An Exit Interview

Hearst Business Media’s Barry Green, retiring this fall, reflects on 25 years of b-to-b circulation and offers a frank assessment of where things are going.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, June 1, 2009

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It’s a common refrain we hear about people who “choose” the circulation discipline: It falls into their laps. Barry Green, VP, director of circulation and audience development for Hearst Business Media, is no different. And as he prepares to leave his job of 25 years later this fall, he sits down with AD to talk about the shape of the industry he’s made an indelible mark in. Green has been a familiar figure on ABC and BPA committees, industry event panels and a frequent source of commentary on b-to-b magazine circulation and audience development. Here, Green sounds off on the evolution and meaning of “audience development” as a discipline—he’s a “total believer”—the inevitable march toward integrated audience dynamics, and an audit landscape that’s in the midst of a paradigm shift, driven largely by cramped economics and multiplatform data.

Give us a little background on your career.
I started out at BPA as an auditor. I was there for five years. And then I was at Computer Fulfillment for nine years.

It’s funny, as an auditor you don’t know what’s really going on with the other side. You’re verifying what they do and what the results are. And then on the fulfillment side, I was an account rep and I became a quasi circ manager working with the circ managers and publishers of the clients. So I got to learn some of the things that the publishing side did. And then I arrived at Hearst, which is where I’ve been for the last 25 years.

We’ve got a database of emails, about 1.5 million engineering email addresses. So it’s pretty voluminous, and a lot of stuff on our database is integrated between the print and the digital and the Web and keeping all the demographics in line with the different audience members.

What’s had the biggest impact on your job?
Our integrated database has been the biggest conduit of the transformation of my job within the last 10 years, even more.

Was it gradual?
Yeah, it was gradual and then it became sudden. It was in the formulating process about ten years ago, and I was advising the Web group of things we could do and integrate together. And it was part of the formulating of our email database for marketing and list rental, and usage for circulation endeavors and audience growing for the Web.

All of a sudden [the Web director] was gone and the people below him were gone and it fell on me to be the head of Web development. Not the technicalities of the Web sites, because I know nothing about that, but what to do with it and what could we do with it. Then it became learning email marketing rules and regulations and playing around with getting the data on somebody reflective of where they came from and the demographics that would apply across the board on the electronic industry.

It’s been a great shift in importance in the audience development side. I have evolved from ‘circulation’ to ‘circulation and audience development’ to actually being much more confident just saying ‘audience development.’ I probably had that breakthrough about six months ago. I always thought that it was just terminology, semantics. It didn’t matter, you had stuff to do and you did it. But it’s become a total rethink.

Is that because you’re thinking about it as a strategic function?
It’s the perfect storm. And it’s almost like saying why don’t we call it ‘subscription marketing?’ Or ‘demographic marketing,’ and so on, and all of those things are circulation, but actually go back to the audience development verbiage. All of that, including circulation, goes into audience development.

The flip side of that is in some small publishing companies, if they have two magazines and one person on circulation, it may not be anywhere near that utopia of audience development. It’s circulation.

And that’s basically the normal circulation stuff. But once they say, ‘Let’s have a digital copy for people who want to get it that way, and we’ve got advertisers that want to advertise in print and on the Web.’ Once you do that, it’s totally different. I’m a total believer in audience development now.

We’ve got a big story on audits in this issue. How do you see all of this impacting the way audits are performed and valued?
It’s so hard for the audit bureaus and the traditional circulation developers to wrap their heads around the diminishing of the audit as part of the entire sales process. Many books have dropped their audits or are not even in print at all.

It’s hard to think about diminishing the qualitative aspects of the audits. There are ways that audited companies can maintain data and still be comfortable with the data being accurate, but not being within the current rules of BPA and ABC.

People a lot of times misstate the cost and say, ‘Oh, I might be able to change audit bureaus or eliminate an audit and save $10,000.’
That’s not the money they’re spending on maintaining the database—this file of qualified people who receive the publication and/or the Web information, enewsletters, and Web traffic. They’re not talking about that. They should be emphasizing that if they don’t report one-year, two-year, three-year—and requestors—and obviously I’m talking about b-to-b controlled here, if they don’t have to do that, depending on the circ size, they could be saving $250,000 dollars—flat out—by not auditing. It’s about changing the methodology of how you verify that people are qualified and how you get a good return for your advertising.

Where’s that money going?
Qualification, requalification, request efforts. For instance, you could have a budget of $300,000—let’s say for a 100,000-circulation magazine. Depending on the percent requests, percent one-year, two-year and so on, total audit cost for the year is $12,000. That $12,000 doesn’t mean anything.

If this is lightened qualitatively—and it’s so hard for an audit bureau to let go of that, and I can understand because you don’t want garbage out there, you want to give the advertiser the proper people to reach—you can take that $300,000 and knock it down to $100,000.

Audits are necessary so you don’t have the wild West out there, but it now seems that there’s less of a reliance on the audit statements to sell with. A lot of the sales people don’t even take it out. They have to be able to rely back on the data and say it’s audited, but the statement itself, I think I can speak generally, has decreased in use on the sales side.
It’s more about saying what I can get back to you for your investment. We have circ, this is the number we serve in print and digital, it’s audited by BPA or ABC. That’s enough for many people.

When do the details need to come up, then?
The audit debate props its head up at times when a competitor points out a difference between them and you and your publisher and sales people are all up in arms—’How could we have 11,000 people in consumer electronics manufacturing when they’ve got 13,000?’ And I would say, ‘Well, they have 10,000 in computers and computer peripherals, and we have 12,000.’

But that’s not what the marketer was focusing on. It is necessary when it’s necessary. But there are so many more items in the arsenal of sales now that our reps’ heads are swimming. What do they focus on this week? What is going to be the key to have an advertiser take a stronger look at electronic products?

So there’s no big strategic agenda here?
People have been migrating away from it. However you slice it, it’s money. The only consideration is dollars.

I’ll say, without naming names, one publication that has ceased auditing did it right at the statement that would have had to verify two promises ago what they were going to show on their statement. It’s up to the advertising community to chastise them. But if that doesn’t happen, what are we or our competitors going to do about it? If it doesn’t adversely affect them, there will be more non-audits, or even a reduction of quality of what is shown on the statement.

It doesn’t always work, but if a marketer says I’ve only got 80 percent now and 20 percent two-year I could say the other magazine has nothing! They aren’t auditing at all. So how can you hold 20 percent against me when the other magazine could have 90 percent two-year and three-year?

If the advertising community is not going to back up the auditing bureaus, then there’s going to be fewer and fewer audits. It can’t be any more obvious than that.

Given your perspective, is that a supportable long-term situation, or will it come around and kick us at some point?
It might be a ‘50-year shift.’ But we’re in another dynamic shift. I’ve said at meetings, ABM, ABC committees and BPA committees, I don’t know what the timeframe is going to be, but I would be shocked if audits aren’t very, very different. I believe that in order for publishers to survive, and if the advertising community still feels the need for audits, I believe the proof is going to be what they are getting for their advertising dollars, who is a magazine reaching, but analyzed by not who’s updated their requests.

What will this look like?
It’s suspending all the money to contact a subscriber to ask if they still want to receive the magazine. So you spent a dollar or three for each subscriber who told you he wants to get it and may or may not give you demographics, too.

Instead of that, you go to the other debatable item, which is negative option. For example, we send an email to 50,000 people on our file who are getting the magazine. We start with requestors in the one-year category. With email marketing, even under CAN-SPAM, as long as someone doesn’t tell you they don’t want it, they get it. That’s allowable.
So if you send out 50,000 emails to current subscribers and you allow them an option to ‘click here’ if they don’t want to receive the magazine anymore, and you’ve verified that 95 percent of them were delivered emails and you’ve got 5 percent of them opting out you’re left with 95 percent requal.

So that’s the big money-saver?
You’ll have to figure out ways to get demographics. Maybe every three years you do a third of the file. So the $300,000 comes out to $100,000 per year. The demographics will change a little, but if a person is still there at the same company, what are you missing? In the great wash of who you’re reaching, it’s going to be the same amount of people.

So, negative option is going to come, and it’s either going to come audited or not audited. You at least have to try different ways of saving money. And like I said before, it’s all the perfect storm. The perfect storm is audits are changing, the Web is changing things, the concept of advertising and return on investment is changing, and the economy has tanked.
So on top of how difficult it is for circulators to do their circulation duties, suddenly there is no money to do it, and on top of that there are no advertisers to support the publications, so there is even less money, and layoffs.

So, no one can say that these moves are strategic. There were strategic moves going on, but they fell off the face of the earth. Everything comes down to money, in my opinion.

So what about the integrated audits?
We’re creating with ABC’s help these new multimedia statements that they’ve come out with and BPA has one as well. The ABC statement has the normal statement data as well as the multimedia statement data, and gross contacts.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If someone realizes that you have 17,000 circulation but you reach 31,000 people gross with all the various products, it’s 31,000 hits of eyeballs. Good, bad or indifferent—someone will laugh at you and someone else will say that’s great.

How is all of this changing day-to-day functions?
It’s almost like the circulation audit side of the work has become the tail as opposed to the rest of the dog. It used to be the tail wagged the dog, but the tail is there when needed.
Speaking for myself, I’ll realize it’s August already, our audit issue is coming up in three or four months, and we’d better get an email out there. We had been concentrating so hard on all the other things—building the database, developing the email database, the list rental, money coming in, doing 15 enewsletters each month. That takes time.