Two things they forgot to tell you about your media plan

MPX = Magazine Page Exposure
APX = Average Page Exposure

It's easy, and logical, to accept that publications are "read" by more than one person. Just as one television programme will be viewed by more than one person (a household, for example) and a radio broadcast will be heard by more than one person (two in a car, ten on a beach, fifty in a factory for example).

Using simple arithmetic, we can calculate how many readers of a publication there are.

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If 100 magazines are printed and 500 people claim to have read the last issue, then 500 divided by 100 equals 5 readers per copy.

This basic concept has been argued and even fought over (yes, real fist fights) by many people for decades - and the bickering continues as to whether it's a fair calculation or not.

We'll assume for the moment that it's true, which means it will introduce another factor. For our purposes, we'll refer to it as "impacts".

The average print media schedule will be analysed in a variety of ways, some of which are truly spectacular in their ingenuity. One of the more sensible ways is to measure or estimate the number of impacts delivered.

Thus, in our example, the print advertisement will have been seen by 500 readers, which means 500 impacts.

The perceptive reader will immediately identify the two assumptions made in this calculation that belie its credibility.

The first assumption is that all readers will see the advertisement. We can reasonably state that this is not true.

The second assumption is that readers will see the advertisement once only. Again, we can reasonably state this is untrue because we observe the different ways in which people read publications - flipping backwards and forwards several times might mean your advertisement is seen (or "noted") several times by the same reader, for example.

This second assumption is interesting and deserves closer inspection.

Alfred Politz researched the MPX theory several decades ago and actually achieved quite a lot of important probabilities with it until, inexplicably, all his work was shelved.

[By the way, he was certainly a pioneer. In 1954, for example, he developed a technique for determining the effective use of outdoor advertising through the use of airborne cameras that could count readers of the sites through infrared photography.

He also vigorously fought against spurious opinion polls and helped expose many fraudsters or, to be kind, those who didn't understand what they were doing.]

He calculated/postulated that as a magazine is re-read, or referred to again, by the same reader, that an advertisement within that magazine will be seen more than once. It'll be seen 1.8 times, in fact.

Later, around the time of his death, the Magazine Publishers Association in New York resurrected the Politz findings (well, they'd have been mad not to have done so, wouldn't they?) and conducted their own research, which revealed an MPX rate of 1.7.

Later still, the precept was tested again by Media Market Research in the USA, using a much larger number of magazines, and they arrived at the MPX rate of 1.8.

Then the British had a go and researched 110 magazines - discovering an MPX rate of 1.8.

So, against a backdrop of so much research, it's reasonable to suggest that a typical reader will see the same advertisement 1.8 times. Ignoring all other readership criteria for the moment, we can immediately see the MPX figure is significant because, if we take our earlier calculation and go one step further, we find:

500 readers x 1.8 MPX factor = 900 "impacts".

This is 80% higher than the previous calculation made, which was based on 1 reader = 1 impact.

Another reasonable assumption we can make is that, depending on the nature of the advertising message, a reader is more likely to respond (take action) when he sees the advertisement more than once - and this is what "frequency" and "impacts" are all about.

So, we can see that the MPX factor (and the APX calculation) is worthy of more consideration, particularly as (one could suppose) some magazines are picked up more frequently than others.

But there are some very relevant and cautionary complications.

1. How reliable is the readership-per-copy data?
2. How many of the readers have the opportunity to refer to the magazine more than once (if it's a borrowed copy, they may have only a brief chance to flick through it, for example).

It's been established that primary readers have a higher average MPX score of 2.2, whilst secondary readers can drop to 1.2.

Similarly, at-home readers have a score of 2.2 and out-of-home readers only 1.1.

As a conclusion, it must be stressed that whilst MPX is a significant factor, the base data (readers-per-copy) is questionable.

Also, MPX is only one consideration in a list of many other factors such as editorial environment, positioning, cost, quality of reproduction, and so on.

Critics of MPX (and APX) say that the results are pure guesswork and they may have a point. They also say that "recall" is the only true measurement, which may also be true.

Personally speaking, I believe very strongly in media planning "instinct" and I instinctively know that there's a lot more to MPX than many others would believe. But then, I don't really care what they think.

az.oc.srewerb@sirhc

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