Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI), known in the industry for measuring the audience of consumer magazines, said today that it will begin to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns that appear in those magazines. The system, called AdMeasure, is “designed to elevate magazine audience measurement granularity to the level of TV and the Internet.”

MRI hopes it will give advertisers the accountability they’ve long been looking for.

AdMeasure will give audience levels for all national ads one-third of a page or larger appearing in the approximately 646 consumer magazine issues measured by MRI. The ratings for each magazine will be accessible to publishers and advertisers via an online database and will be searchable by a specific ad or magazine.
 
“Historically, a magazine’s total readership was accepted as a proxy for ad exposure,” MRI CEO Kathi Love said. “But accountability-focused advertisers are demanding more direct measurement of the reach of their ad campaigns.” MRI’s AdMeasure, she said, “moves the needle from measuring the ‘opportunity to see’ a print ad to measuring how many readers actually saw the ad, as well as how many took an action as a result of seeing it.”
 
Ad pages and revenue in consumer magazines dropped by 26 and 20 percent respectively in the first quarter of 2009, according to MPA’s Publishers Information Bureau, displaying a shift in advertiser confidence in print.

How it Works

AdMeasure’s print ad ratings will be derived from three sources: MRI’s Survey of the American Consumer, which measures the average issue audience of consumer magazines; the Issue Specific Readership Study, which measures readership for individual issues of magazines; and research from MRI Starch, which has research on the effectiveness of print ads that appear in magazines on consumers via a small Internet sample.

Anne Marie Kelly, SVP, marketing & strategic planning at MRI, used a fictional magazine to illustrate how AdMeasure rates an ad. “For our imaginary title ‘American Magazine,’ the February 9th issue had a total audience of 23,422,000 readers—we know this from our Issue Specific Readership Study,” she said. “The MRI Starch ad noting score for a Subway ad in this issue is 68 percent.  23,422,000 million times 68 percent equals 15,927,000. So, 15.9 million consumers who read that issue of ‘American Magazine’ saw the Subway ad.  But this is just one metric AdMeasure offers.”
 
Other metrics available through the database include the number of readers who read the ad thoroughly and the number of readers who saw, read, and took action to a given ad.