To prototype or not to prototype, that is the question – can usa guidelines be embraced worldwide

There are a rich variety of magazines serving a wide array of niche targets vital to promoting targeted brands. The nature of their audiences are such that many (hundreds) cannot be rigorously measured by the syndicated services and prototyping offers a solution. Prototyping – estimating a magazine’s audience based on a subscriber study and using a model (judgmental and/or computerized approach used individually or together) to select surrogate “measuredâ€? publication(s) – is perhaps as much an art as a science. However, because of the pressure to include audience estimates in computerized planning systems necessary for increasing productivity, virtually all the major agencies, as well as the publishers, follow this process in the USA. Prototyping provides the data to create an estimate for the “unmeasuredâ€? magazine audience within the appropriate syndicated study for subsequent computer assisted media analysis along with all measured publications. This increases efficiency for media planners, buyers, and sellers tremendously.

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