Carat Press Director: “Monthly ABC release is a huge tick”

The release of monthly ABC results for some publishers was welcomed by Dominic Williams, head of press at Carat, as part of the ‘Future of Consumer Magazines’ panel held by MediaTel Group in London this morning.

Williams saw this as a “huge tick”, believing that it showed the ABC “moving in the right direction”, with requests from the market bringing about the “right result”.

The only caveat that Williams had was that the data is “difficult to find”, due to the fact that as the last release of data was mainly available via publisher websites, only a selection of publishers made data available via the ABC site itself.

However, Williams is pleased with this development as it is something that advertisers have been keen to see and follows in line with National Newspaper titles and their monthly circulation releases.

According to Williams, the results are needed “so we can be transparent to clients” rather than requiring the data to help trading.

Greg Miall, managing director of Sport Magazine, took the opportunity to stress the rigour that the ABC takes regarding auditing their title, stating they are not “in the business of hiding”.

When discussing the area of currency research, the panel were also satisfied in the direction that the NRS are taking under the stewardship of Mike Ironside, who joined the organisation in January and their plans to broaden the survey to include websites in future.