Attentionization

Here is my latest article – You Are Your Audience – for MinOnline, the online site for Magazine Industry News.

In case you don’t want to click through, I’ve reprinted here, with helpful links.

You Are Your Audience – May 14, 2009

You are what you eat.  We’re accustomed to hearing this from childhood.  And while simplistic, if there is anything that I believe unequivocally it’s that whatever it is you consume, it becomes you.  And you become it.  Who doesn’t, when seeing Bill Clinton, think ‘Big Mac’?  Or when seeing Barry Bonds doesn’t think ‘Steroids’?

The information that you consume is no different from food.  Effectively, reading material is software for your thought-process, and combined with what you hear and see, it forms your beliefs and creates reference points.  But what about the food, the books and the magazines?  Do they have any say in this?  Yes, they absolutely do.

Magazines are only as good as who consumes them.  The same goes for newspapers.  The casual observer may not see the symbiotic relationship between a magazine and its readership, but upon closer inspection, a magazine or paper is only as good as the audience that consumes it.  And if a magazine doesn’t know who’s consuming it, it’s lost.
Without the right audience measurement tools in place a media buyer can perceive your publication as untargeted media spend.  Today, you don’t want to be in this category.  Join this club and your ad dollars shrink.
Just today, Conde Nast closed Portfolio magazine and released its entire staff.  Portfolio, with the tagline “Business Intelligence” is perhaps the most ironic example of how important audience intelligence is to the advertising operations of a magazine.  In today’s world of Bernie Madoff and TARP, when conspicuous consumption is out and composting is in, who is the reader for a glossy general magazine that features ads about private jet services?
With 415,000 subscribers and venerable competition the likes of Forbes, Fortune and Businessweek, it’s not clear who was left to reach that hadn’t been marketed to in those other books.  So Conde pulled the plug, citing flagging ad sales for April’s Sarah Palin cover issue – only 21 pages of ads in a 100 page issue – as its reason.
Did they know who their audience was?  How many general interest publications can the readers consumer and the advertisers support? If ‘you are your audience’ and your audience has disappeared, what’s left?
It used to be easy to figure out who was reading your magazine.  It was whomever you had written it for, and those people lived in zipcodes.  For paid circulation, those zipcodes could tell you a lot.  They corresponded to Prizm Clusters and earned this much income, had this many children – or none – and owned this type of car.  You had the ABC reports and your rate base and you managed to these numbers.
If you’ve been running a controlled circulation magazine, you were even better off.  Your subscribers, in exchange for getting a free subscription, filled out a dense form with all sorts of information about their role, purchasing authority, and other business demographics.   The numbers are audited by the BPA.  With this sort of information underpinning your rate card, it was easy to explain your audience profile – the consumer – to an advertiser.  If was especially easy if you were publishing ‘CFO’ magazine and your articles focused on the latest FASB rulings and Sarbanes Oxley.  That was your audience.  They were your subscribers.  You were reliably delivering your product to their door every day, week or month, and the advertisers paid to reach your very specific and targeted audience.  And they ate it up, month after month.
But everything has changed.  ABC and BPA are still valid.  In fact, I’d argue that they’re even more necessary than ever before.  But they aren’t enough.  Advertisers want desperately to prove the value of their marketing spend.  And Publishers want to be able to charge the most possible for their select and desirable audiences.  They are in this together.
But that’s only one piece of the measurement puzzle.  What about the web readers?  As more and more these publications repurpose their content on the web – and turn print ad dollars into digital dimes – are they are hastening their demise in an effort to reach a larger and larger untargeted audience?
As Denny Hatch, in his excellent ‘Business Common Sense’ column noted several weeks ago, it’s possible to read the majority of the long form articles of Vanity Fair without subscribing or paying a dime.  He thought that cheated the paying subscribers to the print edition.  I tend to agree.  Why?
If Vanity Fair goes out of business because it is giving its content away, subscribers and advertisers lose.   A much better solution would be to require registration, learn more about its readership, require login to access content, and then use this information to better target content to all readers – not just the print subscribers.  Vanity Fair would obtain an excellent database of potential print subscribers, the advertisers would get better audience intelligence and Vanity Fair might get higher CPMs for its ads.

Some would suggest that online magazine sites use web audience measurement tools to really understand their audience.  If they do, they should do so in conjunction with the collection of real data from their visitors, and the requirement that they log in to access content.  The benefits of truly knowing your audience will only help you and your magazine to be more successful and better serve all of your customers, whether they are readers or advertisers.