Monthly Lexean wary of auditing circ.

In March 2007, bi-monthly men's magazine Lexean, to prove to advertisers that 100,000 copies of its inaugural edition were circulated, underwent a "special audit" on condition that the publication would submit to a standard circulation audit after six months.

Six editions and a year later, despite repeated attempts by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Singapore (ABC) to get Lexean to commit, the title remains not audited and Holman Chin, GM for its publishing company Viscion Media Group, says the title has now become a monthly.

"We haven't audited yet...Lexean has just gone monthly so our first monthly publication is the Jan/Feb edition and we will have 11 issues a year. It's a different frequency now so we're looking at auditing in a year's time," he said.

Chin, who previously told Marketing he backed the auditing process, says he still believes in auditing even though none of Viscion Media's publications are audited.

"We haven't done it for any of the magazines yet because we're pushing with more online initiatives right now so eventually we will. We're launching a few new things that are non-publishing related as well which we will announce soon. Before we audit Lexean we need to settle it down and get a consistent track record with the publishing," he said.

"Should I spend more money doing this? I don't think it makes much more difference because no one else does it or not many recently. And they'll be sticking with their old numbers from 2006 or from wherever. It's an extra cost. Advertisers advertise because they like the content, plus we do events with them and that's a big thing because we go beyond just selling a page - we sell a bit more and there's more accountability that way. We help them organise readership events," he said.

Chin's somewhat half-hearted statements of intent to get Lexean audited will no doubt be frustrating to the ABC who, by Chin's own admissions, suffered "flack" for the special audit of its inaugural edition. News of the "one-off audit", as described by one publisher, drew criticisms from several publishers who were concerned it was allowing Viscion Media to print a large number of any magazine and claim that as an audited circulation.

At the time, ABC administrator, Eddy Quek said Lexean had an undertaking with advertisers in that issue that they only pay for ads after the circulation have been audited by ABC Singapore. The ABC Singapore issued an audit statement after verification of the circulation of that issue only, for the specific purpose and conditional on Lexean's undertaking to subscribe to circulation audit six months from launch.  

"These facts were widely publicised. We are still hopeful Lexean will subscribe to a circulation audit," he said, and was quick to reiterate it should be understood Lexean is not an audited publication.

"Advertisers and media buyers should be wary when publishers fail to audit. They can only ensure that they are not taken for a ride by insisting on audited circulation," he said.

When Marketing asked Chin if he thought an audited circulation for Lexean would be similar to its 100,000 readership number, he said that he hadn't looked at the figures and did not know what to expect.