• by Michael Shields , November 8, 2004

PReSS, Monroe Mendelsohn Research's new magazine research product aimed at gauging individual magazine's connections with readers, is set to debut next Tuesday with several new media shops on board.

PReSS (the Publication Readership Satisfaction Survey), which will unveil the results of its initial 17,600- person survey of nearly 200 consumer titles, has added Carat and Universal McCann to the roster of shops that have purchased version one of the new product for their print planning purposes. Already, Mendelsohn has contracts with Publicis, MediaCom, and MPG, as well as smaller shops like Mullen.

Last spring, PReSS made news by signing up bigwig advertisers General Motors and Procter & Gamble.

When released, the new research tool will purport to go beyond current metrics provided by companies like Mediamark Inc. (MRI)--delving into measures of reader involvement and/or engagement, which have emerged as the industry's most-repeated buzzwords over the past few years.

PReSS rates magazines on attributes such as "I look forward to reading every issue," "Is cutting edge," and "Contains ads that I trust."

While officials at Mendelsohn have reported some resistance among publishers to buying into PReSS, it appears as though some agency folks are bullish on the product's potential.

"It hopefully brings a new dimension to print planning," said Marc Turk, information manager at Carat Insight. "It brings more depth, and is hopefully easier to use than MRI. It will enable us to plumb the depths of reader involvement in a different way."

Turk said that once PReSS data is available, planners at Carat will be given the green light to use the information at will. "Once we begin to receive the data, we will let the planning group play with it as soon as possible."

"We are very much looking forward to it," he added.

Besides reader involvement, one factor that may have nudged PReSS into consideration for several media researchers is the fact that it will measure 41 titles that are not currently measured by MRI, thus providing valuable basic demographic data on those titles from a third-party source.

It will be interesting to see what sort of immediate impact PReSS has on the magazine advertising market. If agencies begin to actively use the product, it is likely that holdout media giants, such as Initiative, will join the party.

And despite some publishers' resistance to subscribing to the data, it is a virtual certainty that magazines that score high in certain PReSS categories will begin incorporating such metrics into their sales presentations.

Turk speculated even further. "This is going to be a better tool," he said. "The $24,000 question is, are advertisers going to move more dollars toward print away from other media because of this?"