Media planners will soon be able to plan smarter investments in magazines and hit specific reach targets thanks to an upgrade in Roy Morgan Research’s media planning software, ASTEROID.

Magazine Audience Accumulation is designed specifically to provide insights into how magazine audiences grow over time, and aims to give agencies and advertisers a more accurate reflection of the return on investment from the print magazine component of a campaign, according to Roy Morgan.

The research company first measured magazine audience accumulation in Australia 15 years ago in collaboration with the Magazine Publishers of Australia (now Magazine Networks).

This year, Roy Morgan validated the main findings of the earlier research in a study incorporating 105 weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly and newspaper-inserted magazine titles – a collaborative project with Bauer Media and Pacific Magazines.

Roy Morgan said the research identified many distinct paths to full readership, typically called ‘accumulation curves’. These curves have now been built into ASTEROID, and can be run against all of Roy Morgan’s extensive profile data, from car buying intention to frequent cosmetic purchasers and Helix Personas.

The mathematics underpinning these accumulation curves model the variation in how different magazines’ audiences grow, and accurately reflect how many readers will have had the opportunity to see the advertising at any point across the campaign period, the research house said.

“Agencies and their advertisers know how many people in total will have the opportunity to see the advertising, but until now have not had a tool to sensibly apply the progressive reach over weeks when creating an advertising campaign featuring magazines,” Michele Levine, CEO of Roy Morgan, said.

“Our research showed that not all magazines accumulate readers at the same rate, so the solution was to develop and apply accumulation curves. The accumulation curves demonstrate the benefits of putting magazines first when constructing an advertising campaign also featuring ‘quick hit’ media such as TV and online.

“Agencies now have an enhanced trusted tool that enables them to better align print magazine advertising placement with advertisers’ expectations of response to their advertising campaign.”

The new software add-on will be available from 23 August 2016.