Questions have often arisen regarding the rate at which an individual magazine issue accumulates its total audience over time. This interest has been sparked less by methodological debate about the best way to capture this information than by the practical importance of developing accumulation or velocity curves for print media planning. Despite the importance of this issue, no one in the United States has conducted any major research on accumulation since 1977, and no national study of this phenomenon has been conducted for more than 35 years.
Interest in audience accumulation has been rekindled in the past two years for a combination of reasons. First, Erwin Ephron’s advocacy of “recency planning� prompted a tremendous demand to know when a particular magazine issue is read. If magazine advertising exposure needs to coincide with the reader’s buying decision, magazines and agency planners must know what percentage of an issue’s total readership is being read at key points in time. Second, the development of multimedia planning optimizers requires placing magazines on an equal footing with other media, especially television. Media optimizers, which focus on weekly reach, require velocity information about magazines on any given week.
Symposium: 1999: Florence, Session 7 - Print: Exploiting the Competitive Advantage
Authors: Agresti, Joseph, Baim, Julian, Frankel, Martin
Organisations: Mediamark Research Inc
Topics: Data Collection, Fusion and Modelling