MRI Trials Specific Issue Readership Data

In the US, Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI) has announced an experimental research program to assess the gathering of a new kind of readership data. A weekly web-based consumer survey will attempt to gauge how quickly specific issues of magazines accumulate their audiences.

Beginning in May, MRI will survey 2,500 different adults each week via the Internet. The goal is to find out how quickly consumers read individual editions of magazines, to help in calculations of advertising ROI and reach a better understanding of issue-to-issue audience variability.

President and CEO Kathi Love says the new study is intended to leverage learning from the firm's core product, the Survey of the American Consumer, to estimate readership of specific magazine issues so marketers can get a fix on ad exposure for their individual print campaigns. The new trial builds on another pioneering project, a diary-based audience accumulation study conducted in 2000, and three further large-scale, experimental Internet studies we have fielded since 2003. Love says of the 2000 study: 'Information from those diaries was presented to our clients in the form of audience accumulation, or velocity, curves for individual magazines and groups of magazines. Advertisers and their agencies have used the curves to establish the timing of the delivery of print advertising in general, and to more tightly integrate magazine advertising into media strategies. This is the next step in the evolution: establishing accumulation curves for specific issues of magazines.'

Respondents will be shown magazine covers along with those covers' issue dates and asked whether they had looked into or read those particular issues. Other questions will cover how consumers obtained the magazines and where they read them, along with demographics.

MRI's Survey of the American Consumer includes 26,000 in-home interviews with adults 18+ twice yearly, in the spring and fall. The firm is part of the GfK Group and is online at www.mediamark.com

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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