Magazines Warming To Effectiveness of Time Spent

The tides are shifting.

Historically, the magazine industry has been against using time spent as a measurement of a medium's impact. After all, much more time is spent with TV than with magazines.

But recently, the Magazine Publishers of America have been putting more emphasis on each minute consumed rather than overall time spent, and guess what? Magazines stack up quite favorably.

Which is why Ellen Oppenheim, CMO of the Magazine Publishers of America is now touting a new metric called "Ad Value Per Minute."

All we can say is "welcome to the time spent club Ms. Oppenheim". You're not alone, by the way. It now seems that there is a new round of interest in advertising circles regarding the relative value of time spent.

Not with the media, mind you.

But, with the advertising.

Of course, the most accurate format in which to measure time spent with advertising is digital video. Viewers click in to start the video and click out when it no longer interests them. Those start and stop points are measurable.

And, we would argue, monetizable.

Viewer time spent for the money invested in which to create the video will either prove to be a good return on investment for the advertiser. Or, not.

The thing is, that ROI is now transparent. It still amazes us how many advertisers ignore this data. Or, fail to use it in a proactive manner.

If advertisers can now know how well the commercial involved the viewer, why not pay their agency accordingly?

Advertisers say accountability is their number one priority. If true, you'd think their actions would better support their words.