Foxy catches a dose of lies, damned lies and statistics

“You’re my funny valentine, Sweet comic valentine”…enough already. Sadly, I’m not feeling the love this week, no matter how many heart-shaped pizzas AND CHOCOLATES I scoff…

Still, at least I have the pictures of the Campaign A-List Party to keep me amused. I don’t think I have seen quite so many old blokes trying to look young in a room since last year’s bash.

Now, apparently there were nearly 200 people there, although to be fair, that is probably the entire readership these days following a round of price hikes that have seen the subscription cost soar to over a grand. Yep, A GRAND A YEAR.

And, weirdly, for a magazine which claims to be the advertising industry bible, it does not publicly disclose how many subscribers it actually has. That’s a bit like running an ad campaign and not revealing the results to the client. (Surely that doesn’t still happen does it?)

According to its own figures, which have not been updated for over three years, Campaign claims to have 819,000 monthly unique users and 1.9 million monthly page views. Sounds impressive doesn’t it? But when you break that down it actually means readers look at just over two pages a month each.

Then they claim to have a social audience of 1.06 million. Again, sounds impressive doesn’t it? But when you look into it, something smells fishy. So, they have 224,000 Twitter followers, 78,000 Instagram followers, 37,000 on Facebook, 13,000 on YouTube and 41,000 on LinkedIn, which actually adds up to 393,000; not quite the 1.06 million then and no doubt most of them follow on multiple platforms too.

But a quick look at this week’s IPA Agency Census, exposes these figures further, with member agencies employing just 24,963 people, down from 26,787 in 12 months. Naturally, not every agency is an IPA member but even the most generous estimates put the UK ad industry headcount at just over 120,000, so who are the other 940,000 people in Campaign’s social audience?

Of course, here at Decision Marketing we make no such ridiculous claims, even though, with no paywall, we actually have a global audience of 5.18 billion Internet users.

We know we have readers in Australia (Stuey, Lara, Dave), in the US (Sundar, Tim, Andy and Mark), in Timbuktoo (Moussa, Abdoulaye, Mariam and Aminata) and even down in the West Country (Catherine and Martin). All we’ve got to do now is get some of the other buggers to read this shite…

Foxy has ditched X but is still on Instagram,  just don’t get too excited as she’s never there