The past few years have been rough for magazines, and they’re taking little comfort in signs the economy may finally be coming out of a recession.
When it comes to ad spending, magazines are in for more hurt even when the economy recovers in large part because advances in measuring competing media, such as TV and the internet, have made those media that much more attractive to advertisers.
Magazine ad spending plummeted nearly 21 percent in the first quarter, according to TNS Media Intelligence, and prospects don't look to improve anytime soon.
In an effort at catch-up, this week MRI began offering a measure of print ads’ effectiveness with a rating similar to Nielsen’s television commercial ratings. The magazine audience measuring service calls its new rating system AdMeasure.
Just how effective it is is subject to debate, but one thing is for sure, AdMeasure and similar systems aren’t likely to go away anytime soon. The pressure to create comparable ratings is simply too great.
“Advertisers are really pushing for more advertising-specific measurements,” observes Anne Marie Kelly, senior vice president of marketing and strategic planning at MRI.
“We’re trying to move magazines into that so we can compete with other media.”
AdMeasure incorporates three distinct MRI data sources--audience measure, measure of specific issues and its measure of ad effectiveness--and uses mathematic formulas to merge them into one measure that purports to project audience data for a specific ad on a specific page of a specific issue of a magazine.
Another service, Affinity’s Vista, has been measuring ad effectiveness for a few years. But until early next year it won’t be able to project national audiences for specific ads as MRI is doing.
Media buying shop Starcom and publisher Time Inc. have signed up MRI’s ad effectiveness ratings. And many agencies, including Starcom, and magazines are using Vista’s measure.
But the question is whether in the longer term these new measurements will help magazines all that much.
Two questions arise, and the first is whether it makes much sense to attempt to measure magazines as one might television.
Magazines are a very different medium and a very different experience. They have their own unique strengths. They are physical, tactile objects. They are read, rolled up and stuffed in briefcases, pulled out, read again, and perhaps tossed on a coffee table to be picked up later.
Readers spend time with their magazines, and they identify with them, and by extension their advertisers, in a way they could never do with a TV set. Those strengths can't be measured on the same footing as a TV ad.
The second, more immediate question is just how credible these measurement systems are.
Advertisers want more and more proof that their ads are working and that they are reaching their target audience--return on investment--and agencies are anxious to please their clients, but just how good are those numbers?
There are doubters.
“I’m upset so much credence is given by ad agencies to these measurements by Vista and MRI,” says magazine consultant Martin Walker, chairman of Walker Communications. “They’re making projections off a very limited online database, in general, both of them.”
The problem, of course, is the internet, which has completely transformed the measurement of media almost since its inception, offering data on how many people are visiting sites and how they are interacting with those ads.
That pushed other media to offer advertisers comparable data, which eventually led to the evolution of commercial ratings for TV, as well as improved measurement systems for local TV and radio.
The magazine industry has little choice but follow suit.
“We’re trying to raise the bar with magazine measurement because the internet really changed the game with very ad-specific measures,” says MRI's Kelly.
