One of the most vexing problems for magazine publishers is trying to figure out just
how many people read printed copies of magazines, rather than letting them languish
in stacks of unread mail. Other questions have been raging since the dawn of
the printing press, such as: How long and often do readers spend reading the pages?
Do readers skip around among the articles? Do they read from front to back or from
back to front? And does anybody look at the advertisements? Historically, these have
been mostly unanswerable questions, left to estimates and guesswork. But a marketing
research company, Mediamark Research & Intelligence ( MRI), is testing radio
frequency identification (RFID) technology to measure magazine readership in
public waiting rooms.
The real-world testing follows up a year of laboratory testing. Jay Mattlin, senior
vice president of new ventures at MRI, points out that the system needs to be tested
“in a non-laboratory setting to determine how well it holds up in this important
reading environment.”
The project’s objectives are to determine whether the RFID-driven passive print
monitoring system “can reliably measure—in a waiting room setting—the total time
spent with a specific magazine issue, the number of individual reading occasions and
potentially, reader exposure to individual magazine pages,” according to an MRI
statement.
For the lab testing, MRI created an “intelligent” magazine prototype—containing
the passive print measuring system—that keeps track of reader activity with designated
pages. “Essentially, an RFID tag attached to the magazine sends a signal to a
tag reader each time the test subjects turn to one of the designated magazine pages,”
notes MRI. “The system records the times of the openings and closings of designated
pages, as well as the opening/closings of the magazine itself.”
Mattlin reported that the system correctly identified magazine openings and
closings an average of 95 percent of the time in internal tests.
“We’ve learned a lot so far in our controlled environment,” he noted. “But considering
the complexity of trying to measure a non-electronic medium, like magazines,
with electronic signals, it’s going to take a while before we have a firm grip on
the full potential of RFID with regard to magazine audience measurement.”
Of course, the most interesting thing to note about this story is the timing: How
much value is there in solving the age-old viewership problem as print magazine
readership continues to decline, and publishers have shifted most of their focus and
content online?