concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey last October, she and several editors on her staff wore black T-shirts with the words “AARP The Magazine — Rocking Generations of Readers” printed on the back.
Dennis Quaid, 56, was on the cover of AARP The Magazine to publicize the issue of medical errors. The magazine's cover subjects have become somewhat younger and its articles have a less geriatric tone.
On the front was the current issue of the magazine, featuring the rocker on stage with the headline, “The Boss Turns 60.” But as Ms. Graham, who is 55, said in a column in a subsequent issue, not everyone encountered at the concert shared her staff’s enthusiasm, most notably a woman in her 60s who said, “But why would you want people to know you’re old?”
For Ms. Graham, being born before the Kennedy administration is nothing to be ashamed of, and celebrities like Mr. Springsteen are increasingly happy to appear on the magazine’s cover. (“I used to be on the cover of Rolling Stone,” Ms. Graham quotes Mr. Springsteen saying from the stage of the concert, “but now I’m on the cover of AARP The Magazine!”)
There was a time when editors at the magazine — published bimonthly by the organization that advocates for Americans over 50 — fully expected AARP-eligible celebrities to reach for a 10-foot pole when invited to appear on the cover, but Ms. Graham said in a recent interview that the magazine has in the last few years “reached a tipping point where we’ve had A-list celebrities coming to us to be on the magazine.”
In fact, publicists for the current cover model, the actor Dennis Quaid, 56, approached the magazine, said Ms. Graham, saying that Mr. Quaid was primarily interested in speaking on behalf of victims of medical errors after his own 12-day-old twins nearly died when both were inadvertently given overdoses.
It turns out that the AARP magazine, which assures readers that they are in their glory years, is itself remarkably spry, never mind the economic downturn. The magazine sold $23.9 million in advertising in the second quarter of 2010, compared with $20.9 million during the same period in 2009, an increase of 14.5 percent, according to the Magazine Publishers of America.
During that same period, among roughly 235 major magazines, revenues grew 6.2 percent. As for the number of advertising pages sold, the AARP magazine was up 10.4 percent in the second quarter over last year, compared with an average page increase of just 1.1 percent for magazines overall.
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Mailed free to AARP members, it has the largest circulation of any magazine, distributing 24.4 million copies each issue in 2009, more than three times that of Reader’s Digest, which has the third largest distribution, with 7.6 million.
(An issue-oriented AARP publication, AARP Bulletin, had circulation of 24.2 million.)
AARP now includes within its eligibility range the majority of baby boomers — those born from 1946 to 1964 — making them, in a bit of symmetry, 46 to 64 years old. And the magazine, which in an earlier incarnation was called Modern Maturity and struck a more geriatric tone, now tends to feature on its cover celebrities on the younger side, including the actress Valerie Bertinelli (50) and Dr. Mehmet Oz (50).
Formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, the organization started going solely by its acronym a decade ago, and to say it represents retired people today is largely a misnomer: about half of its 40 million members are still working. (Membership exceeds the magazine’s circulation because only one issue is sent to a household.)
The current issue of the magazine (September/October) unveils a redesign that is decidedly contemporary, with more white space, short articles that tend not to jump to another page, and numerous referrals to the Web site (aarp.org/magazine), which also has been revamped.
Channels on the Web site recently expanded to 13 from seven, including one channel for technology, debunking the perception that older Americans are not computer literate. In fact, 46 percent of boomers were on a social media network in 2009, up from 30 percent in 2007, according to eMarketer, a research firm.
In a recent study, Nielsen determined that boomers account for 38.5 percent of purchases of consumer goods, yet only 5 percent of advertising expenditures are currently aimed at those ages 35 to 64.
“Today’s middle-aged and older consumers are different than their predecessors,” said a post about the study on Nielsen’s Web site. “The conventional wisdom that they spend little, resist technology and are slow to adopt new products needs to be re-assessed. Boomers are an affluent group who adopt technology with enthusiasm.”
While AARP previously catered to different ages of its membership with different publications (in 2002 it introduced a publication called My Generation aimed at those 55 and under while sending Modern Maturity to those over 55), today it sends AARP The Magazine to all members, but sends slightly different versions to those 50 to 59, 60 to 69, and over 70.
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In the current issue, the 70-plus version substitutes an article about hearing aids for one about hotel-branded merchandise in the other versions.
It also substitutes an advice column about changing careers at 51 with one about writing a novel, and an article about maintaining a strong marriage is accompanied by a modified illustration by Kagan McLeod of a couple sitting against a tree that bears their carved initials. (The illustration for older readers features a man who is bald rather than graying, a woman wearing a long skirt rather than jeans and, resting between them, a cane.)
“AARP has garnered this enormous audience and gets the buying power of this demographic,” said Lori Hiltz, executive vice president of the Chicago office of MPG, a division of Havas. She previously served as a senior vice president at the PHD unit of Omnicom in Detroit, where she worked on a campaign for the Jeep division of Chrysler, which is still running in the magazine.
Unlike the previous generation, “the 50-plus consumers coming into the segment now have adopted new technology, are more likely to have a college education, and have a greater depth of discretionary income,” Ms. Hiltz said.
The tracking poll, conducted by U.K. survey company YouGov PLC, has shown how much an automobile recall cost Toyota in reputation, and how long it took to bounce back. Its German arm has made headlines for measuring the deep dive in the reputation of a German fitness-studio chain after its founder's music festival last month ended in a deadly stampede. And BP PLC has used the poll to follow public response to the massive oil spill this year from its well in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a person familiar with the matter. (A BP spokeswoman declined to disclose which measures the company uses.)
Daily tracking polls are becoming a must-have for companies who have suffered blows to their public standing. Online polls are fast, and often less expensive than telephone surveys. But getting measurements quickly on so many companies involves taking steps that could dent the reliability of the numbers.
Those pitfalls, including questions about maintaining a random sample of participants, worry data experts who study survey methodologies. Still, the growing acceptance of Web-based surveys marks a turning point in the polling industry. Until recently, many established pollsters had shunned their online counterparts or said their methods were dubious. Now, some traditional telephone pollsters have begun incorporating online polling themselves.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index, a poll founded at the University of Michigan, until this year conducted surveys exclusively by phone. "We used to think telephone sampling was the way to go," says David VanAmburg, managing director of the index, which now is produced by a for-profit company in Ann Arbor, Mich. But then people started ditching landline phones—one in five households, at last count, were cellphone-only. This spring, ACSI began blending online and telephone polling.
YouGov began tracking American opinion of corporate brands three years ago for its poll, which it calls BrandIndex. (YouGov has conducted polls for U.K. papers the Sun and the Times, which like The Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp.) Each day, the company sends out enough surveys to members of its one-million-person panel of U.S. adults in order to receive back at least 5,000 completed surveys on 1,100 brands. Each brand is rated by between 50 and 125 people per day, and the results are combined into a single score.
"If you have a crisis or a potential crisis, you can have a sense of, how much of an impact is this having with consumers?" says Ted Marzilli, the New York-based global managing director for BrandIndex.
Other research companies take a different approach to using the Web to monitor corporate reputations. New York firm NM Incite, for example, monitors chatter on blogs and social networks, using automated tools to detect whether comments such as Twitter posts are positive or negative. While some respondents to an online poll might not be customers of the brand they rate, or might not have much influence over others, people who comment on blogs and social-networking sites are likely to have an outsize impact on brands.
A problem, though, is ensuring that the software correctly categorizes online buzz. "That's the hard part," says Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of digital strategic services for NM Incite, a joint venture of the media-measurement firm Nielsen Co. and McKinsey & Co. "Anyone who claims perfection is misleading you." The company continually updates its algorithm and occasionally has analysts review material, he adds.
Some data experts wouldn't consider YouGov's survey panel, recruited exclusively online, to be randomly chosen. For one, not all Americans have Internet access. Also, polls that recruit participants online favor the heaviest Web users, who are more likely to spot the ads seeking brand raters.
Mr. Marzilli says the company ensures respondents are representative of the overall population by such factors as age and gender. He also questions whether those who aren't online "would view BP or Toyota inherently differently than people with Internet usage." And he pointed to the company's success using similar panels for political polling—for instance, predicting Barack Obama would beat John McCain by six percentage points in the national popular vote for president in 2008. President Obama won by seven percentage points.
Even survey experts who have doubts about the reliability of online polling say it is a useful way of tracking changes in public opinion over time. "There is probably no other mechanism available" for the intensive daily results like those the BrandIndex seeks to generate, says Michael Brick, vice president of Westat, a company that conducts polls for the U.S. government. "If you use caution with the results, you can get something valuable out of them."
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Aug 6, 2010
With summer in full swing, the buzz scores of beverage brands are also hot, driven by consumer need to quench their thirst. Overall in 2010, however, Ritz remains the most popular snack brand, and Subway steals the spotlight as the quick service restaurant that offers the most value to consumers, according to market research firm YouGov.
Last Updated: 8:22 AM, August 6, 2010
Posted: 3:46 AM, August 6, 2010
