U.S. Dailies Launch New Combined Print/Online Report
Important Details: Audience-FAX is the U.S. newspaper industry’s latest push to promote “reach,” capturing audience in print and online and proving its utility in the increasingly digital age. The product brings together data in a new packaged format, so that advertising buyers will be able to see:
- Print readership on a Sunday and weekday basis;
- Online audience on past 7 day/past 30 day basis;
- Combined net un-duplicated 7 day print/7 day online basis and 7 day print/30 day online basis;
- Total unique visitors.
As print circulation has declined and online readership has increased, the industry has made efforts to show its unduplicated, increased reach. The new product, produced by Scarborough Research for the industry, is a continuing work in progress, Gary Meo, SVP print and Internet services for Scarborough, told Outsell. Meo said that the ad industry is looking at increasing fine-tuning, and he pointed to more specific measures that may be added to the industry report, as that demand for specificity gets louder. The specificity, of course, is easier to gain online than in print, but among the requests so far are: more user demographics, day-parting, effects of placement, and content adjacencies on performance and time spent with each medium.
Chris Boyd, chief executive of the Audit Bureau of Circulations for UK and Ireland, says that while he applauds the U.S. efforts, U.K. advertisers have not pushed his agency to provide combined reporting. “They have other sources to get the detailed buying decision they need,” he told Outsell.
Implications: Outsell believes that the U.S. ABC step is a small one forward. The issue is that the measurement of audience — and ad effectiveness — is moving at light-speed. NetRatings has just upgraded its report, with more detail on total minutes and total sessions, in addition to the standard unique visitor and page view data. Interactive agencies are crunching data constantly to fine-tune buys, and it’s not clear that Audience-FAX — which will basically offer a six-to-12 month-old rolling database — will meet their timeliness needs.
Outsell’s own Ad Spending Survey certainly underlines the need for better metrics. 75% of respondents ranked improved metrics as key (saying it was a major or minor problem currently) to increasing ad buys. Interestingly, a significant number — only 15.4% — said that bundling of ad sales (print and online combined) is their preferred way of buying ads; 52% said they would prefer to buy a la carte. That’s a sobering finding for traditional publishers who have long prized bundling as a way to hold onto print (and broadcast) advertisers, while selling new online products. If online buys are becoming their own animal, subject to a different set of metrics in a far-compressed time frame, then attempts at bundling such as Audience-FAX may not achieve their intent.
In fact, these two worlds — print and online — may be diverging faster than most publishers understand. It’s instructive to hear the words of one interactive buyer. Scott Shamberg, VP of eMarketing, told the Local Media Publisher Summit, sponsored by Centro in May: “Everything is driven by a cost per something. We’re optimizing every half-hour. [Our advertisers] can run a circular and get very little learning. They can run the same message on USA Today.com and change the message three times in an hour.”
Instead, publishers may need to find ways to more closely satisfy the demands of fastest growth part of the ad industry, providing more and more immediate data on who’s reading what.