case for buying ads across multiple channels and platforms,
thereby extending advertisers’ investment and reach.
“Something of this magnitude changes how ABC reports to
the industry,” says Kammi Altig, ABC’s communications man-
ager. “It’s customizable and it’s all-encompassing, and that is
certainly new and pretty revolutionary for us.”
It’s revolutionary for the entire publishing industry, accord-
ing to ABC board member Brenda White, senior vice presi-
dent and publishing activation director at Starcom USA, a
Chicago-based media agency. “The publishing industry is
evolving into a brand perspective versus a channel perspec-
tive,” she says. “Publishers have digital assets and they’ve
got print assets. In order to bring them together, [advertisers
and agencies] need to understand what the entire brand is all
about. For instance, when we look at People magazine, we’re
interested in its total audience. We want to buy People the
brand, and that includes its online audience, its tablet audi-
ence and its print audience. The CMR is really great because
it gives us one trusted source for all that information. It’s
one-stop shopping.”
Lavery likens circulation auditing to branded storytelling:
Previously, advertisers could read only a single chapter. With
the CMR, they can read the entire book. “Publishers and con-
tent providers need to be able to tell their complete franchise
story,” he says. “When it was just print, that story was pretty
straightforward. In a multimedia publishing environment, it’s
a lot more complicated.”
Turning the Page on Print
Launching the CMR was a simple and pain-free process. The
organization comprises four different publisher constituencies: newspapers, consumer magazines, business publications
and farm publications. The idea started with ABC’s business-publication members, who had already been producing for
several years a “multimedia” version of their traditional
publisher’s statements. As ABC leadership and staff began
discussing the shifts in publishing, they decided to adapt and
expand that concept for the rest of ABC’s membership. One
of ABC’s 14 advisory committees explored the idea further
and made a recommendation to the organization’s 38-mem-
ber board of directors, which approved a beta test of the CMR
for newspapers at its July 2008 board meeting.
“The newspapers came around, I think, for a number of
reasons,” Wachowicz says. “One of those, certainly, was the
significant press that their industry was receiving associated
with the decline in their traditional metric of paid [print]
circulation. They recognized that ABC reports are the most
widely accessed and relied upon reports for [advertisers],
so they decided, ‘We’re growing in other areas besides paid
circulation, and we’d love to be able to tell that growth story
through an ABC report that advertisers trust.’”
The Tribune Company volunteered to be ABC’s guinea pig
because it wanted to communicate to advertisers its entire
portfolio of products, including not only the Chicago Tribune,
but also RedEye, its free daily newspaper for 18- to 34-year-
olds; Hoy, its Spanish-language newspaper; TheMash, a
weekly newspaper written by and for teens; Metromix.com, its
local entertainment website; Chicago, its monthly consumer
magazine; and WGN Radio, WGN TV and CLTV, its radio and
television networks — in addition to a slew of related websites, e-newsletters, social media pages and mobile apps.
“We have the Chicago Tribune, which is our core prod-
uct with the traditional blue masthead, but we also have all
these other options for advertisers,” says Tribune Company’s
George, who is a former ABC employee. “That’s the reason
we decided to do the CMR. Whenever we talked internally
about our brand, we didn’t talk only about the Tribune, and
we didn’t talk only about paid circulation, which is going
down traditionally in newspapers. We talked about everything.
That’s one of the benefits of the CMR: Even though your paid
circulation might be smaller, if you take everything — your
Facebook fans, your hits on your website, your print product
— newspapers have [tremendous] reach. A publisher that
does a CMR can communicate that.”
Because ABC gives publishers the freedom to self-select
what metrics they want to report in their CMR, the Tribune
Company chose its preferred data sets internally, then fur-
nished ABC with the relevant information. ABC subsequently
audited the numbers, then released its first newspaper CMR
in June 2009. Straight away, the industry applauded — then
adopted — the tool.
“The [Tribune Company] is recognized as a leader in the
industry,” Wachowicz says. “By doing something new and
fresh, they were able to show that they had a story that was
much greater than a decline in paid circulation. This is a big
industry, but an industry that talks amongst itself. Through
viral marketing efforts, other [newspaper companies] recognized that they wanted to do something similar.”
Branded for Success
One such company was Tribune Company’s hometown rival,
Sun-Times Media Group. Like the Tribune Company, it has
an entire portfolio of products in addition to its core offering,
the Chicago Sun-Times, including seven daily and 32 weekly
newspapers in the Chicago suburbs —including the
Naper-ville Sun, the Southtown Star and the Joliet Herald-News —
and a growing portfolio of digital properties.
