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reader involvement
New index to quantify connectedness with a title
By Jeff Bercovici
Buyers and sellers of media like to tell you that theirs is, above all, a people business.
It's curious, then, how apt they are to treat magazine readers as a commodity, like sacks of sugar or bushels of corn.
If Woman A and Woman B have the same age, household income and number of children, they are more or less interchangeable for media buying purposes.
But people aren’t like sugar or corn. A formula that relies on computations of CPMs and audience composition doesn’t tell you if Woman A unplugs the phone and devours Magazine X from cover to cover every month, or if Woman B uses Magazine Y to housebreak her Jack Russell terrier.
Ideally, agencies try to factor information like this into their buys, but doing so can be inconvenient and time-consuming, and it doesn't necessarily earn them the gratitude of clients, who are principally concerned with cost efficiency.
But if a tool existed that allowed them to distinguish the magazine whose readers are blah from those whose readers are rah-rah, a tool that was easy to use, standardized and widely accepted, that would be a different story.
Such is the thinking of two Reader’s Digest Association executives, Britta Ware, U.S. director of research, and Eric Gruseke, publisher.
Ware and Gruseke have been making the rounds of agencies, trying to sell them on something they call the Involvement Index.
Calculated using existing MRI data, the Involvement Index is a variable that expresses the "connectedness" that exists between a magazine and its readers.
Armed with a given magazine’s Involvement Index score, media planners can then weigh such a number however they choose and plug it into the planning equation alongside CPMs and the audience composition index.
"This is a simple idea that will make the lives of planners a hell of a lot easier," says Ware.
But in order for that to happen, agencies will first have to persuade IMS, which supplies most of them with the planning software and related services that they use to analyze MRI data, to integrate the Involvement Index into its data offerings.
The idea for the Involvement Index first took form as Reader's Digest, which ranks near the top of all magazines in terms of the amount of time its readers spend with each issue, sought a way to exploit this advantage with advertisers, says Gruseke.
"It's something we've always tried to sell on, but what we found over time was that wasn't necessarily what the market was buying," says Gruseke. "Audience involvement, rightly or wrongly, was always relegated to a tertiary role."
That role, if anything, has gotten smaller in recent years as planning has become largely a computer function, he says.
"It's really gone from value to price. The bottom line is, how much further can the agencies and the mega-buying companies go in pushing price?"
Also forcing the issue, he says, are the new circulation counting rules, adopted by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which allow publishers to report copies sold for next to nothing in a separate category of paid circulation.
These new rules may encourage some publishers to pad their rolls with cheap circulation--making the need to be able to identify magazines with quality circulation that much more urgent.
"The reality is that quality magazines in this industry have to take a stand and start getting credit for their quality," says Gruseke.
January 28, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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