Lights! Camera! Research!

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July 1, 2002

Byline: greg lindsay

Arnold MPG, a unit of Havas, has a reputation for being among the most progressive agencies around. So last year, when the shop declared it would hold a cattle call for publishers wanting in on Volkswagen's 2002 schedule, their request for proposals didn't ask for the usual demographics or reader reach stats. And it didn't ask for the number of parties publishers could throw in the Beetle's honor. What they wanted to know was: If one of your readers went on a road trip in a VW Beetle, where would they go? Who would they take with them? What music would they listen to?

National Geographic Adventure was among the magazines that answered Havas' call. Months later, national sales director Rich Antoniello frowns as he watches the mini-movie his marketing crew churned out. "This is the part where it starts to resemble a bad beer commercial," he mutters. In the brief video, a group of Bobos in their late twenties - meant to represent Adventure's ideal readers, but looking straight out of a Bud ad - sit around a campfire at dusk, laughing, eating lobster, and then piling into their VW Beetle for the trek back to the city after a weekend of biking, yachting and water-skiing. Imbued in the film's 13 minutes is the message that these fictional characters (played by members of the magazine's marketing staff, it turns out) are the essence of the magazine's audience. The assumption is that advertisers can learn a lot more from this contrived story about readers' real loves, pursuits - and brand preferences - than from mere demographic data. Total cost? Roughly $600 and 24 hours of the marketing team's time.

Adventure was not the only title to respond to Havas' request by producing it's own idiosyncratic version of "My World And Welcome To It." Music mags Spin and Blender each produced a video, while GQ and Newsweek produced audio CDs meant to represent what their readers would listen to on a road trip. Less tech-friendly titles had their top editors meet with the VW team. Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl made a personal appearance to sketch her readers' profile.

In the end, going the extra mile paid off for Adventure: Volkswagen bought the pitch - to the tune of 10 pages. If it sounds like a ton of work to land just one advertiser, that's because it is. Adventure's publisher Chris Sachs insists he doesn't mind when a client asks him to flex his creative muscles to answer what should be self-evident - who his readers are, and why they should be advertising to them. But he confesses that the new hunger for value-added research can be exhausting. "It requires a lot more heavy lifting," says Sachs. "But it brings you closer to that true marketing partnership."

He had better get used to it. Over the last couple of years, more and more media buyers have demanded that publishers take over research duties traditionally performed by ad agencies. Hit hard by the recession and a growing awareness that traditional mathematical models fall short, agencies are determined to make their buys more compelling by making their reader research more telling. Rather than undertake expensive research themselves, they're pushing a hefty share of it onto the backs of magazine marketing departments. Publishers, who are as desperate for ad pages as the agencies are for clients, are not only more tolerant (and outwardly welcoming) of oddball requests like Arnold's, they're rushing to unveil new forms of reader research. Says Sachs: "People aren't interested in tchotchkes anymore. Now we do things that really do help clients define their target market a little more clearly and ultimately, sell product."

To hear participating publishers describe it, Arnold and VW received special treatment they couldn't possibly give everybody. "If we got 700 of these [RFPs] every year, we'd have to triple the size of our [eight-person] marketing staff," laughs Spin publisher Jon Chalon. (If it's any comfort, Steve Moynihan, group media director for Arnold, says he won't ask for something similar this year, because magazines don't change direction that often.)

Yet that hasn't stopped Chalon from pitching in this summer's big touchy-feely audition: Absolut Vodka and TBWA/Chiat Day have asked publishers, "If your magazine was a bar, what kind of bar would it be? What would your readers wear, drink and dance to?" TBWA declined comment, but one can picture its planners mixing and matching submissions to fit, or even influence, the image Absolut wants for its campaign.

Again, Chalon's team didn't skimp. "We did another video," he says. "We used music and a lot of photographs from the magazine over the years to demonstrate what the bar would be like." But, he adds, "I won't tell you what the story is." The cost this time: $1,000. At this rate, discussions of tracking shots and close-ups might replace talk of CPMs and passalongs at publisher luncheons.

pushing past commodity talk

So why are all these media-buying types suddenly sounding like Barbara Walters interviewing Jimmy Carter ("If you were a tree, Mr. President...")? The move toward publisher-driven research is another by-product of the industry's frustration with the raw numbers and syndicated research of MRI, which is often criticized by buyers, researchers and publishers alike. The problem is that numbers only give a rough indication of who reads what and what they buy. "The demographics do not tell the whole story," says Gina Sanders, the new publisher of Teen Vogue. "You can have people with identical $100,000 incomes and identical demographics and they have completely different lives."