Attention Pays the case for taking printed magazine investment levels back to those seen in 2015 to optimise for profit.

In Brief

‘Pay Attention’ demonstrated that magazines deliver quality attention at exceptional value, by combining attention data with CPT data by media channel, this started to raise the question are we under-estimating the opportunity that printed magazines present?

With this in mind in ‘Attention Pays’ we were keen to understand optimum levels of investment for printed magazines. Whilst it’s always better to do individual studies by brand, we wanted to provide the market with some useful guiding principles.

Our aim was to address three key questions:

• What is the gap in printed magazines investment across the market?
  
• What are optimum levels of investment into magazines for advertisers?
  
• How well do printed magazine perform on profit ROI?

To answer these questions we turned to Benchmarketing, an expert in this type of work. They conducted a meta study using their database which contains thousands of campaigns. For our study they compared 125 campaigns that used printed magazines with similar campaigns that didn’t. This database is made up of client research studies specifically measuring profit ROI, exactly the kind of data you need if you want to understand optimisation. 

Key Findings

• Benchmarketing have revealed that the conservative estimate on the levels of magazines under-investment by the market is £220million. If advertisers were to collectively re-deploy this money into magazines, they would see their campaign profit ROI optimised. This translates into advertisers spending 5% of their budget in magazines.
  
• This isn’t about increasing overall adspend, instead it’s about rebalancing the media mix, diverting some money back into magazines. Previous work has found magazine investment to be highly effective in the mix. ‘Bridging the long and short term’ divide found magazines to be particularly strong at delivering customer acquisition effects. It also demonstrated that magazines worked well in combination with TV and Digital.
  
• Overall at an aggregate level we found that magazine investment levels are currently not at optimum.
  
• Magazines really deliver when it comes to profit ROI for beauty brands. Magazines are the number one for channel profit ROI for beauty brands, followed by the AV channels of cinema, digital video and TV. For beauty brands not currently investing in magazines a 5% re-deployment of media funds into magazines would result in a whopping 164% improvement in campaign profit ROI.
  
• Finance advertisers don’t typically invest in magazines, only 22% do. Finance brands are more likely to invest in TV, digital and outdoor. However, ‘Attention Pays’ found magazines to be a top 3 performer when it comes to channel profit ROI, alongside digital and newspapers. For finance brands not currently investing in magazines a 6% re-deployment of their budget would mean tapping into campaign profit ROI improvements of 68%.
  
• Magazines are increasingly offering highly relevant opportunities for finance advertisers, especially those who see the benefits of finance messaging in a lifestyle context.

Implications for Advertisers

There is a strong case for pursuing the marginal gains that can be achieved by rebalancing the media mix. Small changes can make a really big difference. In a competitive media landscape where every pound counts there is an opportunity to optimise campaign profit ROI, by investing 5% into printed magazines this unlocks PROI improvements of on average 90%.