Adgully Exclusive | Magazine industry looks at capitalizing on the "engagement" factor

On the second day of Indian Magazine Congress 2010, post insightful discussions on topics pertaining to the magazine industry Pradeep Gupta, President, Association of Indian Magazines (AIM), made an announcement that the deemed body will undertake an "engagement study". The announcement came at the right time since the industry has been unhappy with the IRS results and that a new metric will probably provide better data, about the "consumer" and not just the "readers", for the publications and the advertising agencies.

The announcement had followed post a lot of advertisers and brands pointing it out to the magazine industry that there was a need to study in what way the magazine has been able to reach a particular audience category.

Almost a year now post the announcement the much-awaited Engagement Study will be released at the World Magazine Congress 2011 in New Delhi next month. Gupta, confirmed this development to Adgully and in an email interaction wrote ' "The study is in final stages and will be presented at the World Magazine Congress. Before that, I can't share anything about the contents of the study."

Talking about the methodology implemented for the study, Mitrajit Bhattacharya, General Secretary, AIM, tells Adgully that the research was a desk research, a qualitative survey which comprised of 20 one-on-one interviews of 2.5 hours each by Quantum preceded the large scale Quantitative Survey (Sample Size: 3600 +, across 10 centres) by IMRB.

"The qualitative survey had target audience by genre clusters of magazines - women and film, news and business, men's interest and niche interest. SEC A+/A and B1, Male/ Female were covered. The quantitative survey had a huge sample size to validate the amplification and dimensionalisation of findings from the secondary and qualitative research. The survey covered Male/ Female from SEC A/B households across ten centres," he says.

Further speaking on the effectiveness of the study Bhattacharya says that the magazine industry has never been represented well by the large readership surveys like IRS, which are largely designed to cater to the needs of the dailies. "The data for the magazine industry as a whole have been less robust. More so, these surveys do not attempt to cover qualitative dimensions like reader involvement, lower clutter levels leading to higher attention, recall or even the image building capability which are the strengths of the medium," he contends.

However he quickly adds, "But let me clarify at this stage that this survey is not attempting to capture any data at an individual title level. It is a very robust survey with a huge sample size, both qualitative and quantitative, trying to address the issues of the magazine industry as a whole, well represented by all major genres and languages."

Bhattacharya says that the Engagement Study will be a highly credible tool for the advertising fraternity to understand the engagement of consumers with various media and to evaluate the level of engagement of magazines vis-a-vis other media. Moreover that these insights will help the advertisers immensely in choosing a medium like magazines vis-a-vis other media. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]