulation reports, the nation's top print buyer, General Motors' Linda Thomas Brooks, Thursday said the magazine industry has failed to address the issue head on, and that this has set the publishing world back years in terms of corporate accountability.

Ironically, Thomas Brooks also applauded the publisher that was at the center of that scandal, Gruner + Jahr, for making the greatest industry strides since then. Among other things, G+J has restructured its marketing department, hired accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct an investigation of its circulation process, and led the industry in advancing the frequency of its circulation audits from the customary annual cycle to reports that are issued every six months.

Still, Thomas Brooks described the impact on the magazine industry at large as a "crisis of confidence," and said she was surprised that the magazine industry failed to make a "bold statement" in the wake of Gruner + Jahr's disclosures and make a "one bad apple speech" to assure advertisers that such practices were not prevalent.

"There wasn't enough recognition of the damage that it did," said Thomas Brooks during a panel discussion on magazine circulation and audience data at the Association of National Advertisers Print Advertising Forum in New York.

In an environment where the advertising departments of major marketers are under greater scrutiny from corporate procurement departments and governance standards, she said the practices exposed by the Rosie magazine trial have set confidence in magazine audience circulation reporting back "three-to-five to plus-five years."

But when G+J USA's top sales executive--Vice President-Corporate Sales and Marketing Jack Bamberger--outlined the steps the publisher has since taken to rehabilitate the credibility of its circulation reporting, Brooks Thomas said: "The day after you come into my office with those sheets, I'm going to do a competitive."

"We need that for the whole industry," seconded Tony Jarvis, senior vice president-director of strategic insights at MediaCom, referring to the six-month frequency of G+J's circulation audit statements.

But Jarvis also advocated increased frequency for magazine audience data, the kind produced by Mediamark Research Inc. and other syndicated suppliers, that are used by agencies to develop audience estimates in conjunction with magazine circulation audit reports.

Jarvis said the circulation reports are merely a base step in the process, and that agencies need the syndicated audience data in order to develop audience reach estimate for specific demographic targets. Ultimately, he said agencies would like to push for data that reveals the actual sales effectiveness of consumer magazines.

"What we have here is a bit of a chasm between planning and buying," said Jarvis, alluding to the fact that planners build magazine schedules based on syndicated audience data, but that magazine buyers negotiate them off of circulation rate bases.

GM's Thomas Brooks said while that is an admirable goal, it is imperative for publishers to first improve the confidence in their circulation reports.

But the biggest audience reaction of the day came from G+J's Bamberger's suggestion that advertisers start "testing print creative" the way they copy test TV ads--a move that he said would lead to higher confidence levels about the performance of magazine ads--and, presumably, bigger magazine advertising budgets.