The firm hired brand and media metrics consultancy Sequent Partners earlier this year to look into why magazines have “traditionally been poorly represented in marketing mix models” and discovered that modellers needed more granularity from magazine data to fully and fairly value the medium.

Jim Spaeth, founding partner at Sequent, said: “Marketing mix models can’t fully measure the ROI of advertising without accurate weekly market-level audience data, a situation that has disadvantaged all media but television.”

However, MRI said that the combination of data from its range of consumer surveys would “level the playing field” for magazines and provide modellers with the data they needed.

Kathi Love (pictured) the firm’s president and CEO, said: “MRI’s R&D work on marketing mix modelling has resulted in a win-win for both us and the industry. Audience Accumulation, Issue Specific and Market-by-Market [All MRI studies] can, collectively, level the playing Field vis-a-vis other media in these models. our new deliverable will not only make these data available to modellers, it will make them extremely easy to accurately input into proprietary systems.”

The software, which is yet to be named, is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2010.