Top Consumer Publishers: Settling the scores.

Campaign's first report on the UK's top consumer publishers assesses each company based on the events that have driven it through the year, along with financial and other measures.

Campaign's first Top Consumer Publishers report aims to provide an insight into the leading publishers in the UK, focusing on achievements with their editorial products as well as the service they have provided for advertisers.

The aim is to balance a subjective analysis of each publisher - nine consumer and eight customer - with financial and other factual information. However, gaining access to information on advertising revenues, retail sales value and turnover proved as fruitless as ten-pin bowling uphill.

Some publishers were more helpful than others and, in the case of a plc such as Emap, much of the information is publicly available. But there are some gaps in the tables showing financial information. This is for various reasons and partly because, since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, companies that are part of larger public groups (such as Redwood and Forward Publishing) are prevented from divulging financial information.

Other companies, such as Conde Nast, are privately owned and declined to provide worthwhile data. Companies House information on such companies is often so out of date that we decided not to use it.

However, despite these barriers to providing a detailed analysis,it was still possible to get an insight into each publisher through such events as magazine launches and closures, innovations that they have put in place for advertisers and the quality and stability of management teams that run each company.

Influenced by its bigger sister, Campaign's Top 300 Agencies report, Top Consumer Publishers sets out to offer a strong opinion on each publisher based on the events that have driven them through the past year or so.