Taipei Times: Why should publishers join the federation to make their circulation transparent and how do they benefit?
Glenn Hansen: Well, you have external benefits and internal benefits. The internal benefits ... Everyone has goals they wish to accomplish.
And the use of a circulation audit helps the management determine that the staff have in fact accomplished all the goals that they have established for them, but have done so in an acceptable way.
So it’s used very much to get things organized inside the company. When you have no auditor, there is no interest in being organized. And when the auditor comes in and says I want to see this, this and this, everyone has to get much more organized. And it does help the publisher identify areas of inefficiency so that they can fix those areas and become more efficient.
But you wouldn’t do it for that reason only. That will also need to be the external benefit.
There is just so much at stake now in the media environment that the person responsible for the marketing budget in the company — typically we call them the chief marketing officer, or the CMO — wants some measurement on success.
Different media have different key performance indicators [KPIs] that allow them to measure how successfully their money was spent.
In print media, the first one should be that you got what you paid for.
If you think you [the advertisers] are buying 60,000 copies, you should have that independently verified that it is 60,000 copies and not 6,000 copies. So the first external benefit of the audit for the publisher is to satisfy the needs of the chief marketing officer for one of those key performance indicators.
So, as one requirement of the international federation, every ABC [Audit Bureaux of Circulations] must be not-for-profit and it must be tripartite — three parties: media owners, advertisers and media buyers. They are the members who own the organization. The reason that it’s done that way is so there is total transparency and the media buyers have just as much a voice in what their requirements are as the media owners.
TT: How do you ensure the accuracy of your data?
Hansen: You have to first start with the manufacture. How many newspapers or magazines were actually created. The only way you will ever know that is you have to go to the printing plant and you have to watch them print.
You can’t do that every issue, every day. It will be too expensive. You can periodically check. If it’s a daily newspaper, maybe once or twice a month, to check, unannounced. And with that done periodically at least you know they are being honest on those days.
For all the other days — that needs documentation from the press as to how many copies were produced and in the printing world, you need to know the capacity of the machine — how many copies could have actually been manufactured.
The second question is how are they distributed, whether that it is through the retail channel to the dealer network, through subscriptions, or through free bulk giveaways like in hotels or something like that. And then you have to count every copy that has been distributed.
Then the question is — in every category [dealer, retail sale, subscriptions, free], you want to make sure that the numbers are not being mixed up; that the copies in the paid subscription category are true and that the copies in the dealer category are true. So now you have to do certain audit tests to prove that.
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