At Spark in Manchester, Anna Sampson, insight & strategy director at Magnetic, shared findings from Magnetic’s study – Attention Pays: Optimising for Profit, that analysed the Profit ROI of magazines within cross-platform media campaigns.

The work was carried out in the wake of the Radiocentre and Ebiquity study that uncovered the extent of the disparity between the performance of various media and marketers’ perceptions.

Benchmarketing mined Profit ROI data from their database of 1000’s of models. For this study they compared 125 campaigns that used printed magazines with similar campaigns that didn’t.

The findings presented a case for rebalancing the media mix. “At an aggregate level, the market is underinvesting in magazines, and not achieving the optimal profit ROI that they could be.”

The work explores what this means for key vertical sectors. In beauty, for example, an optimal investment of 5% of budget would deliver brands a potential improvement in profit ROI of 164%. For brands in the finance sector, with an optimal 6% of budget directed towards magazines, there is potential for an improvement of 68%.

At an aggregate level, beyond beauty and finance, the analysis revealed that for those keen to optimise their magazine investment 5% is a useful guideline. If advertisers were to invest to the optimum i.e. 5% instead of the current 3%, they would see an on average 90% improvement in their profit ROI.

Check out all the pictures from Spark here.

If you’d like any further information on any of the Spark North presentations, contact hello@magnetic.media