Audits & ReadershipNiche titles flex pex

AdMedia,  Mar 18, 2004  by Steven Shaw

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

ACNielsen highlights major gains for several niche market magazines including NZ Performance Car, NZ Classic Car and lifestyle mags like NZ Adventure. One of the biggest leaps forward was for Sunday Star-Times, New Zealand's favoured national weekly newspaper.

Mike Howard, formerly of Carat (now with media benchmarketing business MediaSeNZ) applauds Nielsen's reporting structure and delivery.

"There has been a lot of consternation in recent years about the relationship structure and delivery of the print readership data," he says. Not all of this can be solely laid at the doorstep of Nielsen. "The beaut thing is all parties worked through the issues and initiatives and have come out with a very positive result.

"There are certainly some surprises, notably the lack of comment from some of the publishers - perhaps Metro being the standout. On rate card basis at least, there is no other publication in the market that had an ad revenue increase like they did in the past year [$2m to $3.7m, according to NMR/Adquest] and their readership mid-term had increased to 190,000. To see that consolidation wasn't achieved was a disappointment.

"Perhaps there's a silver lining to the reduced readership," Howard suggests. "Maybe readers now feel a more personal attachment to the new format and are not so keen on sharing it with friends - hence lower readership per copy." [Anecdotal evidence, among AdMedia staffers, suggest there's more than a grain of truth in this. -Ed]

"The real coup," he says, "must be Sunday Star-Times. "Despite the editorial setbacks of last year, when many of the old editorial team walked out with their redundancies, Terry Quinn and his team held those reins." Howard says their commitment to change was made "in a way seldom seen in the magazine market, let alone newspapers".

Glenda Wynyard, md at McCann-Erickson, says she's biased - she reads the Sunday Star-Times "cover to cover, religiously". It is Sunday, after all. "I think the way people read that paper is more reflective of a magazine than a traditional newspaper," she says. "When they first said they were going into magazine formula, into tabloid, I was so bitterly disappointed, I thought, oh god, how could you do that? Particularly when the Herald was launching canvas.

"I've got to say, though, they did the right thing. I take a personal interest in the paper because I love it."

Wynyard expressed little surprise at the overall findings, saying most of the movements agreed with findings from focus groups. "What we're getting out of these people," she says, "is that they're buying more and more niche titles. They're buying titles that they feel are reflecting their lives more."

Mike Howard notes that readership is growing in some of the newer titles, citing FHM, Real Groove, Ralph, Cosmopolitan, and Dolly as examples - while some of the more established titles - Australian House & Garden, NZ Gardener, Next - "have gone back, perhaps for the first time ever, or certainly in quite a while."

Peter Myles, media director at Colenso BBDO, expressed concern at the recent fragmentation of research. "The single biggest question everybody's going to have to get their heads around," he says, "is whether we're going to end up having two currencies in the market - Roy Morgan or ACNielsen?"

He emphasises the need for "some sensible common currency for people to work with", and says it ultimately doesn't matter who it is. "The minute you stick another currency into the marketplace it just screws it all up. How would the stock market be going if Air NZ shares were trading at $1.50 on one market and $1.75 on another?"

Myles says it's only wise to use a combination of things, including circulation, readership and pass-on rates. "We look at primary readers and all that's available to us," he says, "and then apply other factors - editorial quality, all that sort of stuff - and arrive at an answer which has a number of factors built into it."

If it was as easy as relying solely on the research, he says, an advertiser would just punch all that information into a computer and hit the button. "Anything to do with creative thinking, innovation or insight beyond just the numbers goes out the door. That's why, ultimately, advertisers pay media professionals to do something with that data and not just slavishly adhere to it."

Research on readership also won't cover the newer, fresh titles that are popping up with increasing frequency, says Glenda Wynyard.

"What about the stuff that's not even on the radar at the moment? It's a crying shame - there are some really great new titles coming through, in fact available at the moment. I think you're going to get a lot of new product development coming through towards the end of this year. Which is incredibly exciting for the publishing industry."

Interestingly, several executives - not the ones quoted here, obviously - confessed they had yet to study either set of readership figures.

c 2004 Profile Publishing Ltd, Auckland, New Zealand, and can not be used without prior permission of the publisher.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.