The Audience Risk Manager uses historical magazine data on how many people read a specific issue of a title, how many recall seeing a specific ad and how many take action as a result of seeing that ad.

GfK MRI president Kathi Love hopes the tool will provide “a level of comfort to publishers who have been reluctant to embrace audience guarantees” by allowing them to work out the probability of them achieving what the advertiser wants.

Some publishers have jumped in feet first already, among them The Week magazine who began working with GfK MRI last year to provide the data to back the guarantees it made to advertisers that ads in its pages would generate higher than average recall.

Others have taken a different tack. Last June, Meredith announced a deal with consumer goods researcher Nielsen to identify a selection of its subscribers within Nielsen’s consumer purchase panel in a bid to measure the uplift in sales of goods advertised in Meredith’s magazines.