Print-Ad Effectiveness: More Accurate Than Ever

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July 1, 1999 by Jim Spaeth

Jim Spaeth is president of the Advertising Research Foundation. His e-mail address is jim@arfsite.org.

But publishers should promote the supporting research if print's power is to be proved.

Magazine sales reps have been telling the story for have been telling decades: Magazines are different from other media. They build intimate relationships with readers. And readers are more involved and attentive. But these non-quantifiable, yet important advantages have rarely found expression in the numbers that drive media decisions. In the planning and buying worlds of CPM and R&F (reach and frequency) they're quickly forgotten.

Enter new technology marketing mix modeling. Actually, this technology has been applied to media analysis since the 1960s. However, it was not until the full flowering of UPC data in the late 1980s that we could truly realize its promise. Marketing mix modeling is a kind of regression analysis that enables us to understand the individual contributions of a host of factors to the ups and downs of a brand's marketshare.

A typical analysis will use 156 weeks of data for 50 markets, for a total of 7,800 observations, to differentiate the individual contributions of price, promotion, display, coupons, distribution and advertising to the weekly marketshare fluctuations of an advertiser's brand. The end result of this statistical legerdemain is astounding: the long-sought-after advertising ROI!

The key to marketing mix modeling is the massive amount of weekly, market-by-market data. The market-by-market part of the puzzle is not difficult. If we apply the national readers-per-copy estimate to county-level circulation data, we can re-express a magazine's audience into almost any geography desired. The problem is obtaining weekly audience impressions. The most recent data on weekly audience accumulation patterns for magazines are from 1967-not terribly useful! Solving this part of the puzzle will be crucial to the future health of the magazine industry.

For TV, providing weekly impressions data is relatively simple. That's the way the medium is delivered and measured. But a magazine builds its audience day by day as more readers obtain a copy and read or look into it. In the case of a monthly, this can take many weeks. Magazines can't get into the game until a method for gathering sound data on the weekly delivery of magazine impressions, market by market, is implemented.

So what are we doing about it? Under Advertising Research Foundation auspices, a group of industry leaders known as PrintLab is developing guidelines for measuring magazine audience accumulation. MRI has already conducted a pilot study. Other firms have proposed research designs. The need is clear and solutions are on the horizon, but we will need the support of magazine publishers.

The Magazine Publishers of America has launched an ambitious program of research that is highly complementary to this initiative. In the latter part of 1998, they completed a major study with Millward Brown to demonstrate the power of magazine advertising to generate awareness. And MPA recently completed another major study with A.C. Nielsen and IPSOS/ASI to demonstrate magazine advertising's power to generate sales. These landmark studies will open new doors, but follow-through is vital.

What's next? PrintLab will release its guidelines for magazine audience accumulation measurement. But this initiative can't go forward without publishers' support. Publishers must invest in these services and, equally critical, work with advertisers and agencies to ensure that the data are used to integrate magazines into the modeling and planning processes already going on without them. These studies will enable advertisers to determine the power of print for themselves-in their own terms, with their own tools, for their own brands. I can't guarantee that magazines will benefit every time, but I can guarantee that the decision process will be objective for the first time. Just don't drop the ball!