Tony Jarvis is president of Jarvis, Sherman & Jarvis, an advertising and marketing consultancy in Toronto and managing director of Spot Quotations and Data, Canada. He is a member of the Board of the Canadian Advertising Research Foundation and its former Chairman. He spoke at the Worldwide Readership Research Symposium in San Francisco in April, 1993 a year after he was appointed to the Program Committee for the Worldwide Broadcast Audience Research Symposium, sponsored by the Advertising Research Foundation (arf), the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (esomar) and carf. Most recently, Jarvis was invited to speak at the arf Readership Measurement at a Crossroads conference in New York. The following is his reponse to the special feature in the May 27 issue of Strategy on PMB Print Measurement Bureau.

In heralding the continuing evolution and success of pmb, the advertiser and agency experts interviewed for your story omitted to mention a fundamental pmb issue, while the experts from the magazine publishing side seemed to be searching for a better return on their pmb investment.

Few in the industry are bold enough to remind your readers that the pmb database – despite the fact that it contains, overall, very good information – still contains a fundamental flaw. That is, its continued use of the antediluvian ‘through-the-book’ methodology for collecting magazine audiences. (Through-the-book research involves showing respondents magazines stripped of their advertising and asking the respondents if they read that issue.)

The vast majority of advertisers and agencies voted to change this approach to ‘recent reading,’ but the proposal was, in effect, vetoed by the magazine publishers. This was despite the fact that a switch to recent reading would have reduced the cost-per-thousand readers for virtually every magazine measured.

Canadian magazine publishers are now faced with not only a methodological dilemma – apparently pmb’s presentation on ‘through-the-book’ gained little if any acceptance at the recent World Readership Research Symposium in Berlin – but, due to pmb’s unquestioned overall success, it no longer serves the market segment it originally was established to serve: magazines.

Magazines pay most of the freight at pmb, but they are outnumbered by advertisers and agencies (230 to 70). It is the advertisers and agencies to which pmb now offers the greatest value. As a comprehensive syndicated ‘single-source’ database, it saves them significant amounts of money in executing custom research in areas of common interest.

As such, should not advertisers and agencies carry a significantly larger burden of the overall cost of pmb? The consequent loss of publisher control would surely be irrelevant. It apparently has been of little benefit to magazine publishers for at least the last 10 years.

Today, pmb’s measurement of magazines could be, and obviously is, considered secondary to the majority of its users. It could even be considered tertiary, if one accepts that the methodology is not only outmoded and outdated but also probably understates the audiences of most magazines.

In this scenario, and unless pmb’s membership costs are rebalanced, it appears that magazine publishers would serve themselves, and pmb, best by dramatically reducing their role in and commitment to pmb.

Apparently, they simply can no longer afford, nor do they need, the overly rich pmb data, either for advertising sales, editorial evaluation or circulation development.

By reducing their support of pmb, magazine publishers could produce a magazine readership study based on the latest, internationally acceptable, leading edge methodology (recent reading or perhaps frequency) together with a wide array of qualitative measures, most notably some kind of Magazine Page Exposure (mpx) measurement, which attempts to measure repeat reading occasions and proportion of the magazine read. This could help to even further bring down magazine cpms, while potentially enhancing the medium’s perceived value and effectiveness.

(pmb has examined, for many years, additional qualitative measures for magazines without successful implementation.)

Such a move would remove, once and for all, pmb’s implied responsibility to support and promote magazines (which was certainly intended when it was established over 25 years ago.)

The ‘new’ magazine audience study would contain only very limited but relevant demographic, broad product category, lifestyle and other media information. Access would likely be available only to member publishers (all magazines would be measured), advertisers and their agencies.

In case your readers are not aware, this highly focused, high-quality magazine database concept is already being closely examined by u.s. magazine publishers who face a similar investment/value situation with Mediamark Research (mri) and Simmons Market Research Bureau.

I do not believe such a move should adversely effect pmb, which could save significant costs by reducing or eliminating the personal interview part of its survey. (The personal interview is primarily required for the current battery of magazine readership questions.)

Many publishers would remain as members, albeit at the regular media member rate, and pmb would remain as Canada’s best, on-going, ‘single-source’ database.

Similar to the situation in the u.s., pmb could consider calibrating any new ‘more approximate’ magazine audience measurements to those from the new magazine publishers study.

The bottom line for advertisers and their agencies is that, even at increased cost, pmb would still be one of their best media/market database bargains. And they would also have access to the best, latest and internationally compatible magazine audience measures.

Based on the suggestions in this article, I hope to stimulate the industry into examining a new era in magazine measurement in Canada, whatever it turns out to be, focused on data quality, not only to the benefit of magazine publishers but equally to their ever more global advertisers.

I also trust that these suggestions will help pave the way for pmb to achieve its goal of becoming the ultimate single-source database for all Canadian marketers…as it evolves into the cmmb, Canadian Market Measurement Bureau.

While there may be quite a few letters about my observations, I hope this will produce some immediate and serious initiatives from some far-sighted publishers.

Canada has not yet caught up with the rest of the world in metered television measurement; let’s not wallow in the same position with magazine measurement.