Task Force Established To Develop Newspaper Readership Measurement Standard For Print And Web that Answers Advertisers’ Increasing Demand To Track They Get What They Think They Are Paying For

Philip M. Stone February 23, 2007

Here’s one of the biggest problems a newspaper faces today, as explained by a Houston car dealer, when trying to convince an advertiser to stay with print rather than switch to the Internet: “We can pretty much measure an online cost per head. But if you put an ad in the Sunday paper it will probably cost more than $2,000 and you have no idea who comes through the door because of it. We’ve wasted a lot of money that way.”

Add to that comments by such a luminary as A.G. Lafley, Chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble, a company that spent $6.8 billion on global advertising in its just concluded 2006 fiscal year, who says that he wants to find better ways to gauge whether he’s getting value for his advertising spend. “What’s important to us is to be able to measure it,” he said at a recent Fortune Magazine C-Suite interview.

The newspaper industry seems to have finally gotten the message and it has held its first Media Measurement Integration Task Force summit meeting in Chicago to try and come up with global standards for combined print and digital measurements.

If this group can’t crack this particular nut then doubtful any group can. It includes Michael Lavery, president and managing director of the US Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC); Erica DeLorenzo, senior manager of Industry Initiatives and Legal Affairs for the Interactive Advertising Bureau; Anne Crassweller, president of NAD Bank, Toronto; Chris Boyd, CEO of the ABC, UK and Ireland; Antonio Athayde, executive director of the Brazilian Newspaper Association; Dick Bennett, CEO of IM Services, Richard Foan, Managing Director of ABC Electronic in London; David Asher, senior manager of business analysis and research for the Newspaper Association of America; Gary Moo, Senior Vice President of Scarborough Research, and Martha Stone (no relation) manager of the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper Project for the World Association of Newspapers.,

A couple of the big problems the Task Force must handle is that some media research firms have already established combined measurements for print and digital combined, but advertising agencies don’t often plan their media buys in an integrated manner, so how to change their ways?

And then there is the thorny issue of global standardization and guidelines. So far no international group has tried to create a standardized combined print and digital currency that could help ad agencies measure where their spend is going.  

The first order of business will be to survey hundreds of media buyers globally on their needs for a global print and digital metric, the results hopefully pointing the way to how newspapers and the agencies can work together better in buying across platforms.

Martha Stone explained more in an email exchange with FTM. “The web is a highly measurable medium…but there are already many newspaper studies that prove that newspapers are highly measurable as well – just not as instantaneous as the Web. Several large advertisers are working with the Interactive Advertising Bureau in the US on making standard measurements for several ad units, including video and rich media. Large advertisers are also demanding audited ad impression standards. These standards will go a long way to help our task force with a more reliable integrated metric. IAB hopes to have several standards of standardized units in place by the end of this year.”

FTM asked if the task force would address one of the major advertiser complaints that it was just so plain hard and difficult to make a cross platform buy with a newspaper, and how they wished they could make a national buy with independent newspapers by basically pressing a button.

“We are addressing the ease of buying print,” she said. “But it’s too soon to talk about how this would be done since we haven’t polled the agencies yet for their feedback and partnership in improving the system.”

And then we played the devil a bit and asked her if it didn’t mean that by accepting a standard for joint print and web it really meant that print accepted it was in continual decline and the only way newspapers can keep their numbers up today is to add their web readership. But she wasn’t having any of that decline talk.

“The guidelines being created by individual companies and associations like the National Newspaper Association, Canadian Newspaper Association, the ABC in the US and the UK, were created to show the true reach of newspaper “brands” into their marketplaces, both print and digital.

“Significant numbers of people are reading online newspapers, and of course, by all means, no question -- these numbers need to be counted! Heretofore, these numbers have not been part of the sales proposition for newspapers to a large degree, and as the world changes, so, too, must these statistics. It took decades for newspaper circulations to be audited, for TV viewership and radio listenership metrics to be standardized. It’s time for print-digital to be standardized. It’s just a matter of evolution. It is not a defensive move,” she explained.

And she reminded us that advertising in online newspapers is particularly robust in those countries with strong broadband penetration  -- the US, Scandinavia and the UK not far behind. “In the US most news web sites are sold out of ad inventory for the rest of 2007 and are scrambling to create more inventory by driving more page views with high-view content,” she said

The task force meets again in June. “We’re just starting. But there’s a real momentum and a lot of interest in this task force. Stay tuned!”

We will, Martha, we will.

HELP! ftm wants your audience figures! Send to the numbers guy!

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