Reach more people without spending more 

Delivering a young, upmarket audience is a natural strength of magazines, making it very effective used in combination with TV (older down-market) and Newspapers (older-upmarket).

This media efficiency map shows the complementary nature of television and magazines, where magazines deliver a young upmarket audience compared to an older downmarket audience delivered by television

The more invested in a single medium, the greater the diminishing return in coverage. It is the key point in exploring magazines' role within mixed-media schedules.
Eventually any medium will merely add frequency to its heavy users. To ensure the maximum reach for a campaign it is likely that a mixed media approach will provide a better result than any single medium.

When considering which media to use it is important to appreciate the inherent strengths and weaknesses of each. Everywhere in the developed world TV tends to deliver consumers who are mass market and concentrated in the older demographics. This doesn't mean younger, more affluent groups on TV can't be targeted, it just means that, because they are not a natural strength of the medium, more upscale or younger audiences will become increasingly expensive to deliver.

Magazines, on the other hand, tend to deliver more affluent and younger audiences. The strengths of both media complement each other perfectly.

To help identify the value added by the addition of magazines to TV, BMRB produced a fusion of BARB audience data with NRS weighted TGI called Mercury. This enables planners to measure with more accuracy than previously possible, the delivery characteristics of TV with print. The graph right illustrates what a typical TV schedule might look like. If targeting particular groups the delivery might be slightly different, but not significantly.

On the surface everything is pretty much as expected - purchasing about 400 ratings and reaching around 73% of main shoppers roughly 4.5 times across the burst. But, scratch beneath the surface and a very different picture emerges. Those shoppers who view a lot of television have had almost 900 ratings delivered against them with a frequency of 9 or 10 exposures.

At the other end of the scale, the younger, more affluent consumers are seeing least of the advertising - only 160 ratings against these light viewers. The schedule is missing 1 in 2 of them - and those that are reached are seeing the advertising only 3 times.

The dotted grey line at the top of the chart should be much flatter than it is if this 'broadcast' schedule were truly going to deliver a broadcast audience. Adding (more) magazines to the schedule will go a long way to redressing this imbalance.

Doing this, the first thing that would be appreciated is that magazine ratings are very much cheaper than TV. If it is upscale or younger audiences that are of interest (and this is where under-delivery will be most acute) then magazines are just one third the cost of TV.

In other words, moving 100 TV ratings into magazines will get 300 ratings of identical size for the same budget. For mass-market audiences (like Main Shoppers), magazine ratings are closer to half the cost of TV. This increase in ratings obviously results in an extension to advertising presence as well as bringing the campaign's cost per rating point down significantly.

But the biggest advantage is the increase in coverage that this strategy will generate and the distribution of that coverage in a truly 'broadcast' manner. Mercury can measure how magazines improve the performance of the schedule. The grey bars represent the TV only burst already seen. The red bars represent a mixed magazine and TV schedule of 300 TV ratings and 193 magazine ratings. The 193 ratings, rather than 200, are driven by the way in which schedules are constructed on Mercury. The figures are, frankly, conservative: the combined ratings are probably under-estimated.

At the macro-level coverage shows an increase of 18% to a level of 87% in total. The heavy viewers are still seeing too much advertising but the frequency against this group has dropped slightly. (To reduce this further would require moving more ratings out of TV).

But it is with the light viewers that the improvements are most impressive. Coverage has risen by a massive 49% to the 76% level and frequency is now at a more sensible figure of just over 4 opportunities to see. The red line is much flatter, much more broadcast, than the grey dotted line. The difference between these two lines represents the increased number of consumers that will be exposed to the advertising for no additional investment.

What does the last 25% of budget buy? The answer is, if left on TV, not as much as magazines would. All the people that TV finds it easy to reach (the heavy viewers) have seen the advertising too much already. Consequently, the only people left to reach are the ones that don't watch much TV. It seems a little strange that a medium might be used to reach the people that don't use it - but after 300 ratings on TV, this is pretty much what is happening.