New magazine ad campaign tracker to give accountability advertisers want

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The steady march towards greater and greater accountability for magazine advertising took another pace with the announcement by Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI) that it will begin to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns that appear in U.S. magazines. No word on whether there is a similar system in the works for Canada.

According to a report in Folio: the system, called AdMeasure, is “designed to elevate magazine audience measurement granularity to the level of TV and the Internet” and 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.”

The ratings will come 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.