Research proves that research works?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov, 1987 by Joe Hanson

Research proves that research works?

Wouldn't the advertising media world be a nice place to work in if media buyers could open a report that showed them the audience figures for every magazine they might possibly be interested in? Provided in a comparable format, such reports would allow for few decisions that could not withstand quantitative analysis.

It's that kind of wishful thinking that is responsible for millions of dollars spent each year on magazine readership research, conducted principally by Simmons Market Research Bureau, Inc. and Mediamark Research, Inc. Unfortunately, it's the mentality of those who want to do business in such a cut-and-dried way that has made a confused mess out of magazine audience research.

To begin with, evaluating magazines strictly on a quantitative basis fails to recognize the essential difference between magazines and broadcast as advertising media. Broadcast delivers numbers. Magazines deliver readers. The act of reading involves an exchange of information and ideas that makes advertising work differently in magazines than in broadcast.

Second, magazine publishers have no choice but to participate in audience measurement studies: Advertisers demand data before buying space. But there's no doubt in my mind that the more magazines that participate in these studies, the less meaningful are the results of a study for any given participant. Respondent fatigue has to be a major factor in the wide swings that occur from year to year within each of the individual studies, as well as in the differences in a given magazine's audience as reported by each of the two services. Conceivably, valid research could measure the women's magazines with perhaps eight or nine additional lifestyle titles; or the newsweeklies could be combined with four or five other magazines. But requiring a respondent to give the interviewer an enormous amount of demographic and buying information, and then forcing him to look through more than 100 magazine logos or issues (clearly distorted by the fact that the stripped-down issues carry no advertising) must blur the accuracy of each of those studies.

As an aside to this subject, I can't help but chuckle when I read articles in Ad Age and The Wall Street Journal about the problems A.C. Nielsen is having with the electronic "People Meter' TV rating system. Television, in my opinion, has for many years been selling highly inflated audience numbers based on misleading research to ad executives who have a great stake in believing those numbers. They give ad executives license to do what they really want to do anyway --spend their dollars in broadcast rather than in print.

Magazine audience research, with all its problems, is substantially more sophisticated than anything that's ever been attempted in the broadcast research community. Even People Meter research is a long way from providing the kind of data routinely available about magazine audiences. This is the first time that there's been a movement to provide somewhat more accurate broadcast data, and the turmoil is enormous. I'm pleased to see it and I hope that broadcast audience research continues to become more accurate in defining the shrinking network television audience.