RFID Gives Focus Magazine a Sharper View of Readership

The Magellan RFID tags comply with the ISO 18000-3 air interface standard and have a data transmission rate (also known as a reply data rate) of 106 kilobits per second, enabling the interrogator to read many hundreds of the tags at once. This is why Magellan's technology is often used in document-tracking applications, where—as with the Focus magazine pages—multiple tags are placed close and atop each other as they are being read.

As the pages were flipped back and forth, and in and out of the interrogator's range, the device took constant reads. All of this tag data was associated with the person turning the pages, based on which button was pressed before the magazine was opened. The information was then saved to a flash drive inserted into the magazine holder. Once the tests were completed on all tagged issues, the magazine holders and flash cards were returned to the publisher, where RF-it's software was used to analyze the collected data.

While this data has helped Focus determine how long its testers spent on most pages, Deisenberg says there were times when the tags' movements in and out of the interrogation zone made it difficult to know which pages the participants were reading, and for how long. "People go through a magazine in a much more chaotic way than we expected," says Deisenberg. "Sometimes the [interrogator] could not decide which pages were open because of the way the reader was holding the magazine."

To remedy this situation, Dominik Berger, managing director of RF-it, says his company is experimenting with applying logic to its software that will deduce which page of a specific issue a person is reading during times when particular pages appear to be quickly moving into and out of the interrogation zone.

Before the next test of the technology, Deisenberg says, Focus hopes to refine the design of the holder to make it more comfortable for participants. "One complaint we heard from the first testers is that the holder is clunky," she states. "It's not easy to handle the magazine in the way they are used to."

Even if the magazine begins using the RFID-based system to measure how its issues are read, Deisenberg says, it does not intend to abandon its conventional surveys (in which readers answer questionnaires), because that provides a much more detailed glimpse of its customers' interests.

Mediamark Research and Intelligence (MRI), a New York-based provider of magazine audience and multimedia research data, is also experimenting with RFID-based readership tracking (see MRI Gearing Up to Test RFID for Tracking Magazine Usage).