No Rain on This Parade

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2003

Byline: JOE MANDESE

A debate raging through the print-advertising industry over the past few years suggests more the silly mayhem of a "Saturday Night Live" skit than a serious discussion about audience-measurement methods. It goes something like this: "It's a newspaper. No, it's a magazine. No, it's both!"

Well, whatever.

The "it," as it turns out, is the occasionally amorphous medium of Sunday newspaper supplements. But the debate over their definition, at least for now, appears to be over. "They are magazines carried by newspapers," announces Rebecca McPheters, president of McPheters & Co., one of the research companies that helped forge that industry consensus.

It's a good thing the battle rages no more, because the leading national Sunday newspaper supplements, Parade and USA Weekend, historically have positioned themselves to Madison Avenue as magazines that just happen to be distributed by newspapers - and which happen to have extraordinarily large reported audience numbers.

It was the latter point that initially sparked the "Are they or aren't they?" debate. It began when some advertising agency executives and print-industry rivals, such as TV Guide magazine, protested the methods used by Mediamark Research, Inc. to attribute those humongous audiences to the Sunday supplements. In the past, MRI simply credited the total circulation of the newspapers that carry supplements to the supplements themselves, without knowing whether the newspaper readers were also reading the supplements or, for that matter, whether nonreaders of the newspapers were reading the Sunday supplements, which they could have obtained through pass-along.

To settle the matter once and for all, Parade led an industry initiative to research the question. It began by conducting a "nomenclature" study, polling readers on how they viewed newspaper supplements. As it turns out, consumers consider them to be more like magazines and less like sections of newspapers.

With that important issue behind it, the initiative, which has been marshaled through an ARF (Advertising Research Foundation) task force, set about designing a new method for measuring the audience of Sunday supplements.

Using a new research technique that will provide a customized questionnaire to each respondent, MRI last month began surveying consumers about the Sunday supplements they read and the carrier newspapers that deliver them. With those two pieces of data, media planners are expected to develop methods for estimating the audience of Sunday supplements based on the ongoing research of their carrier papers.

In an important development, USA Weekend has stepped up to support and help fund the new study; the findings should be released this summer. In all likelihood, the total audience for supplements should be somewhat smaller than it had been using MRI's old method, though the supplements do stand to gain some audience from pass-along readership.

When all is said and done, the numbers will have far more credibility on Madison Avenue and should be far less debatable from the perspective of mass-circ magazine rivals.

Wantedness: Dead Or Alive?

For the better part of a year, advertisers have been poring over magazine circulation statements in an effort to glean new insights about the advertising value of a magazine's audience, but some top circulation experts say they may be misdirecting their energies.

"[Advertising's] value isn't really in circulation but in circulation's ability to generate an audience," magazine research consultant Rebecca McPheters instructed ad execs attending the American Association of Advertising Agencies' recent media conference in New Orleans. "It's whether people read or see the ad."

Bobbi Gutman, vice president of consumer marketing at Primedia (publisher of Folio:), echoes McPheters's sentiments, asserting it may be difficult, if not impossible, for media planners and buyers to discern how and why publishers manage elements of their circulation, such as the newsstand and subscription prices that they charge readers.

"There are so many factors that go into determining price," says Gutman. "When we try to relate wantedness to price, it's very misleading."

By "wantedness," Gutman is referring to a term some publishers have been using to describe the involvement readers have with their publications. Some publishing and agency executives have taken the price paid per issue as a possible indication of such wantedness, and so they have been spending countless hours attempting to decipher that information from the Audit Bureau of Circulations' recently revised magazine circulation statements.

Instead, Gutman, McPheters, and the Magazine Publishers of America's chief marketing officer Ellen Oppenheim recommended ad execs focus on metrics that describe the size and "quality" of a magazine's audience.

"I would argue that every magazine that is read is wanted," McPheters noted at the New Orleans confab. - JM