What's your ad percent?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June, 1998 by Jeffery Parnau

The USPS wants you to use software to measure ad size and determine your ad:edit ratio--and that could mean big trouble for many publishers.

Some of you may need to get a glass of water, sit down, and take several deep breaths before reading this. Others need not fear lightheadedness or fainting, as you are already "doing the right thing," either accidentally or by sheer luck. The question separating the two groups is simple: How do you figure the percentage of advertising in your second-class publications?

If you measure ad sizes yourself, by hand (or "eyeball"), you could be in serious trouble with the USPS, and might think about getting that glass of water now.

Let me begin my explanation with an example. Suppose you have a 3" x 5" ad at the bottom right of a page. Suppose also the magazine trims at 8" x 10". If you measure the ad and divide it by the page's trimmed area, you could say that the page is approximately 18 percent advertising. If the ad bleeds off the right and bottom, you could say the page is 25 percent advertising. But the USPS says both ads occupy the same area--25 percent of the page. How do they reach that conclusion? They informally suggest that when you measure the ad, you include any white space adjacent to it.

At a recent meeting of the Association of Paid Circulation Publishers, we discussed this question with a USPS representative. We reviewed a 1996 document offered by USPS to demonstrate their intent. Their intent is this: All advertising must share white space proportionately with non-advertising.

So why should you care? For some publishers, the impact could be enormous. Consider a magazine like Computer Shopper. To qualify as Second Class, it must be no more than 75 percent advertising, which means that in a 1,000-page issue, there must be 250 pages of editorial. But if the publisher could measure the size of each ad, the company might be able to print 900 pages instead of 1,000 and still maintain the 75 percent ratio. Now imagine the cost of printing and mailing 100 million pages of that magazine, every month, and you will see that it is indeed an important question.

The real shocker, though, is that I am personally aware of several major (really major) publishers who measure all of their ads and compare them to the trimmed size of the magazine. This practice has been verbally endorsed by USPS reps for years. Their position, roughly paraphrased, has been, "If you charge a bleed rate and can substantiate that marginal space is actually paid for, then you can measure ads that do not bleed in determining ad percents."

Now along comes computerized issue planning.

In the past, few publishers actually took the time to measure every little ad, but instead would assume that four quarter-page ads equaled one full page of advertising. But with high-speed software, and the absolute requirement of the software to know the true size and shape of each ad, it got easier. You could push a button and have the true dimensions of all ads. And of course, with that you could compute the ad:edit ratio. And of course, the program would do this all instantly.

But what happens if you are currently using the measurement method, and then you install automated software? Boom. If, for example, a magazine like Computer Shopper formerly used the measurement method, but has now installed software that has been at least informally endorsed by the USPS, it could suddenly find that, say, three 32-page editorial signatures must be added to their million copies. Making this switch could instantly ruin magazines that have lived on the 75 percent edge for years.

Why is this such a sudden and potentially shocking problem? Several reasons.

First, for the first time in publishing history, many major publishers have implemented systems that can account for the ad percentage accurately and automatically. Second, massive regional and demographic editions are forcing publishers to automate this task. Third, the USPS wants to eliminate the paperwork (the 3541 form) publishers now complete to report these data. And the USPS wants to eliminate hand-marked copies and rely on the data reported by the publisher's planning software.

The importance of the final ad percent doesn't apply only to magazines that approach the 75 percent limit. This measurement is used to determine how many pounds of your shipped magazine are advertising. Those pounds are charged for by distance. Using the "old" measurement system would drastically underestimate the total pounds of advertising, and result in a nice savings for the publisher.

With all that in mind, consider the "electronic" USPS position: Their tolerance for error, once you automate this process, will be zero. No errors. No guessing. Perfect ad percents every time.

Does any of this make sense? Personally I think not. White space is at the discretion of the art director. If you want a two-inch margin on the outside of each page, who is the USPS to declare that some of it is advertising? If you charge one advertiser a certain fee for a 7" x 10" page, and another advertiser a different fee for an 8" x 11" bleed, how can the USPS possibly claim that you sold the marginal space to the smaller advertiser and demand postage for it?