Patrick Burton of Allied Domecq has called for the Audit Bureau of Circulations to reform; “ABC must fulfil the needs of advertisers and agencies or someone else will do it, eg the BPA). He also issued a reminder that “circulation is not the be all and end all”. He was speaking at the ABC’s Annual Conference held yesterday. Burton called for radical action. ABC at the moment is weak he said, there is not enought information to be useful. He called the 6-monthly data largely irrelevant, and bemoaned that not all newspapers and magazines are audited. He called for a Press Advertising Bureau which could demand more audits; there is little point imposing new standards until advertisers and agencies insist on an audit.
The other main theme of the conference was a definite demand for the ABC to audit new media, such as Web sites. Stuart Anderton, Publisher of Futurenet called for Internet and database auditing. Futurenet believes it is the busiest magazine site in Europe, but can only claim this for now because there is no audit. Futurenet is just starting to get advertisers onto their sites, but they do not yet cover any costs; advertisers want to know how many viewers look at each site. Futurenet believes it has around 60,000 readers per week.
Pippa Littler from the Electronic Telegraph echoed his call for auditing. The Electronic Telegraph said they too are just now starting to make money from the advertising revenue of the ET. Auditing becomes all the more important to a medium like the Internet where the only source of revenue is advertising.
All on-site movements are trackable by the ET; this data includes a registration scheme, usage details are all kept in a log file and finally there is a qualitative response method, ie e-mail. Although the ET can and is collecting this data, the need for auditing is to enable these claims to be justified, and to enable comparison with other sites, for advertisers.
Several things must be audited, believes Pippa; users must be authenticated, to check they are real people, the number of visits must be verified, then the number of unique users, and finally page accesses. However, auditing of the Internet will be difficult; there is no clear division between circulations and readership. Registrations are often not accurate with some users sharing passwords, and others registering more than once. There is no quantifiable “total market”, and finally the users of the Internet, the “surfers” have far more control.
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