MEDIA FORUM: Will circulation figures ever be truly transparent?

Can anyone persuade publishers to become more open about circulation figures and would any change be for the better?

Whatever you think about the pros and cons of last week's revelations about The National Magazine Company and its Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, the whole episode can hardly be construed as good news for the integrity of the ABC system. But so what, you may well ask. There have been question marks over the ABC system for as long as anyone can remember.

For those who missed it, NatMags was found guilty of breaching rules on bulk sales. In the figures for January to June last year, it included a large number of copies in the bulks column that should by rights have appeared in the 'monitored free distribution' column. A minor distinction, you might think, but the extra copies made a substantial contribution to trading currencies during the period in question. The rogue 'sales' were those shifted in joint promotions with national and regional newspaper publishers whereby the titles were 'bagged up' with newspapers. They were thus extra incentives to a newspaper purchase However, no money changed hands for the magazine in each bag.

This was a reminder, should one be needed, that the rules on bulk sales are still open to abuse, prompting many to speculate that reform of the system is not moving forward quickly enough. Even fans of NatMags (and it has many defenders) admit that the publisher was being difficult when it claimed it hadn't understood the rules. After all, it found countless ways to prevaricate, including disputing the ABC's preliminary findings line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph. The appeal process took three months.

So is it time for the industry to demand movement here - not just on the issue of bulks but on other transparency issues, such as forcing magazines to release figures on individual issue sales? Some analysts believe that single-issue figures are now the main priority. Once that level of transparency is achieved, the bulks issue will be easier to police. Of course, publishers tend to argue that this will be too costly for all concerned, especially for the big buying points. And anyway, buying the medium is already complex enough.

'Rubbish,' Paul Thomas, a managing partner at MindShare, counters. 'The reason publishers don't want monthly figures is obviously that it will highlight the massive issue-by-issue variations there are and that will open up the market to seasonal pricing. I'm more than happy to negotiate against circulation.'

It would also, he argues, make publishers manage their inventory more effectively. At the moment, everyone has a fair idea of the issues that genuinely sell well and those that don't. So a lot of opportunistic advertisers come into just a handful of issues, which grow to the thickness of telephone directories. 'There's a need to penalise advertisers that are creating the clutter and aren't committed to using the medium the rest of the year,' Thomas says. 'If there is a seasonal market, they can run smaller issue sizes and charge more. For many magazine advertisers, stand-out is a real issue. The current system allows publishers to hold prices artificially - and the fact that they resist change makes you wonder whether they have any faith in the ability of their sales teams to trade against the actual figures.'