Is print media shifting standards?

Frank Hall, FOB Consulting Ltd, thinks publishers could be in for a challenge if Wilde’s definition of a cynic – knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing – begins to define the print buying process …

Much has already been written and said about the Evening Standard‘s recent switch to free distribution, and I have no intention of revisiting terrain so well travelled by others. The debate about the relative strength of paid-for circulation compared to free is an important and relevant one, but I believe it’s also part of a far wider debate that we need to have about the print advertising market in general.

Traditionally the accepted currency for evaluating, planning, and buying print media has always been audited readership rather than either circulation or distribution. Yet the word ‘readership’ is only conspicuous by its absence from the majority of coverage and comment surrounding the Standard‘s ability to attract enough advertising revenue to compensate for lost cover price. In itself this may seem a little pernickety and pedantic, but I believe it is indicative of a shift in both attitudes and practise within the print planning and buying fraternity.

For weeks before a major set of ABC figures are released agency buyers try to prise early indications of the results from their sales contacts, whilst the trade press tap into every conceivable vein of information to trail the results in advance. When they are eventually released the figures are poured over by buyers and trade press alike and page after page of analyses and commentary flood into our consciousness and conversation. Even the smallest change in a title’s circulation has become worthy of comment, whilst the overall tone and sheer volume of this coverage creates something akin to a feeding frenzy.

And yet the release of comparable readership data for the same titles seems to pass by with relatively little fanfare. This is not to say that the ABC’s are irrelevant; of course they allow relative performance of competitive titles in a directly comparable way and provide agency, publisher, and client a convenient top line benchmark. But the relative importance placed upon them compared to the attention given to readership data seems far greater.

With consumer engagement so high on the communications agenda, agencies are falling over each other to present ever more sophisticated consumer insight tools and techniques to their clients, who themselves recognise that even audited circulation is a relatively blunt instrument. But when it comes to actually buying print space there does seem to me to be an increasing shift towards a circulation based currency. Why should this be?

Buyers have always tried to use the metrics that best suit their arguments with an individual media owner, and all that is legal is fair when it comes to media buying, as I would be the first to admit. But the nature and the degree of pressure on the agency buying function has undoubtedly changed over recent years. The increasing incidence of auditing has been driven by the growing influence of procurement departments within clients and the consequent importance of performance related fees to agency incomes. Add to this the diminishing staff levels at most agencies, particularly those with buying roles in traditional media, and you have a very different set of dynamics than operated even five years ago. A buyer on a major print client has an increasingly clear target to hit – beat the pool rate if your agency is to maximise its income. Even when not buying on an audited account, the pressure to deliver the best price is still heightened by the increasing incidence and regularity of statutory reviews for an increasing number accounts in any given agency. All of this is true of every medium and is not particular to print.

However, print audit scoring is always based on price and rarely on audience delivery, so the key difference between circulation and readership is that cost-per-thousand circulation can become a constant across all clients whilst cpt readership varies by audience and therefore by client and even campaign. So it’s increasingly attractive shorthand for a hard pressed buyer to establish one constant price for a media owner rather than to have a fresh negotiation for each campaign or client. And with most sales forces also subject to restricted headcounts the pressure on them to find shortcuts is equally great.

As Murdoch and others have pointed out, maintaining editorial quality costs money and whether they pay for a title or receive it for free the ultimate arbiters of editorial quality are a title’s readers. And the size and profile of print readerships should be what determines a publication’s advertising value. By reducing the purchasing of print to a commodity trade driven by an audit process rather than the delivery of a communications strategy the value of those readers is increasingly ignored. Knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing is Wilde’s oft quoted definition of a cynic. If it comes to define the print buying process then survival will become even more challenging for publishers big and small.