Archive for the ‘Digital’ Category
Publishing Talent is Everywhere
12 Jan 2010
by James Meyers
One of the unfortunate realities caused by the 2009 recession is that a lot of very talented people are out of work. One of the hardest hit sectors has been the publishing industry where powerhouse newspapers and magazines have cut staff or gone out of business entirely. New graduates are finding it nearly impossible to find publishers who have open positions and are hiring.
Even if your particular company has weathered the recession fairly well, like Imagination Publishing, the atmosphere of uncertainty that surrounds our clients causes everyone to be overly cautious about adding staff even when business is growing.
Consequently, publishing talent is everywhere. The state of publishing has allowed us over the past year to have a number of outstanding contractors and interns in our offices who would not have been previously available. These talented individuals, hungry for opportunities, have made significant contributions to our work and as a company we could not be successful without them. These positions offer both the company and the individual the opportunity to see each other in action. As a result, several interns have been offered and accepted full time positions at Imagination as they became available.
I suspect that this will continue to be both the situation and an opportunity throughout the publishing industry for the foreseeable future. For publishers and marketers, I say you should seize this opportunity to tap into the wealth of available talent by constructing creative scenarios where the best talent can demonstrate what they have to offer. For editors, designers, marketing professionals and digital specialists, now is the time to impress innovative companies with your creativity, passion and energy. You need to create your own opportunities to be noticed and prove your value to companies who can afford to be highly selective right now.
Harvard Business Review Article Reinforces The Core of Custom Publishing
11 Jan 2010
by James Meyers
The new January 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review has a fabulous article called Rethinking Marketing. It is a must read article for all chief marketing officers but even more so for agencies who make their living by supporting marketing initiatives and have seen their traditional advertising business continue to erode.
The article correctly identifies a fundamental shift in marketing that custom publishers have benefited from over the past ten years. This trend has resulted more than ten straight years of increases in custom publishing spending by marketers while mass media advertising has fallen dramatically. The secret that custom publishing “gets” is that customers today expect to interact deeply with companies, and with each other to shape the products and services they consume. It is the customer who has the control to determine whether a product is successful and no amount of traditional advertising can change that.
In order to be successful, HBR points out that companies must shift their focus to building their long-term relationships with their customers rather than trying to “influence or push” customers to buy. Today it’s about understanding the complex needs of customers, nuturing them, cultivating them and retaining them for the long run. Smart marketers are shifting from measuring product profitability to measuring customer profitability. Just as importantly, traditional marketing goals like brand equity and market share are being replaced by new objectives like customer equity and customer lifetime value.
Customer, rather than product objectives have been the core of custom publishing for more than a decade. The essence of custom publishing has always been focused on building long-term relationships between marketers and their customers. The unique ability that custom content has enhance customer relationships and increase lasting loyalty is the secret to custom publishing’s stellar growth. Custom publishers have a ten year head start on traditional advertising agencies on understanding how to use content to build customer relationships. With the explosive growth of digital delivery channels giving customers instantaneous access to content as well as each other, custom content providers will continue to flourish as more and more marketers shift from pushing individual products to building long-term customer relationships.
The Aha Moment of Print Magazines
8 Jan 2010
by James Meyers
I had a wonderful lunch yesterday with a prospective client in Washington, DC. At one point, they asked me that question which has been asked so many times over the past several years, “Do you think that print is going away?”
I’ve thought about this question many times and so I answered it with an unequivocal, no. Of course, there’s no denying the seismic shift that is sweeping media and content delivery because of the Internet. Digital delivery of information has changed everything and will continue to do so as technology, communication and innovation rapidly allow all of us to choose how we want to consume whatever it is that we are looking for.
But there are some very strong reasons why print will continue in the future as well. First, we all know that there’s intangible quality and texture to print that will continue to attract it as it always has. Second, the portability of print will also endure. But I believe the most important attribute about print is the “Aha” factor. Print dominates over digital in its ability to create the Aha moment. The thing that I love about browsing a magazine or newspaper is the unexpected article that excites me, interests me or enlightens me in a way I never expected and wasn’t looking for. With digital, I search and learn, with print, I browse, learn, think and am entertained all at the same time.
As I boarded my plane back to Chicago, I once again proved my point. I purchased The Harvard Business Review, Yoga Journal and The Atlantic at the newsstand. Although these three magazines have nothing to do with each other, they all mean something to me and all three provided information, entertainment and stimulated some action on my part.
Let me give you an example. The new January issue of The Harvard Business Review is completely reinvented from an editorial and design standpoint which is what first caught my eye. I highly recommend that you pick it up the new issue for many reasons but particularly for the article on “Rethinking Marketing”. It is an enlightening insight into the changes that are occurring for every company and organization that will necessitate a complete change in strategy and organizational structure.
This HBR article, that I wasn’t searching for, provided such an Aha moment that I’m tingling with how I can communicate the breakthrough thinking to my company and our clients. I’m certain that I’ll be committing my blog tomorrow entirely to this future trend but for now, back to my original point.
Print will always be a strong delivery channel for target audiences who crave well-written editorial content that informs, provides thought-leadership, entertains, provides the unexpected and delivers that Aha moment.
Long Live Magazines!
7 Apr 2009
by James Meyers
Another business trip to the west coast! As I fly through the air at 35,000 feet for four hours without online access, how will I possibly survive?
Good old print magazines. They’re still great at informing, exciting, awakening, thrilling, surprising, uniting and engaging. Just like digital, those attributes can also still be found in print.
When I’m online, I’m usually looking for something. It might be information on a specific topic, or another user with similar interests to mine or a company that interests me. I browse, but I’m usually browsing in an area that interests me. I spend hours every day online usually looking for something or interacting but it’s nice to sit back and passively enjoy the unexpected.
With print, I might be reading a special interest magazine but I also might be browsing a daily newspaper or lifestyle magazine. And I’m reminded of how happy I am to find things I didn’t know I was looking for like an article on museums in the Financial Times, an in-depth look into China in The Economist, an article on leadership in BusinessWeek or the latest in men’s fashion from Esquire.
And I’m not alone. As I look around the first class cabin (I luckily got an upgrade), I see three people reading books (not on Kindles), one reading People, one reading Road & Track, one reading the in-flight magazine, two working on spreadsheets on their computer, two people in conversation and two more sleeping.
It’s my favorite part of flying. The chance to toss four or five magazines into my briefcase and then spread a couple of hours being entertained, enlightened and educated on topics I wasn’t really looking for.
I’m lucky to work in an environment every day where I get to use and experience the best of both print and digital publishing worlds. Both have incredible strengths that our clients use to connect and engage their customers and members. The smartest marketers utilize both print and digital in an integrated strategy to use custom content as a highly effective marketing tactic.
They’re Partners, Not Clients
24 Mar 2009
by James Meyers
Over the past several years, Imagination has come to understand the importance of customer relationships to insuring business success. During the early years of our custom publishing business, we successfully grew the company by focusing intensely on driving new business opportunities. While the strategy worked, we too often found ourselves needing to replace lost clients. In the newspaper business, we called it churn. Often times it was because the client’s budget was cut, or a personnel change at the client or they decided to try something new. Like the time a client decided to eliminate their very successful custom magazine in order to pay for sponsoring seat cushions at the Super Bowl. They did it one year and the custom magazine was gone, the Super Bowl sponsorship was gone, the great ROI was gone and soon after the CMO was gone too.
Occasionally, our intense focus on developing new clients caused us to underestimate the opportunities that we had with existing clients. Eventually, we realized that our best opportunities for growth came from clients where we had moved beyond a client/vendor arrangement to a valued partner relationship.
For years, we had used terms like customers and clients to describe our relationships but the reality was that they weren’t really relationships because they were based on “I need something and you can sell it to me” rather than a much more intertwined partnership. And it’s true partnerships with partners who understand, value and are willing to invest in custom content and publishing services that are they key to long-term success for both parties.
Like every company, we began 2009 unsure of the effects that the global recession would have on our business. We’ve seen some losses but we have more than made up for them with new business opportunities from existing partners and new clients who were seeking the full range of strategic custom content strategies that we provide. We take pride in the fact that many of our largest partner relationship have been in place for more than five years and that our business with them has consistently grown. In the end, isn’t that what a successful relationship is all about? The opportunity for both parties to grow by understanding each other’s needs and expectations while working together in a spirit of mutual respect and trust.
Business relationships don’t happen on day one. It takes time to develop and nurture a partnership so that both sides benefit from the relationship over the long run. We’re proud of our partnerships with some of the world’s leading companies and trade associations.
Are Editors Still Necessary?
7 Dec 2008
by admin
I had dinner this week with the president of leading trade association for business professionals. For nearly two hours, we debated the changing role of editors in today’s digital world and whether in the future, editors will even be needed.
Let me start by saying that years ago, before I started my custom media company, I was a senior executive for a major daily newspaper. Many things troubled me about the newspaper business at that time. One was the dismissive attitude of editors toward this new newspaper start-up called USA Today. Who would ever read this “Mac-lite” newspaper filled with short stories, colorful graphics and reader commentary, and never ending surveys and polls? Surely, it would never last! Yet today, twenty years later, nearly every daily and business newspaper has copied their tactics.
However the most disturbing comment I ever heard at the newspaper was the editor-in-chief ranting on in a meeting that readers didn’t know what they wanted or needed to read, that was the job of the editor, to tell them what they needed to read. It seemed arrogant at the time and today it seems like an absolute indictment of what’s wrong with many newspapers and magazines today. Too much of that attitude is still ingrained in editors today even as a digital tidal wave of user-generated content, opinions and community is sweeping over the world.
The role of editors is changing rapidly and forever, but I’m convinced that done correctly, an editor still can be the heart and soul of any publication. The difference in the future is that editors must be aggregators of information balancing reader-generated content with expert editorial and providing context and space for both. Reaching out to readers, and more importantly to potential readers through all available media channels will be a critical skill that every editor will need to master. And listening to readers and participating in online communities will provide insight and content ideas that yesterday’s editors never could have imagined.
I applaud journalism schools like Northwestern and Missouri who have taken bold steps to integrate print, digital and business courses as a mandatory requirement for their degrees in the face of angry traditionalists. The world is changing at incomprehensible speed and the lines of journalism, communication and business are blurring, but editors can and will remain as essential navigators of content in this digital world.
