This month, Bauer Media has unveiled a new metric ‘The Anatomy Of Influence’ to understand and benchmark the influence of media brands.

The AOI metric was developed by Kantar Media who studied over 2,500 consumers through complex analysis to generate simple-to-understand influence scores.

As a starting point, the study looked specifically at magazine brands. Kantar’s Influence Score or AOI has been built around three key components of the magazine brand consumer – the Head, the Heart and the Hand.

Head: The behavioural attributes towards brand usage and consumption across platforms creating two measures around engagement and intensity.

Heart: The attitudes about and feelings towards magazine brands with two clear measures around anticipation and connection.

Hand: The scale and type of actions as result of having consumed the magazine brands with two more measures around action and recommendation

Bauer has been using the findings to fine-tune the influential power of magazines in its portfolio. It is now embarking on a conversation with its agency and advertiser customers around the role of an influence metric alongside other accepted metrics of magazines such as ABCs and NRS.

What the research highlights to us here at Braben is how there is an increasing level of pressure on established measurement models for media given that media brands can now be found on many different combinations of platforms.

The question of what is influence and how do we harness it to drive action is one that will continue to be asked but as Bauer Media’s Chief Executive, Paul Keenan, pointed out towards the end of the session, ‘Reach without influence is just noise’.

The challenge now is to develop and agree a measurement model that understands how consumers are influenced by media brand and their content across the full mix of media platforms. As importantly, how the different media platforms can enhance influence through different combinations, depending on the media brand, content and consumer. Not to put it lightly, that’s quite a challenge but it appears to be becoming more and more of a necessity.

For another view on Bauer Media’s new AOI research, take a look at Chris Smith’s excellent article Beyond circulation figures and readership surveys on the Guardian Media Network.

I attended an event last week with the excellent Primesight team and one of the speakers was James Davies from Posterscope. At the heart of his presentation was a call-to-action to build an ecosystem in outdoor that all businesses in the space could contribute to and feed off.

He cited how the big players (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook – the familiar ‘biggies’ everywhere I turn currently) are each building their own ecosystem that feeds itself and by doing so grows the business.

As I watched the presentation, it reinforced to me that at the heart of every great communication campaign is a brilliant story.

Humans have told stories for thousands of years. The best ones have been told, shared, built on, retold, interwoven with new themes relevant to new ages, stolen, plagiarised, recut, uncut, translated and told through different mediums…

Stories are currency that people exchange to learn and add richness to life.

So, when thinking about the story you are going to tell about your business, it is also worth considering the ecosystem of stories that you are looking to participate in.

Like all eco-systems, stories interconnect and people will listen, tell, critique and retell your story to their own agenda. So, as you consider the story at the heart of your business, here are five questions worth thinking through:

What are the compelling stories right now for your audience?

What are the themes of the stories others are telling in your space?

What are the new themes in your story that you want to introduce?

Will these themes allow others to build on your story and develop it further?

Are there themes you can add to your story to make it more exciting?

In short, don’t think of your story as the only story.

Think of your story as part of an ecosystem of stories.

If told well, it will be a story which your audience and connected businesses will want to adopt as part of their own currency.

For further reading on storytelling in business, take a look at:

http://cognitivefilms.com/video-advertising/elements-interesting-business-story/

http://www.themoleskin.com/2010/03/storytelling-in-business-elements-of-story-structure/

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-11/strategy/29985877_1_stories-executives-plot