MAGtrack Carries Out FT Survey

MAGtrack, the media research company, has announced details of the survey it carried out on the Saturday 12 October issue of the Financial Times .

The How To Spend It supplement, launched eighteen months ago, performed better than expected, with its ads generally having more consistent readership scores than the rest of the paper. Though the early news and reviews fared well, pages as far back as 9 and 10 of the Weekend Money scored particularly well. The research company suggests that this may be due to the higher standard of ad creativity in this section. Overall the FT proved well read throughout, with peaks including p16 in section 3 (on property).

The survey also reveals that colour ads have a 25-30% higher readership as against a cost premium of only 18% more. Whole page adverts scored an average of 49% compared to 63% for DPSs and 29% for quarter pages. The best read were whole page and colour ads for Burberry and Mercedes-Benz with 68% and 63% respectively. The ads which performed least well were those offering personal finance with their traditionally low levels of creativity.

Other findings include:

• 97% of respondents read the front page while an average of 64% read some of each page.
• The least read pages (20%) were those containing the share listings and special interest price information.
• Right-hand pages had a higher score than lefts by between 18-31.

The survey also covered the Internet, predicting that ad spend on the Net is about to soar. At present the Internet accounts for 3.4% of all advertising and the report says this will grow to 22.2% in the next six years as more ads migrate to the Net. By 2002 the total spend on Internet advertising is expected to total £3.43 billion.

MAGtrack: 0171 437 4337

FT: 0171 873 3000