Do CAB audits create fraud instead of stopping it?
In this guest post, Scott Lewis questions whether audit bureaus are keeping up their end of the trust equation.
That moment from the early 1990s, is one I’ve never been able to forget.
I had opened a spreadsheet that had been accidentally attached to an email to find it held data I’d never seen before – including the print-run of the B2B magazine I was editing. 1200 copies. Which was a bit of a problem. Mainly because we were telling everyone its distribution was 8500.
So unless there was some serious loaves and fishes action going down somewhere, I was an unwitting party to a fraud.
After that I stuck to working for magazines that did have auditing from the Circulation Audit Bureau (CAB). It wasn’t perfect. Many publishers used bought-in lists to boost more genuine distribution.
I couldn’t agree with you more, Scott. I sat on a CAB working committee to bring more relevance and transparency to the CAB magazine audits many years back, with a decision made at that time to introduce mandatory auditing of verified recipients (opt-in subscribers) so advertisers could see a true picture as to which magazines had a ‘real’ audience as opposed to just a distribution list. After receiving push-back from a few of the larger B2B publishers, the toothless tigers at the CAB back-flipped and decided to make the verified reporting ‘optional’ – which left us with an audit process comparing apples with lemons. In recent years, it appears the amalgamated AMAA has lost interest in the CAB members, with the audit systems and processes becoming less and less relevant to niche and specialist B2B media companies. A recent survey of my senior sales team members on this point revealed that less than 5% of their clients or prospects know what a CAB audit is – and they are more interested in the opt-in audience profile and samples that we can share, than anything else. Unfortunately (as I would prefer we had a robust and relevant audit bureau in Australia) I feel the back-flip on mandatory reporting of verified recipients was the start of a long, slippery slope for the CAB.