NewsLine Column: Making Magazine Ads Count
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In an effort to determine the average return on investment from magazine advertising, the PPA has commissioned a study into the medium’s effectiveness. Phil Cutts, director of marketing and communications at PPA Marketing, explains the need for such research…
Overall magazines are the fourth largest advertising medium after TV, regional press and national press, taking approximately 17% of advertising expenditure in 2003. We all know that magazines sell. If they didn’t brands simply wouldn’t use them and consumer magazines wouldn’t be bursting with ads or take so many inserts.
We also know they sell as we are not short of research or case studies which demonstrate magazine advertising generates sales. What we don’t have, however, is a comprehensive study that reveals the how or the why of magazine advertising.
Consequently PPA Marketing has commissioned new research from Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) to identify the impact of magazine advertising on FMCG brand sales in the short term. Thanks to the newly available NRS Readership Accumulation data, it has been possible, for the first time in a study of this kind, to calculate when magazine readers initially see a title and its advertising. It therefore not only updates, but improves on the accuracy of earlier work in this arena.
The main objective of the research is to provide planners and advertisers with a unique insight into what it is that drives magazine advertising performance. It will provide a series of lessons which can be drawn upon to improve the sales effectiveness of media campaigns.
To measure sales uplift TNS used its Superpanel, a representative sample of 15,000 homes nationwide, which records daily take-home purchases combined with a MediaSPAN six-monthly questionnaire to measure magazine exposure and Nielsen MMS data to establish the media schedules of the brands.
The media campaigns chosen for the research were those that had seen an increase in sales according to the Superpanel data. It was also essential that the selected brands had a large enough Superpanel sample, that the magazine advertising accounted for over 10% of the total advertising budget, and that they had a distinct advertising campaign period with no activity before and after.
For each brand selected (20 in total) Superpanel members were ranked according to their total expenditure to the magazine advertising schedule during the campaign period. The top 40% in terms of exposure were defined as the exposed group, whilst the bottom 40% were the non-exposed group. On average the research found that the top 40% received about 90% of all the magazine exposures generated by a campaign, in comparison to the non-exposed group, which received around 2%.
Purchasing levels for each brand by each group were also collected during the campaign period and compared with the corresponding period before the campaign started. The assumption is that all other factors, such as consumption of other media or promotions which might affect sales, would be the same for each group.
The research took place over a 76 week period and, after extensive analysis, we now have the preliminary results. We aim to launch the research early in 2005, and from the initial feedback are confident that it will achieve its major objective to identify the impact of magazine advertising, which we will demonstrate through a number of named case studies from a variety of sectors including food, drink, toiletries, pet food and cleaning products.
After the launch of the research we expect the next steps to include examining campaigns for additional hypotheses – such as investigating synergies between magazines’ creative executions and other media. It would also be beneficial to examine whether positioning, environment, weight of advertising or number of executions influences success, which would shed further light on how magazines sell.
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