The Magazine Publishers Association is looking to provide a more holistic view of the reach of magazine brands through a new online tool, dubbed Magazine 360°.
The website serves as something of a central control panel where media strategists or advertisers can access total magazine brand reach – across print, online and social – for participating MPA member publications.
The data on Magazine 360° can be used to give a broad overview of the total reach of a single publisher or it can be segmented into categories, target audiences or individual publications.
MPA deputy chair and Kowhai Media director James Frankham says while magazines have been active in digital for years, publishers haven’t been good at measuring audiences or communicating the value of that to the market.
“In some respects it’s been one of the magazine industry’s great failures,” he says.
“The MPA saw this as an industry-wide problem, and looked to the US market where a 360-degree standard had been adopted to address it. We followed suit, and took the opportunity to dovetail with measurement standards common to the local market to quantify readership and impressions across all mediums.”
Until now, those interested in the reach of magazine brands would have to rely on three separate sources of information: ABC for circulation data, Nielsen for readership, and various sources for online and web traffic.
The new site, developed by Tangible Media, brings all this data together in a single place, giving the user an instant idea of the overall reach of a magazine brand across all touchpoints. And creating it has been one of the MPA’s biggest recent investments.
“We recognise that the process has to sum apples and oranges, but the size of a fruit bowl tells a very interesting story,” says Frankham. “It turns out magazines are just as good at building an audience in digital media as they are in print media. And that success is represented across brands as diverse as mass-market weeklies and premium lifestyle titles. I think the results surprised us all.”
Some stats
- In the last 12 months, 40,276 people have attended an NZ Geographic-owned event.
- Many of the magazines included have well-established Facebook audiences. Little Treasures reaches 295,751 New Zealanders, NZ Geographic reaches 275,160 and Woman’s Day reaches 240,516.
- Information magazines have the most Twitter followers. Metro has 61,600, Idealog 47,400 and NZ Listener 15,482.
- Bauer’s www.nowtolove.co.nz aggregation had 261,285 unique New Zealand users in April.
- DEMM Engineering & Manufacturing magazine’s e-newsletter reaches 6,548 people.
About Magazine 360°
Magazine 360° is a magazine metric that captures audience of magazine media content across multiple platforms and formats. The Magazine 360° purpose is to provide to advertisers, agencies and publishers, a meaningful and authentic lens with which to view magazine media audience reach.
The Magazine 360° calculates total audience touchpoints by adding the following platform metrics together to provide a broader 360° view on magazine brands performance:
- Print (Latest Nielsen Readership (AIR) or in the absence of no readership figure the latest ABC Circulation (ANC))
- Digital – Digital Editions, Websites & Email Newsletters
- Social platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube
- Brand Extensions: Events and One Shot Special Editions
- The Magazine 360° at an individual magazine brand level is unduplicated within each platform, however when the individual platform metrics are combined, it creates a total duplicated Magazine 360° audience measure.
As some of the data is self-reported by publishers, each participating publisher authorises the MPA to validate data at any time and this forms a key component of the Magazine 360° Code of Conduct.
No publisher joining fees
The only requirement for a publisher to participate in the Magazine 360° is to be a paid-up member of the MPA and agree to the code of conduct.
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