Scandal in Canada? Fat Chance, Eh?

By: Mark Fitzgerald They're too polite to say it out loud, but advertising and newspaper industry figures in Canada are more amused than alarmed by the circulation scandal down in the States. "It has provided some mild entertainment over the summer," one executive laughed, before quickly admonishing a reporter not to attribute that quote.

Canadian publishers and advertisers can be a little smug about news that roils even U.S. newspaper groups with spotless circulation records for one simple reason: Circulation isn't how newspapers measure success in the Great White North ? readership is.

"Readership is the currency for setting rates and buying advertising," says Bob Reaume, vice president of policy and research for the Association of Canadian Advertisers. As a result, there's no incentive to inflate circulation, he says: "It's not that we're more moral here than media sellers in the States."

For almost two decades, virtually the entire Canadian daily newspaper industry has reported its readership twice a year as part of a study that is universally accepted by advertisers and agencies. And since 1997, the entity that conducts the readership research has been organized as a tri-partite body of newspaper, advertiser and ad agency members that is identical in composition to the world's largest circulation auditor, the Schaumburg, Ill.-based Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC).

But Canada's Newspaper Audience Databank, better known as NADbank, gets newspaper participation even ABC would envy. With a membership of 75 Canadian dailies ? and the two jointly operated Detroit dailies in the U.S. ? NADbank covers 97% of the nation's total daily newspaper circulation.

"Absolutely, readership is the leading metric here," says NADbank Executive Director Anne Crassweller. Newspapers were actually a little late to switch to measuring audience over sales of copies, she adds: "All the other media were bought on eyeballs."

And with NADbank controlling the research on newspapers, there's no chance for individual papers to fudge with their audience numbers, either.

It's a system that may someday come south to the United States.

For more than a half-decade, the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) has been trying to convince the industry to adopt the readership metric. In fact, more than a year before this summer's scandals, NADbank's Crassweller met with NAA officials to talk about the prospects for a U.S. version of a universally accepted readership study. NAA's Vice President of Circulation Marketing John Murray says the readership metric keeps circulation and other newspaper departments concentrating on building value for advertisers: "Advertisers want to know how many people saw the ad, which you can't answer with circulation."

Ironically, some worry the circulation scandals may actually impede progress toward adopting the scandal-free readership measurement. Says NAA President and CEO John Sturm: "I think that this issue ? moving towards the readership metric so we can be on same platform and be measured as other media are measured ? is so important that I would hope like heck this temporary circulation blip doesn't become linked in a way that the cynics would suggest that moving to readership is just a way to cover up problems on the circulation side."