Encore!

It’s many years since I took a real interest in the circulation of National Newspapers, even longer since I was responsible for some of the figures. In those days a drop in the sales figure of any title was considered a very serious matter. A fall in any of the titles in my charge would prompt a discussion with the Chairman! The reasons for the decline would be mulled over by everyone involved in the industry and the publisher would make strenuous efforts to recover the lost sales. Now it seems, a drop in sales every month is expected, dare I say accepted? and from the figures I saw last week in the Press Gazette the pattern continued through December 2009…with one shining exception, The Daily Mail. Though no longer involved in the industry I am saddened but not surprised by what I see. Apart from some tinkering with the mastheads, the increase in issue size and the use of colour, there seems to be little difference in the papers today from those of my years. Even the content has a horrible resonance to past times.
 
Another set of figures caught my eye too, they were not familiar to me. As a dinosaur I am permitted the luxury of looking at the figures of ‘new media’ as an academic study, those that interested me were those published by the websites of the National Newspapers, they also covered the month of December. I expected to see reports of huge increases in the number of “Unique Viewers”, a description I equate with the primary reader of a newspaper. There were some modest increases but the two traditionally regarded as the perameters of the market, The Times and The Mirror, showed serious, well I would regard them as serious anyway, declines in their viewers, whilst their main rivals improved their positions. I would have thought that should tell them something. Overall the total figures were nowhere near the levels of newspapers. So if the lost readers of newspapers are not migrating to the internet where are they going? 
 
Looking at the absolute figures for both media I was surprised to see that those for the internet were so low. If the purchaser of a newspaper is regarded as the primary reader and that equates with the unique viewer, newspapers reach as many people in a couple of days as the on line site reaches in a month. Admittedly the former is in decline and the latter in the ascendant but I really can’t see the day when no one reads a newspaper, can you? I have no doubt that research into the arrival of the ‘Unique Viewer’is advancing at the same speed as did that for newspapers in the mid-ninteen-seventies. It is clearly vital to know where those viewers have come from, who they are and what their lifestyle is. Just as it is for newspapers and television.
 
It seems to me that there is an enormous upheaval going on in the media world just now. Newspapers are losing buyers and are not launching new titles to meet the changiing markets, commercial television has launched new channels but is still losing viewers, magazines are proliferating with what seems a new title every week, and use of the internet is growing at an astonshing speed. Even mobile phones are now regarded as a news medium. How those in media departments of the advertisiing agencies cope with all that I really can’t imagine. The areas of research, the market reports and all the new legislation on what can and can’t be said must have turned buying media into a science.
 
In the mid nineteen-seventies I was instrumental in creating a new framework for the measurement and clarification of the lifestyle of national newspaper readers. It was called the Household Income, Expenditure and Readership Survey. Existing research showed who the readers were, where they lived, their age income and socio-economic group based on their job. That for years formed the basis of most media schedules. I believed there were fundamental differences within the social groupings and that the newspapers they read could influence them to consider many products not normally asociated with a given title; ie it was thought Daily Mirror readers wouldn’t be interested in advertisements for up market products or subjects like finance, whilst the reverse would be true for titles like the Times. I discussed the theory with Jack Rubins, then the media director of Dorland Advertising and we devised an outline plan for a research programme to examine and test the possibilities. The Mirror Group were far sighted enough to accept the proposal and finance the project.
 
The results of that survey completely changed the way advertisement space was sold in the newspaper industry. More detailed information than ever before became available about the readers and their lifestyle and proved to be of interest in areas far wider than the advertising industry. Perhaps it’s time to repeat that survey but this time include all the media, find out just who reads, listens, watches or speaks into what, and how work and leisure time is really spent in modern Britain. Is there a media group today as far sighted as the Mirror Group was then, and who would undertake the research? It would be expensive but the rewards would be great and  I bet the politicians would lap it up