Accent on Living

A FAVORITE pastime of magazine publishers is the survey. Pick up a paper almost any day of the week and there’s another full-page layout bristling with maxima: first, best, biggest, fastest., highest, richest, most. The magazine — let’s call it Uproar — has been surveying itself; and to everyone’s surprise, including its own, Uproar now emerges as the foremost magazine ever to qualify for the second-class mailing privilege. Not only does the survey show that Uproar is on top, but it also discloses that what the public had always regarded as the really big guns in the magazine field are sliding downhill at a woeful rate. Compared with Uproar’s, their position is calamitous.

The Uproar survey is surprising simply because of what has seemed self-evident about Uproar for years and years past — a magazine grinding along on a slightly threadbare formula, its content roughly equivalent to daytime television. It is hardly imaginable that on Main Street or Madison Avenue one ever hears the question, “Have you read the latest Uproar?” By spending furiously on high-pressure house-to-house squads, Uproar has been able to keep its circulation around 2 million but there it stalls. Very little is going on around Uproar. Very little. It becomes plain that Uproar needs a survey — badly.

The people who make surveys are usually known by some such name as Medianalysis Associates, Inc., or Statistical Measurement Associates, Inc. (It doesn’t cost any more to do business with “Associates” than with an ordinary company, and it’s much more modern.) Their task is absurdly simple. All they have to do is to show wherein Uproar — far behind its field in point of circulation, advertising linage, dollar volume, and everything else — is actually the true, if unappreciated, leader. And in surveying Uproar into the lead, the easiest category for a beginning is under the heading “ Uproar Leads!” Who is gaining and who isn’t ?

The Associates start surveying Uproar’s performance month by month. It’s a grim picture for the past couple of years. Newsstand sales were dwindling, and so were the other indices. Advertising was terrible — thirteen months of steady decline, while competing magazines remained crammed to the bursting point. By August , ‘52, Uproar’s linage was striking bottom; it was so bad that it couldn’t become any worse. There was an upturn, consequently, in September — in fact, September linage in ‘52 was better than ‘51 by 17.4 per cent. The competition, meanwhile, was more or less at a standstill, with linage bulging at peak figures.

Thus, under the modest heading “Uproar Leads Again!” the Associates prepare a little table showing that while Uproar was gaining 17.4 per cent, the two biggest, magazines gained only 3.6 and 2.1 per cent respectively, and the third even lost 1.8 per cent — about as if Standard of New Jersey had mislaid a gallon of gasoline. But it makes a sprightly table nevertheless. Hurrah for Uproar!

What else can Uproar afford to say of its advertising position? The totals are certainly to be avoided. But hold on — what about the really weird lot of snippets that are scattered through Uproar’s pages in behalf of itch cures, how-to-do-it courses, pain relievers, deodorants and such? There are as many as a half dozen of these tucked away in a single column of many an Uproar page. And because the response to an advertisement in Uproar is so small, the turnover is heavy. Hardly any advertiser will remain in it very long, with the result that new ones are forever coming and going. The Associates explore the statistics and find that Uproar actually has more advertisers than its competitors. (This is probably the only item in Uproar’s big full-page advertisement of its survey that is at all what it seems to be.) The figures show up strongly in tabular form. “Uproar Has the Most Advertisers!”

The Associates wisely decide not to make circulation comparisons, for Uproar comes off too poorly on this count. But they have surveyed too many magazines to be perplexed about a trifle of this kind. Circulation may be balky, but what about readers? Not how many readers, but how ardent are they? The Associates retire to their secret cabinet. After making certain astrological calculations and examining the omens, they emerge with the news that Uproar’s readers think it’s a wonderful magazine. Conversely, by further occult methods, the Associates find that the readers of other magazines don’t like them at all. The rapid-fire talk and the manipulation of the three shells speed up a little in the text covering these pronouncements, but there’s another able to prove them. “More Headers Prefer Uproar!”

Another withdrawal into the mysterious cabinet, and out pop the Associates once again with the clincher. Do Uproar readers believe its advertisements? The answer is, most certainly yes. Absolutely. And the “other" magazines, detestable frauds that they are — do their readers believe their advertisements? The answer is no. They do not. (This seems reasonable enough, when one considers that the survey has already shown that the readers don’t like the other magazines they read, anyhow.) Hence, another table, another caption: “More Readers Believe Uproar Ads!”

Uproar leads! Uproar wins! Forward with Uproar!

One might think that the average adult could get some idea, by reading a magazine and its rate card and circulation figures, whether the magazine is any good or not. But this is not so. Only by a survey can he tell one magazine from another.