Magazine Industry Scraps Monthly Reporting - and Why Advertisers Shouldn't Care

According to MediaDailyNews (and thanks to Bob Sacks for pointing this out), the Publishers Information Bureau - the organization that provides the numbers on booked magazine advertising revenues and pages - will discontinue its monthly report (free registration required) and go to quarterly updates. This apparently has put into a knot the knickers of many advertising buyers:

...the move is the latest in a pattern of similar moves by other media trade groups over the past several years that appears to be suppressing, not enhancing the flow of information about the advertising performance of their member media companies.

But I think that's a self-defeating view. Why do advertisers make choices based on media revenues? It's an institutional lemming effect - "Hey, look, Doug, all those lemmings are jumping off that cliff. Maybe we should, too!" A more sensible business approach would be for companies to examine the effectiveness of ads compared to the dolalrs they pay for them. If you aren't getting enough results per dollar, who cares how many others use the magazine? And if you are getting good results, who cares how many others use the magazine?

I suspect the real concern is that without some sort of outside guidance, media buyers and marketers will actually - gasp! - have to determine that effectiveness. Before too long, it would become apparent that they don't really know what works best and what doesn't, which would mean that many of thse people would be out of a job. However, don't blame them. Blame the marketing officers and CEOs and CFOs of corporations who recklessly spend ungodly sums. Worried about lowering your costs? Forget about outsourcing product manufacturing and service delivery - and handing the foundations of your company to someone else. Labor is probably only a few percent of your costs, whereas the marketing component will be ... what? A quarter? Half? More? What makes the misdirected effort so darkly humorous is that the techniques for doing this exist. Companies could save money now. But management would have make a decision to do something different - and that would mean being accountable. Perhaps the real onus lies with the investors and owners. If they didn't put up with such a waste of their money, management wouldn't either.