Major themes emerge from FIPP Research Award entries
Guy Consterdine, FIPP’s research consultant, reports the latest news on FIPP’s Research Awards, the themes for FIPP’s Research Forum, and an invitation to join FIPP’s Research Committee. He reviews an Australian innovation, and appeals for information on other recent research projects for inclusion in a second edition of Proof of Performance: Making the case for magazine media.
The entries for the 2014 FIPP Research Awards are now with the international panel of judges, who are assessing which are the best research studies published in 2013 that promote the use of magazines as an advertising medium.
The major themes which I have identified among the entries are these:
•Consumers’ complementary use of publishers’ print and digital platforms
•The effectiveness of advertising on magazine websites
•Implications of the internet’s targeting ability matching that of magazines
•Case studies of partnering with marketing companies to create a range of magazine-centred activities, including digital and events
•Reader engagement with magazines
•Using neuroscience to understand emotional responses to magazine content
•Developing tools for measuring the cost-efficiency of magazine advertising
•Proof of magazines’ cost-effectiveness, and their ability to drive sales
•Comparisons of magazines with other major media, in moving consumers along the customer journey towards purchase
•Demonstrating the continuing value of publishers’ business-to-business media
The judges have a difficult but rewarding task! The winning projects will be announced during the FIPP Research Forum in Hamburg, Germany, on 16-17 June.
FIPP RESEARCH FORUM
The conference, kindly hosted by G+J in their Hamburg offices, will divide the two days into two main topic areas. The flavour of Day One is principally about new insights and points of view concerning magazine media’s digital platforms: how consumers use them, how their use is combined with the printed magazines, how the digital advertisements are performing, and so on.
The second day turns to new tools and fresh evidence about the cost-effectiveness of advertising in magazine media, particularly print.
For more details about the event, and a list of papers and speakers, see the accompanying article.
I discuss one of the Day Two papers in another accompanying article. This is the Magazine Audience Performance Predictor (mapp), a thought-provoking initiative from Magazine Publishers of Australia. Its most noteworthy innovations are to forecast the eventual total audience of each individual issue of every print magazine in the system, within a week of each issue coming on sale; and building these forecasts into media agencies’ modelling of the cost-effectiveness of the medium, on a basis which is comparable to the readily-available weekly audience data for other major media.
FIPP RESEARCH COMMITTEE
We are pleased to welcome Marius Cloete, head of research at PPA in the UK, as the new Chairman of the Research Committee, as successor to Esther Braspenning of Sanoma in Belgium. Further information about this appointment in FIPP Insight.
FIPP’s international Research Committee has members from magazine publishers and associations in many countries around the world. The Committee is valuable as a forum for exchanging information and ideas, keeping up to date with developments around the globe, and helping to guide FIPP’s research activities. If you are interested in joining the Committee, and you work for a magazine publisher or association, do get in touch with me at guy@consterdine.com. The work is not arduous, and is essentially carried out by email.
PROOF OF PERFORMANCE (POP): 2nd edition
I am writing a second edition of my FIPP book Proof of Performance: making the case for magazine media (POP for short) for publication in September 2014. The first edition was published in 2012, and is a much-needed compilation of research-based evidence from around the world, about how consumers use magazine media, and the medium’s effectiveness for advertisers.
A great deal of new research has been published in the two years since the book appeared, making the case for magazine media even more persuasive – including evidence about publishers’ digital platforms. I already have many new pieces of research to consider for inclusion in the second edition of POP but there must be many more out in the marketplace around the world of which I’m unaware, but which would be valuable to include. So I’d be pleased to hear about recent research on magazine media in any country: email me at guy@consterdine.com.
The first edition of POP can still be downloaded for free from the POP toolkit where complementary material can also be found.
