On 30 Years

By Alain Tessier, MRI Chairman

Mediamark Research & Intelligence is thirty years old, and having aged with it, I am happy to say that the company is stronger, more talented and more resourceful than when it began.

1979 was not a propitious year, a very cold winter and a dire financial environment, not unlike 2009. Interest rates were 16 percent and more. The largest mass circulation magazines had ceased publication even as a mass of special interest publications entered the media marketplace. Enter Mediamark with a research product that met the needs of the time and a design created by my late partner, Timothy Joyce. The rest is history, too lengthy to recount here and interesting to only a few of us, except to say that Mediamark began as Magazine Research Inc. and became Mediamark Research Inc. in late 1979 when product/brand usage measurements were added to the survey.

More of you will remember the more recent history, the turbulence out of which Mediamark established itself as the primary magazine audience measurement service and as the single-source base for product/media planning and buying. This was a period during which the company more than doubled in size to increase its research and client service staff, took in-house all its tabulation and data management, and established a research and development entity. It also saw a 30 percent increase in sample size, the design of an empirical audience accumulation model, an issue specific audience measurement system, the acquisition of Starch and more. The marketplace gave Mediamark the dominant position it has obtained, and I think Mediamark has made, and continues to make, the investment necessary to sustain and deserve that position.

Mediamark is today a stronger company because it has a tradition of caring at least as much as its most demanding customer for the integrity and quality of the product, and has hired the kind of people that think and work that way: our president and CEO, Kathi Love; COO Ian Jack; Chief Research Officer Julian Baim and a management team that has safely and confidently steered the company through to the present day. In turn, they have surrounded themselves with staff that make Mediamark a workplace that attracts dedicated professionals and earns their commitment. So where does Mediamark go from here?

All media have undergone changes never imagined thirty years ago, pre-Internet, changes charted by Mediamark that uniquely described the interaction of these media as they changed the behavior of media consumers. Over the 30 years that Mediamark has measured magazine audiences, its single-source design has been able to monitor the evolution of the other major media. Indeed Mediamark produced the earliest estimates of the new cable network entries, and the first Internet providers. Mediamark maintains a clear focus on the magazine medium by integrating audience accumulation and issue specific measurement with its core Survey of the American Consumer, and rejuvenating the Starch ad noting measurements, but has also responded to the user’s need to know about media interaction, particularly with the Internet. Media interaction has become important enough that data fusions with other media measurement databases are in progress and continuously under review.

A second priority is to keep the Survey current with changes in consumer behavior and the people’s use of media. Over the past thirty years such changes have rendered today’s media/marketing environment unrecognizable to its predecessor. The linkage between media and consumer behavior grows in importance as change reshapes both. An overriding third priority is to continuously review the basic survey design to assure the most cost efficient and reliable designs are in place so that survey results are quick to market, without sacrificing survey reliability.

Mediamark Research & Intelligence is up to these challenges.

And so I give this to you, that the 60’s mantra that you can’t trust anyone over thirty has become an old saw, disproved by Mediamark and disavowed by the very Boomers who proposed it, even as their best years came after that anniversary.

Product Portfolio MRI Starch Takes Key Step Towards Developing Syndicated Magazine Ad Measurement Service

“Do my print ads work?” and “Am I making the right media investment?” are two questions frequently asked by ROI-driven marketers, and it’s getting a lot easier to answer them with MRI Starch’s expanded coverage.

MRI Starch will more than triple the number of magazine issues it measures in 2009 as it builds a syndicated ad measurement database, called MRI Starch Syndicated.

In 2008, 214 issues of magazines across 79 magazine titles were measured, and this year, the calendar will include 646 issues across 114 titles. Titles include weeklies, bi-weeklies, tri-weeklies, monthlies and bi-monthlies. All national ads one-third of a page or larger will be measured for each magazine.

The detailed metrics in MRI Starch help clients more fully understand the effectiveness of the ads in magazines. “Our 2009 mission is to develop the granular ROI magazine metrics marketers are demanding,” said MRI Starch SVP Dr. Mickey Galin. “All our initiatives will help advertisers and magazine publishers more accurately and effectively measure the contribution print advertising makes to a marketing communications program.”

In addition to measuring ad readership, MRI Starch is the exclusive provider of several key print ROI metrics, including:

• Actions Taken: provides quantitative and qualitative measures of an ad’s performance including: visited the advertiser’s Web site, looked for the product/service, clipped or saved the ad, bought/intend to purchase and several other valuable metrics.
• Read Some/Read Most: demonstrates reader ad engagement by measuring the percent of consumers who read some or most of an ad’s copy.
• Brand Disposition: helps marketers understand the ad’s impact on brand loyalists vs. brand rejecters by measuring how readers feel about the advertised brand.
• Word of Mouth Opportunity: tells marketers the extent to which readers would recommend the advertised product or brand.
• Bought/Intend to Purchase: gauge’s the effect of the ad or brand on purchase and purchase intent.
• Publication Engagement: identifies the extent to which a magazine’s level of engagement with readers may drive ad readership.

MRI Starch is scheduled to launch an online data delivery system for MRI Starch Syndicated in spring 2009.

For more information, please contact us.

Creative ClientMRI and Starz In Multi-Platform Adventure

Whenever a new technology emerges, speculation surrounding the impact on existing products abounds. Online video is no exception--some believe consumers will adopt Internet-delivered television shows and movies as a substitute for traditional outlets, while others argue the technology is additive and simply gives consumers another source for entertainment.

Starz Entertainment has a stake in both traditional and emerging platforms. Through its core and sister businesses, Starz delivers movies via premium TV channels, DVDs, and in theaters. Its newest offering, Starz Play, serves up video content online through affiliate partners. Starz uses MRI’s Survey of the American Consumer and its multi-platform trend data to understand how online video is impacting more traditional forms of movie viewing and to keep in touch with the Internet video user – the target for Starz Play. This marketing intelligence is key to Starz’ strategic development and partner relationships.

“MRI data show that the audience for online video viewing increased 40% between 2007 and 2008, and it’s imperative that we understand how this increase could impact various areas of our business,” said Starz Executive Director, Marketing, Sales, and Corporate Research Neal Massey. “The demographic and behavioral insights gleaned from MRI let us provide a complete picture of the value of our target audience to prospective wholesale partners for Starz Play,” said Mr. Massey.

Starz looked at the video viewing activities among online video users, compared to the US norm. They also compared incidence levels of the 2008 online video audience to that for 2007. Three key findings give them a clearer picture of online viewers:

• They watch everywhere. Online video viewers index high for virtually every other video-based activity: digital cable subscription, premium channel viewing, DVD rentals/ purchases, pay per view and video on demand, movie attendance and DVR ownership.
• They maintain their traditional video viewing. The incidence levels for video services/activities showed little to no change for those identified as online video users in ’08 compared to ’07.
• They are upscale. The mean household income for users of Internet video is more than $15,000 higher than that of the general population ($81,273 vs. $64,346).

“Based on the analysis, we learned that use of online video complements other forms of video entertainment; consumers have adopted the technology while maintaining high levels of utilization of video from other sources,” said Mr. Massey. “High income levels for this audience support their varied interests in video and don’t prohibit their spending across numerous outlets.”

Starz is running this analysis on an ongoing basis so they can continuously look at how delivery platforms affect viewing–information that is key to keeping audiences tuned in.

Because You AskedQ. What do * and # signify in MRI data runs?

When slicing and dicing data, MRI clients may see an asterisk (*) or a pound (#) next to data. Here is what they indicate:

The * symbol denotes unstable data; it’s a warning that the data should be used with caution. Data based on less than 50 respondents are unstable because the sample size is not considered large enough to create a representative picture.

MEMRI User Tip: MEMRI marks unstable data in the Matrix View, Zoom View, and Excel export. A good way to weed out unstable numbers is to use MEMRI’s Golddigger function to filter any data with less than 50 respondents.

The # sign signifies that data are based on only one wave of a study, not the usual two waves. To convey these numbers accurately, either scale the data point up by 200% or change the weighting to only the wave from which the information was released.

Please let us know if you have any questions you'd like us to include in Because You Asked.

New & Noteworthy

Market-by-Market Releases Local Market Media Data For Top Ten Markets

MRI’s Market-by-Market Study now includes data on local market media in the top ten markets. Beginning with the 2008 release, local newspapers and local radio station information is available for the following:

For more information, please contact us.

Learn About Consumer Insights In New Webcast

Our new Webcast, Insights into the American Consumer, shows how MRI’s broad range of consumer intelligence provides insights to help you understand how your target fits into the ever-changing marketplace.

GfK Receives ESOMAR Excellence Award

GfK--MRI’s parent company--was honored with the ESOMAR Excellence Award for 2007/2008, one of the most prestigious international market research awards. The award was given for the paper, “Training the next generation: It's market research, but not as we know it,” that was presented at the annual ESOMAR Congress 2007.