• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, September 7, 2006

For as long as I can remember, ad buyers have been unhappy with how media audiences are calculated. Projections based on small samples are hard enough to swallow--much less, guesstimates of how many people in a doctor's office read a magazine or see a TV show in a bar. Then, two nearly simultaneous developments added fuel to the fire: the circulation scandals that rocked major dailies in several cities, and the Internet.

If John Wannamaker could have advertised on the Internet, he would have known in short order which half of his ad dollars were wasted--and made the necessary adjustments to get his ad spend ROI up to something that would have given him a little more confidence. And so the Internet has put enormous pressure on traditional media to be more accountable about who comprises their audiences and how they react to ads. But, to be sure, the latest move by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) won't solve anything.

In an attempt to "meet the demands of today's diverse media landscape," ABC just released a new report that purports to aggregate a publications' circulation, pass-along, and Web site traffic into a consolidated report. At first blush, it sounds like a good idea. But it's not.

The "Total Audience Reach" number in the Consolidated Media Report, as it is called, does not in fact represent total unduplicated audience reach as its name would suggest. In fact, it is merely a summation of all of the various online and offline metrics added together. That's right. They just added circulation numbers to total pass-along recipients (not necessarily readers) to total unique Web users and call it total audience reach.

What good is a total audience reach number that counts frequency as more reach? No good at all. In fact, it is worse than no good. It is very misleading. ABC added apples to oranges to grapefruits, ignored all of the audience duplication issues, and created an extraordinarily irrelevant and misleading metric which is certain to be bandied around by a bunch of collapsing print publications in hopes of diverting attention from their plummeting circulation figures.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for new media measurements that can represent the potential synergies and combined reach of online and offline media products. Like Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, I was on ABC's first online measurement task force back in 1996--and believe, like most in the industry, that the focus should be on advertising reach, not media vehicle weight.

We need ABC, or someone else, to step up and provide real leadership here. Our existing media measurement metrics are in disarray, and are less and less helpful every day. We need new sets of metrics that actually measure what advertisers really care about: What audience saw my ad? How many of them were there? How many times did they see it? Did they engage with it? Did they respond? Did they buy something? Did they tell anyone else about it?

That will be real progress we can all celebrate.