Reader Engagement Tool Intriguing Advertisers
When “Adweek” used a tool from New York’s Monroe Mendelsohn Research (MMR) for helping to measure reader engagement across 211 consumer magazines in its annual March “Hot List” issue, Bob Shullman felt a measure of redemption.
Shullman, MMR senior vice president, began championing his PReSS – Publication Readership Satisfaction Survey – tool to intrigued but wary advertisers a year ago. “Clearly it helped,” Shullman said last week of the “Adweek” endorsement. “Anytime a metric gets you on the Hot List people want to know what it is about. From that happening, quite a few people called up and said, We’d like to know more about what the survey is.”
MMR measures reader engagement by surveying more than 18,000 people on a wide range of metrics, from how they receive the copies of the magazines they read to how often and how much time they spend with them.
“Advertisers want to know what’s underneath the audience numbers, what drives people to become readers,” Shullman said. “What is it about a product that makes a reader read a magazine or a national newspaper?”
Marketers have long wanted to know not only who and how many people are reading, but also how engaged they were in the content. In 2002, “Reader’s Digest” took a shot at finding a solution by using Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI) data to drive an “Involvement Index” that purported to measure just that. Agencies found it better than nothing but felt it was a rather crude tool.
The Magazine Publishers of America had compiled its own readership study in 2003, but ad buyers found it lacking as well. “What we’re all dying for is a comparative piece of information,” Audrey Siegel, senior vice president of media planner TargetCast TCM, told “Folio:” magazine in March 2004 in response to the MPA study.
MMR’s PReSS tool “kind of picks up where the MPA left off,” said Tony Jarvis, a senior vice president at Infinity Broadcasting. “The MPA study was great for general results, but when you plan a buy, you do it by magazine. PReSS can identify the brand attributes of specific magazines, and that will certainly be an aid to buying and planning.”
Shullman said agencies are starting to ask publishers to describe themselves using “PReSS metrics,” although he conceded, “Getting change to occur takes a lot of time and a lot of effort.” Of the 14 most prominent ad agencies, Shullman said that MMR had signed up nine. Among the absentees are two owned by Omnicomm, a pair of WPP units, and Initiative Media. “They wanted to see what happens,” Shullman said.
On Madison Avenue, one prominent media consultant termed MMR’s survey a valuable upgrade on the MRI one, but said it had not yet reached the Holy Grail of comparing readers’ engagement with magazines’ content and advertising.
“It makes sense up to a point,” said Erwin Ephron, founder of Ephron, Papazian & Ephron, who gave credit to Britta Ware, the U.S. director of research at “Reader’s Digest,” for first pushing the idea of comparing the reader’s engagement with the magazine with its advertising. “This is not something totally new and miraculous to arrive from Mars.”
Ephron pointed out that many magazines by definition engage their readers because they are target-marketed to certain niches, such as food. “Magazines in fact engage consumers in the advertising that is carried simply because magazines target far better than other media,” he said.
For the 2005 survey, Shullman said MMR will add some categories based on reader requests: “Some people asked us to expand readers’ preferences, what do people read about. We want to have other reading topics added to the list.”
Other new questions could center on a listings of major life events expected in the next year. “That gets into who are the people most likely to be spending large amounts of money on things like cars,” Shullman said.
