Digital Direction

Jerry Wright Chief Executive of ABC inthe UK, and President of the lnternationalFederation of ABCs, says markets are atdifferent stages of development, but allare evolving quickly to better serve theadvertiser.

We exist to serve the advertising industry - publishers and buyers - andto develop standards that help tradeadvertising effectively. So whatever theplatform, we should be able to measureit, and wherever buyers want to buyadvertising we should be able to give thema number which they can use to validatetheir purchases.

For digital editions in the UK, ABC releasesdata in six month chunks. The January-June2012 consumer data included 251 titles,61 of which also reported fgures for theirdigital editions. ABC now also has a Multi-Platform certificate which measures print,exhibitions, social media, email campaigns,websites, apps and digital editions. Wrightnotes that when the press report on ABCfigures now, they give equal importance tothe digital and print figures.

Newsstand challenges

This sounds more straightforward than it is.And Wright admits that measurement canbe a challenge. Websites weve been doingfor 15 years. We can report website trafficand subscribers, depending on whether youare an open access website, subscription,or restricted access. Digtal editions havebeen around for some time but have onlyreally taken off in the last 18 months sincethe advent of tablets and the launch ofdigital publishing platforms, like the AppleNewsstand. Which have dramaticallyincreased the uptake of publications. Thechallenge here is how do we measurethese things? Apple, for example, doesntshare very much data with publishers. TheNewsstand will tell publishers how manycopies theyve sold, but they wont tell themwho theyve sold them to. They regard thatas part of their competitive advantage.

ABC is also limited by its ownmethodology. We are different fromresearch-based NRS with the NRS PADD across-platform measurement survey, moreof which below because they take a sampleof the population and measure what thatsample does. We conduct a census. Whatsmore difficult for us is putting togetherde-duplicated figures across platforms. Thatis what the NRS PADD data is good for. Ourreports look at each individual platform- when you add them all up they couldcome to 300,000 people. But, in fact, somepeople may have bought the print anddigital editions and gone to an event too.

So we dont do de-duplication, like the NRSPADD. What we can offer the publisher andbuyer is a view of the different platformsin granular detail, which would be difficultat a research level. Because sample sizesrequired for each platform would be so vast- it becomes too expensive.

Whats interesting is going beyond thesimple sales and circulation figures. ln thedigital world you can look at not only didan edition sell, but was it downloaded, wasit opened? You can look at activity-basedmetrics too. This is something we are nowactively working on. Buyers are sayingthey want to go beyond sales and see howconsumers are using the products. Digitalproducts leave a trail.

Digital trail

Its that trail that all the big players are onthe scent of. Glenn Hansen, president andCEO of BPA in the US, whos overseeing there-launched BPA Audit agrees that demandfor digital metrics is becoming standard, butsome are being blinded by the science.

When we first started this lin 2011 wethought we would be reporting on what wecall the integrated format, where you wouldbe able to see all of the channels that anindividual consumed and be able to talk tothe marketer about the extent of overlapacross channels. And while most publisherslike to think they have that information,in fact, they dont. So, as a result of that,we had to move away from integratedmoulding into accepting all channels. Theconversations we are having with the salesteams out there now is that if they have anintegrated report, they are very buoyantabout what it provides to the media buyerin terms of information. And that they arein a competitive set that not many peopleare in. Most of the audits weve done arefor market leaders; they are the first ones inthe category - so we have yet to see salespeople going head-to-head against eachother with a multi-channel type of report.

Source: FIPP Magazine World

LINK:	http://www.abc.org.uk/-News-And-Views-/News/Digital-Direction/...
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