MediaFlect

Buzzmachine’s got a new look, but not yet ads that Jeff Jarvis has promised. (He does note in one post that the blog gets him consulting gigs.) He expounds today on the adjustments TV Guide is making to its “(cough)” rate base, shrinking the number of guaranteed readers by millions. The coughs acknowledge what the magazine industry (wink-wink) knows: that a lot of circulation is based on assumptions, but are not truly provable.

On a panel a few years ago, Michael Elliott of Time talked about the failed venture he’d participated in, ecountries.com, and how the Web had essentially shot itself in the foot by offering so much data to advertisers. By telling advertisers exactly how many ads users or readers were actually seeing (the number of “impressions”), he argued, we were letting the advertisers have information they would then demand of other media. (You can tell a marketer exactly how many times his ad is shown in a Web page, but who knows how many people actually see that page in a magazine regardless of how many copies are sold?)

Marketers might gravitate away from print because print didn’t offer such fine detail, I supposed, or such specific targeting as the Web. Michael protested that magazines can do specific demo targeted with print runs to specific zip codes, but conceded just slightly a wee bit that magazines can’t target quite so finely as the Web.

I think Michael is a fabulous writer and editor, a tremendous thinker, and I like him as well. But I also saw in his comments a kind of defensiveness. What, we should bring rational thought and provable data to the process?! Heaven forfend. That would upset the whole model.

Cough.