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THE PUZZLING PASSIVITY OF PRINT
The Pitch is “Buy Hearst not Condé Nast.”
It isn’t “Buy Print not Television.”
By Erwin Ephron
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Their pitch is “Buy Condé Nast not Hearst,” It isn’t ”Buy Print not television.” This is odd. Print has never been in a better position to compete for Television dollars. Look at the facts. The job of a medium is to deliver audience to message. That cost-value balance has shifted from TV to Print, dramatically. This upfront, another 10% TV price increase, overall. Every TV planner knows the litany. CPM’s up. Ratings down. Clutter endemic. Not so with Print. Media-mix is front and center. Media-mix is an open door for Magazines. It is a pleasant way of saying “substitute for television.” But magazines do not step forward. And agencies do not push them. Despite its wisdom and its urgency, media-mix is not happening. TV dollars are not moving to Magazines. The question is “Why?” I think the reasons are rooted in the way Print is sold and planned. Editor versus Publisher Top of the list is Print’s Editor versus Publisher problem. There is confusion between the magazine as a product that consumers buy, read and relate to, and the magazine as a medium that advertisers hire to carry messages to consumer markets. These are very different functions and confusing them hurts print advertising. The undisputed job of the magazine as a magazine is to attract and involve the reader. Without that, there is no magazine and no audience to sell. The job of the magazine as an advertising medium is to deliver brand messages to consumer markets. But many magazines have a different view. They don’t want to reach markets for advertisers; they want to define markets for advertisers. The Publisher’s pitch is “buy my magazine to reach its audience,” suggesting it is unique. This leads magazines to pit their readers against the readers of other magazines, as if there is no duplication, no reach extension and no good reason to buy more than one. This sell inevitably makes magazines less than a mass medium. And less than a mass medium cannot compete with Television. The difference is not semantics. “Buy my magazine to reach its audience” is not “Buy these TV programs to reach your market.” No advertiser is ever asked to buy 13 episodes to reach the viewers of Friends. A small piece of the pie Then there’s Print’s piece of the pie problem. Print’s small share of national adspend leads it to focus on competitive advantage within the medium rather than across the media. My reader spends more time. My reader pays more money. Buy me not him. When TV sells against itself, for example cable against broadcast, it asks for more of the dollars, not all of them, recognizing that dispersion of messages for reach is the key to mass selling, and that competitors are needed for dispersion. Print’s obsession with freezing out the competition also leads to the currently popular competitive measures of reader attentiveness, involvement and receptivity. Measures largely avoided by TV. But there is something far more sinister here. Lurking beneath these involvement measures is the idea that it’s the magazine’s relationship with the reader that makes the advertising work. How self absorbed and self-destructive. It suggests that the ad by itself isn’t quite effective. Does TV suggest that? Magazines Have Been Type-cast To over simplify, there are at least two business models for magazines. The selective media model (a term coined by Bill Simmons), where highly targeted advertisers buy highly targeted magazines. Home, Fashion, Autos. Here the Quality of circulation confirms the value of the reader. Then there is the recency-reach model. The goal of TV advertising is to influence brand selection. Magazines don’t fit the Recency-reach model. Advertisers don’t associate magazines with either immediacy or reach, two qualities that help TV advertising build brand sales. Instead, they think of magazines as highly targeted media that work slowly to build awareness with dedicated readers. They think of magazines as special purpose display: Cosmetics, Fashion, Food, Home or as an upscale complement to TV. The words “sell product” are seldom mentioned. Advertisers don’t make these things up. It’s what publishers have been telling them for years. Yet, it’s probably wrong. Magazines may just be delivering what we’ve asked them for. If we want Print to work like TV, it makes sense to start planning Print the way we plan TV. Today, we don’t come close. The emergence of strong Print groups at the big AOR’s hasn’t solved the planning problem. They tend to be too print-centric, focusing on discounts, positions and value-added. Today’s Print planning needs to start with a good understanding of how Television planning works and follow that lead. Insertion Planning TV GRP planning controls message delivery. It specifies weight and reach levels across the weeks of the campaign. That allows messages to contact different consumers as they come into the market for the product over time. (Remember, advertising works best close to the purchase and all products have a new group of purchasers each week.) Magazine insertion planning ignores the dynamics of the market. It does not consider, or even report, the flow of message-delivery across weeks. Magazines Are Planned For Discounts We plan TV mostly for reach. We plan Magazines mostly for discounts. To get higher discounts, we run more insertions in fewer titles. But reach is key to advertising response and schedules build reach by using many titles; just as TV planning uses many programs. We tend to art direct Magazines rather than plan them. We flow-chart insertions by publication interval. Monthlies block out four weeks, Weeklies cover one. As if all the readers see the ads that week or that month. The boxes are arranged to fill space on the flowchart. There is no distinction between small and large titles. Digest and Gourmet have the same size box. The graphic message of the flow-chart is many weeks of consistent advertising. That isn’t true. The message delivery varies greatly from week-to-week in spite of what the boxes show. Print Weight Is Exaggerated Recency planning highlights the weakness of print plans. Recency says advertising works mostly with consumers who are ready-to-buy. This requires running enough weight each week to build significant levels of reach each week. There is a minimum weight threshold in TV, about 60 to 80 target points to generate a 35 to 40 reach. Careful testing by many CPG brands shows it works. We know from experience it takes at least 50 points-a-week in TV to see sales effects in-market. A heavy magazine schedule delivers an average of 20 points a week. No wonder sales response is disappointing. Twenty-points won't show sales for TV either. How do we begin to plan Magazines better? The big step is to lose insertion planning and focus on how print delivers messages. The answer is “over time.” We should use the actual week-by-week audience delivery for planning, just as we do with Television. The measured readers of an issue, from which we calculate CPM’s and ratings, are accumulated over the weeks following publication. We have all the data we need from MRI to place magazine exposures in time. It’s our thinking that has to change. Planners work with counts of persons viewing television programs or reading magazine issues (vehicle exposure). The more relevant number is persons seeing the average ad carried (advertising exposure). Differences in the probability of a reader versus a viewer seeing the average ad make CPM comparisons exaggerate Print’s cost efficiency. Television’s average-minute audience is a reasonable estimate for its advertising audience, because the average minute and the average commercial minute are similar in size. Print’s Average issue audience is larger than its ad audience, because all readers don’t open all the pages. [1] The TV equivalent would be to assume that all viewers to any part of a TV program are exposed to all of the commercials carried by the program. Something we would never accept. The problem gets worse when we use successive issues to build reach. A magazine builds reach by adding less frequent readers. And the data show it’s the less frequent reader that sees fewer ads.[2] As a result, the reach of an advertiser’s campaign will always be smaller than the reach of the magazine schedule carrying it. Again, there are ways of using MRI data to adjust for this. [3] Inflated Numbers Hurt Print But as we focus on media-mix, Print’s inflated audiences and too low CPM’s begin to bite back. It’s not that strange. When a brand is looking for advertising to build sales and magazine readers (as measured) are less likely to see the ad than TV viewers (as measured), then the low CPM’s produced by high reader estimates lead advertisers to run inadequate magazine schedules, and get little measurable response. And that’s what advertisers seem to be finding. The following note is from a media manager at one of the world’s largest advertisers. “Given the cost-efficiency of Print vs. TV, I had hoped Print would deliver sales more cost efficiently, but that’s not the case for most brands. Seems like fewer readers are reading the ads than the numbers suggest.” [4] Worse than puzzling But recent trends in TV; price increases, fragmentation and clutter, have eliminated television’s considered advantage. Today there is opportunity for Print to be used more and benefit to advertisers in using it more. Yet Print remains passive. It’s worse than puzzling. To be delivered at the Association of National Advertisers first “Print Forum” to be held in New York on June 19, 2003. [1] Certainly magazine issues provide repeat-exposure opportunities for ads (APX), but the key planning metric today is reach, not gross exposures. [2] Many of these readings are out-of-home in public places. [3] Some issue readers will not see to all of the ads. Others will see some of the ads more than once. Think of each issue as having it’s own ad reach and frequency, which is different from its MRI reported readership. The concept is an old one: Ad Page Exposure (APX). It is a measure of the total number of times the average reader of the issue looks at the average page, it is a valuable idea for print planning. [4] Private communication. - June 1, 2003 -
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Fatalism mists the air.
While Advertisers audition media-mix, Magazines hide in the wings. They’ve
left the larger hunt to Television and fight for scraps they already own. The
only competitors they see are fellow publishers. 
A few examples. We plan
TV by weekly GRP’s. We plan Magazines by insertions. That is the classic
difference between the media and how they perform. Insertion planning is killing
Print.
Everything we do tends
to exaggerate the weight of magazine schedules. On the flowchart a hundred
insertions looks like a big campaign. But insertions tell you nothing about
messages delivered. If we flow-charted TV the way we do print, a modest brand
campaign could show 3,000 spots.
Next, we should plan
Magazines using better estimates of how many readers see the ads. 
Until now, inflated
magazine numbers haven’t been an issue because Print doesn’t often
compete with other media. Readership is used more for selecting magazines, where
absolute levels are less important than how well competing titles do. 
