Lights! Camera! Research!

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

Some see a new research model emerging, one in which publishers and media buyers are full partners on the same side of the table. Again, Carat's efforts are noteworthy. Last year, in an effort to build-up Carat's luxury practice, Verklin approached Conde Nast's Architectural Digest about a study the magazine was conducting on the buying habits of millionaires under age 40. Carat volunteered to underwrite part of the report, and to lend its considerable technical expertise. At the end, both parties walked away with access to the proprietary research. Talk about a win-win situation: Architectural Digest's conclusions were taken seriously, while Carat gained critical insight to build business among luxury advertisers. Verklin believes the experience can serve as a blueprint for future collaborations. "Some of the [magazine] research is flawed. But if Starcom puts its name on it with Harper's Bazaar, or Mindshare with Time, then you can trust it."

resurrecting reader panels

Not all publishers have the resources for such ambitious undertakings, so they've responded by re-inventing one the industry's old standbys: the reader survey panel.

Panels are a longstanding tool in every research toolbox. In the old days, if an advertiser wanted to know what a magazine's readers thought about its products, selected subscribers would be mailed or called at home with a questionnaire, and the results would be laboriously tabulated. The problem is, proponents of statistically sound surveying tactics often derided panels as unsound research.

Once panels moved onto the Internet, where subscribers were contacted via e-mail, research departments hated them even more: On top of not being a random sampling of readers, now only wired readers comprised the poll, making the data even less representative. But there's no denying reader panels are cheap, and e-mail panels are even less expensive; setup costs are absorbed by overhead and the list can be easily maintained.

So in the last year or so, magazines without their own digital panel have rushed online to build one. Rolling Stone launched its 10,000-subscriber strong "Sounding Board" in 2001. Wired last month unveiled "Wired Pulse," a 6,000-subscriber panel of men with incomes over $100,000 per year. They join already existing online panels such as Conde Nast Traveler's 40,000-member "Best Of" annual voting pool, and YM's new "Spy Panel" of several hundred teenage girls.

Wired's recent foray into online data gathering has already proven its worth, according to the magazine's publisher Drew Schutte. "We were working with a major financial company - I can't say who - but they had some questions about our readers," he says, "and this was an advertiser we'd never had before. The plan was coming down in a few days. In the old system, the best you could have done was get on the phone and try to poll subscribers. We shot it to the Pulse, got a 45 percent response rate and got it overnight. And instead of sentences, we got paragraphs and pages. We literally just printed it out and showed it to [the client]. We got on the plan for 17 pages." Schutte says he hasn't had to boost Wired's research budget, either - the heavy lifting is done by Wired's enthusiastic readers.