As advertisers continue to push publishers for more accountability, one New York-based company has developed a system to track circulation quality almost instantaneously. Media analysis firm Media IQ has developed Circ IQ, an online software system that analyzes data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The system computes results from 475 consumer magazines and assigns each magazine a score based on four key metrics: stability, quality, consumer demand and accuracy track record. Those metrics are based on a number of measures-for example, a magazine's score for consumer demand is quantified by factors such as newsstand sales and average price paid per issue.
Users can also weigh the criteria based on what characteristics they feel are more important.
"In circulation, like the rest of media, the devil is the details," said Media IQ CEO Mike Lotito. "The ABC statements got to be so complex that it was hard for people to analyze the statement themselves. We wanted to make circulation analysis easier."
The service is already being used by a number of agencies including MediaVest, OMD, Starcom and Universal McCann. So far, media buyers love the speed with which the program combs through complicated data in minutes, especially when a publisher may owe rebates for not meeting circulation guarantees. "When a new ABC statement comes out, we can go right to the screen, put in the issues, check off how much we pay for something and it immediately calculates how much a magazine owes me. If we had to do that manually, it would have been days," said Jacque O'Connor, OMD Midwest director of print. The Magazine Publishers of America will get a demonstration of the service at a June 7 meeting. -Stephanie D. Smith