Tuesday, March 16, 2010

MPA Officially Responds to BoSacks on PIB

MPA Officially Responds to BoSacks on PIB
BoSacks Speaks Out: I am thankful to the MPA for responding to my vent of last week. It has always been my intended policy to start meaningful discussions. I do this in an attempt to have dialog about the consequential issues of the day and for the inevitable success of our industry. In that pursuit I attempt to present as many intelligent perspectives as I can. Without the ability to have cross-pollination we will not grow, prosper nor succeed in our endeavors.


MPA official response to PIB story
Your newsletter item from March 10 calls into question the veracity of PIB reporting. Let's be very clear. PIB is absolutely upfront that it is reporting rate card revenue. We state this in our quarterly press releases and on our website. The reason PIB reports rate card revenue is to offer a consistent and objective year-over-year comparison that can be verified. In fact, thanks to PIB, magazines are the only medium that provides fully verified reports for both units and revenue.

The primary use of the rate card revenue numbers is for publishers and agencies to track ad activity, and the way in which the numbers are presented makes it easy for them to do that by client. Since it is clear that the spending is based on rate card dollars, agencies and publishers can easily benchmark against them. Publishers and ad agencies fully understand what we report and they value PIB for its clarity. Anyone who has questions about our numbers or our process for generating the quarterly reports is free to contact me. My door is always open.

Wayne Eadie
SVP, Research
Magazine Publishers of America
President
Publishers Information Bureau

2 comments:

Brian O'Leary said...

What did they do - email that to you? I guess the MPA hasn't figured out how to use the "comment" button just yet.

The MPA does have data that outlines the average discount on ad page revenue. It's part of the survey data collected each year from member publications.

Including agency fees, an average discount probably approaches or exceeds 70%. Unfortunately, the data is made available only to the magazines who participate in the survey. That may not be quite enough to keep the four media buying agencies in the dark, though.

Brian O'Leary said...

Not that you need a defense, but here's one themed to this discussion http://bit.ly/b9wnLY