Relevance and trust
“Engagement is all about making it relevant to the consumer.”
James Speros, Chief marketing officer, Ernst & Young
The key to achieving relevance is to isolate psychographically homogenous groups of consumers in reasonable numbers and communicate the facets of the advertiser’s brand that are relevant to this community.
This requires that media target consumers according to their values, attitudes and interests. Broadcast media attempt to attract the largest audiences possible rather than segment the delivery of audience into discreet groups. The wide range of magazines however, means that consumers can find magazines that cover every aspect of human endeavour. Currently more than 3,000 magazines are published allowing a consumer choose which topic most interests them, and which magazine reflects most closely their interests and values.
As the Henley Centre puts it:
“People read particular magazines because of the life stages and events which currently involve them: from teenager to golfer, from having a baby to coping with retirement.”
Source: Henley Centre, Delivering Engagement 2004
The individuality and personality of each magazine means that readers can readily feel a close relationship with the particular magazines they choose to read.
“When a magazine closely chimes in with this [consumer] self-image there is a high level of identification with the chosen magazine. There is a feeling of ownership, that this is ‘my magazine’, an informed friend. “
Source: Research Business for the National Magazine Company
As a consequence, consumers expect magazine content to achieve closer personal relevance than any other medium.
NFO Groups research (Absorbing Media 2002) for the PPA asked consumers which medium they expected to be most closely tailored to their individual needs, and unsurprisingly, magazines were felt to be the most likely.
When asked which medium would contain the information that I am most interested in, again the consumer expectation is that magazines are more likely to provide this than other media.
And this relationship has an impact on advertising. As one advertiser put it;
“The editorial/reader relationship is a one-to-one conversation, and in time it creates a bond of trust, of belief, expectation and empathy. It is through the quality of this relationship that an aperture or opening to the reader’s mind and heart is created, through which we advertisers can establish communication.” - Advertiser with Readers’ Digest
In delivering an audience that shares values, attitudes and interests with each other, magazines deliver advertisers the opportunity to embed their brands within the values of their readers. This is more than an opportunity – this is an expectation!
Contrary to the wider market place, where 59 per cent of consumers say that most marketing and advertising has very little relevance to them (2004 Yankelovich) consumers have a strong expectation that magazine advertising will be relevant to them personally.
Hearst Magazines’ Engagement Factor Study (2005), which looked at adults aged 18 to 54, found that the consumer feels the relevance of magazine advertising is more than double that of the Internet and more than 50 per cent that of TV.
Percent agree that “Most of the ads are geared toward the audience
involved with the medium”
| Magazine Advertising | 60% |
| TV Commercials | 38% |
| Internet/Online Advertising | 28% |
Source: Hearst Magazines’ Engagement Factor Study (2005)
Absorbing Media (PPA 2002) found much the same view. Magazine advertising was felt to be the most relevant to the consumer. Again, 50% more consumers felt this about magazines than TV. The difference between magazines and the internet was even stronger.
Magazine advertising also scores very well when consumers consider media that they use as a guide to buying.
This is because the buying guide is at the heart of why consumers buy magazines and why editors create content that helps readers edit choice. People look to their magazines as a trusted agent, filtering and sorting reliable information, sources and offers. As the Henley Centre put it;
“titles fulfill an important role as an advocate and source of referral. These things are crucial to people in generating points of view ……. and personal recommendations in day-to-day conversations and are an important element of successful engagement.”
This trust in the editorial content of magazines rubs off on consumer attitudes to advertising within their chosen title. Not only is advertising expected to be more relevant in magazines, it is also more likely to be trusted by the consumer as Absorbing Media showed.
| “I can usually trust and believe the advertising” | % agreeing it applies |
| Magazines | 23% |
| Newspapers | 17% |
| Newspaper supplements | 10% |
| Commercial TV | 22% |
| Commercial radio | 8% |
| Websites | 7% |
Source: Absorbing Media 2002
When asked which medium contains the advertising that consumers can usually trust and believe Magazine advertising was deemed more trustworthy and credible than advertising in other media.
More recently Hearst Magazines’ Engagement Study echoed these findings. Focusing on adults aged 18-54 they discovered that consumers are 75% more likely to trust magazine advertising than commercial TV ads and 3 times more likely when compared to Internet advertising.
Percentage of Adults Age 18 – 54 who trust Ads in Medium
| Magazine Advertising | 21% |
| TV Commercial | 12% |
| Internet/Online advertising | 7% |
Source: Hearst Magazines’ Engagement Factor Study 2005
So we have a medium that offers audiences segmented into psychographically meaningful groups. In turn, this allows advertisers to make their advertising more relevant to the consumer in a medium where advertising is more trusted.
But relevance is not just the fit between advertising message and audience or advertising and media environment – it is also the fit between the audience and the advertiser’s brand.
This is particularly important when you take the purchasing behaviour of magazine readers into account. Let’s look at the Grocery marketplace. While this is particularly relevant to FMCG manufactures, expenditure in the grocery sector does take a significant percentage of overall consumer expenditure, and provides a useful insight into more general consumer behaviour.
TGI splits the country into three groups of consumers - those that spend £100 or more on groceries each week (the heavy spenders), those that spend £50 or less on groceries each week (the light spenders) and those in between.
If we look at heavy spenders we notice that 35% of the UK population spend more than £100 a week on groceries accounting for nearly 60% of the total sterling volume in the market. Light spenders, on the other hand, while accounting for nearly 40% of the population, account for less than 20% of sterling volume.
Heavy spenders in the grocery sector are much less likely than the average UK adult to be a heavy viewer of ITV and much more likely to read magazines. Light spenders are much more likely to view significant levels of TV and much less likely to read magazines.
As a consequence, those advertisers that concentrate expenditure in TV will be reaching those consumers least likely to show a return on investment most frequently, and those most likely to show a return least frequently.
Media analyst Erwin Ephron of Ephron, Papazian & Ephron recently documented this type of relevance for consumers in TV and magazines, by looking at the composition of product users within the audience of each medium.
Ephron analyzed MRI data, examining five heavily advertised TV brands for
each of six product categories. Each brand also used magazines. The analysis was based on a month of TV and a month of magazine advertising activity for each brand. He compared each medium’s product user index for the product category as shown by MRI. (MRI was used for both TV and magazines because Nielsen ratings do not measure products.)
In examining the likelihood that the audience of each medium used a product, Ephron noted;
“Even for these predominantly TV brands, their print schedules are more relevant to readers than their TV schedules are to viewers.”
Ephron concluded that;
“Magazines give the reader control, which makes the advertising more welcome. And magazines target readers, which makes the advertising more relevant. That is why consumers are engaged more by advertising in magazines than in any other media”.