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A new ABC plan to audit publishers' research
By Jeff Bercovici
Magazine publishers know that making claims about one's readers based on direct-mail subscriber studies is like boasting about your good looks in a personal ad: You may be telling the truth, but don’t expect anyone to take your word for it.
That could change, though.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations is introducing a new program that could cause advertisers to regard subscriber study data from participating magazines with less skepticism.
Under that program, called Subscriber Profile, ABC works with research providers to audit each step of a subscriber study, from ensuring that the sample selected is representative to seeing to it that questions are worded in a standardized way to avoid biasing the responses.
So far, eight of the 10 ad agencies that place the most dollars in magazines have endorsed the new ABC program. They have agreed to strongly recommend or even require publishers who conduct direct-mail studies to get them verified by ABC.
Starcom, Mediavest Worldwide, OMD USA, Mindshare, Mediaedge:cia, Initiative Media, FCB, and Mediacom have all endorsed the Subscriber Profile’s standards.
The support of these agencies will be crucial in overcoming the reservations of publishers who might prefer to go on touting the subscriber data they’ve been using without holding it up to scrutiny.
ABC executives expect the verification service to find many of its initial clients among the 600 or so ABC member magazines whose audiences are not measured by MRI’s syndicated readership study.
For those titles, Subscriber Profile offers a means of establishing the credibility of the MRI prototypes agencies use to evaluate them for media plans, says John Payne, senior vice president of ABC.
It also allows them to compare the audience attributes of various magazines with greater confidence.
Magazines that are measured by MRI, meanwhile, can use Subscriber Profile to dig beyond commonly asked questions and elicit information that may be of interest to particular types of advertisers.
“Our hope longer term is that this becomes the standard if you’ve got a subscriber study,” says Payne.
The first magazines to put their subscriber studies through the audit process were Fast Company, Guideposts and Yoga Journal.
Having just begun carrying advertising less than two years ago, Guideposts found itself for the first time in need of detailed information about its readers, says vice president and publisher Janine Scolpino.
That made Guideposts a natural candidate to participate in alpha and beta testing of the Subscriber Profile program.
“I was right on board with what they were trying to achieve,” says Scolpino. “It just made sense to me that if media buyers were going to make some of their decisions based on the subscription information that they would want to have 100 percent confidence in the accuracy of that data.”
What surprised her was when other publishers remarked on how brave it was to put Guideposts’ subscriber study, conducted by MRI Custom, through an audit.
That led her to same conclusion most print buyers have already reached: Publishers often have little faith in the validity of the subscriber information they present to advertisers.
“My guess is the fact that other publishers haven’t been lining up to do this is telling.”
In a recent poll of Media Life readers, more than 57 percent of respondents said they value publishers' own subscriber studies "not highly at all" in comparison to syndicated research.
That's compared to 7.1 percent who said they value such studies "very highly" and 35.8 percent who said they give equal weight to both.
The survey was co-sponsored by BPA International, which began offering its members a research verification service back in June.
December 10, 2002© 2002 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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