The Problem with Readership Surveys

Publishers of all types of magazines spend many hours planning promotions and selecting front covers to attract the maximum number of people to buy a magazine. Whilst these magazines may well get "passed on" to secondary readers, or be read by partners, it is virtually impossible to design any magazine for anything other than the buyer.

It's thus a sense of enormous frustration for many publishers that the only available data is readership data.

As a strategic tool for publishers, readership data per se is fraught with problems. Some readers picked up by a readership survey may, for example, be people who never actually buy magazines and may have "read" that particular copy in a hairdressers, it might have been a friends "old" copy or even worse they glanced through it whilst queuing in the supermarket (and then put it back on the rack!).

Spook Room talks to people who buy magazines. And thanks to the technology that drives it, they may be people who bought the magazine just yesterday. We'll find out what they bought, why they bought it and what else they bought at the same time. (in addition of course to a little background on who they are and what they do)