I mark the beginning of my digital education more than
twenty years ago when an executive at Hachette USA (now owned by Hearst) asked
me how to spell dot com. He was on his
way to give a luncheon speech about digital strategy and wanted to start out on
the right foot.
In the late 1990s, Hachette was no different than most
companies. It invested in a number of
digital startups, including enews.com (a digital subscription platform
eventually sold to B&N), endured the internecine warfare between print and
digital, and over time made the digital incubator part of the mainstream
business. Echoes of these strategies,
disruptions, and hiccups can be found in most publishing companies of size. It simply took publishers a long time to
understand digital, get on the right side of the browser wars, figure out how
to sell subscriptions at scale and develop the technical savvy to be able to
deliver content to all platforms, such as Time Inc.’s All Access effort, an
industry blueprint.
Laura Lang, Time Inc. CEO, recently announced that the
company would focus on global growth, growing paid content and creating a
broader consumer content experience. To
help with the latter, the company had introduced Amplify, a new digital ad
unit, some months ago. Amplify “marries”
editorial content with brand marketing messages. Given the company’s ability to layer
subscriber data with social and behavioral, this promises to become a very
interesting platform.
Pat Corpora, a friend who ran Rodale’s book division some
years ago, started most strategic meetings with the observation: “What you
propose will cost twice as much as you suggest and take at least twice as long
as your propose.” He was usually right, but he might have to expand
his time frame for digital. Soon I’m
going to write a book on the psychology of digital, focusing on the
generational, societal, cultural and organizational impediments to the
movement. Inertia has enjoyed a long and
successful career.
It is no secret that for a long time magazines looked at
digital through the print lens and digital products became add-ons to the
central business. Some still do. What is most heartening these days is that
magazines are changing their business models and, God forbid, even rethinking
the church/state nexus. This is hinted
at in the above remarks about Time Inc.’s effort to “marry” editorial and
marketing messages. This will help
consumer marketers become more adept at marketing to digital consumers.
These Time Inc. initiatives bode well for the industry
because the company is an industry leader and is surely its first citizen. But it’s equally important to note that other
companies, often smaller and more nimble, are making interesting structural
moves by re-visioning content, sometimes in dramatic ways. GigaOM’s Matt Ingram
tells us that there are five reasons we should pay attention to The Atlantic as
the company pushes the transformation to digital. They include: creating web native offerings
rather than apps, new forms of content like the Atlantic Wire, and native
advertising or more specifically, branded content that looks like what the
content readers are used to.
I have previously blogged about Forbes’ effort to re-think
content. Forbes has done this more
substantially and more elegantly than any magazine or content producer I know. And Lewis D’Vorkin is the Forbes evangelist. In describing Forbes’ new home page, D’Vorkin
explains that each magazine constituency “is represented in one of four equal
modules, or as we call them, stacks.”
These include: the Journalistic Agenda: Forbes is a brand that has meaning; the Social
Agenda, which is based on Forbes’ Velocity, “an algorithm that weighs page views,
sharing and comments;” the Individual User’s Agenda: personalization with
serendipity; and the Marketer’s Agenda: brands are publishers, they create
content, and are experts in their fields. For marketers, Forbes provides a perfectly
transparent AdVoice platform. According
to published remarks by Forbes CEO Mike Perlis, this platform will also have
very high content standards. They won’t
be publishing just anything. D’Vorkin has written that this advertising
trend will shake up 100 years of journalism. I think he’s right.
Other magazines will find their way to this place. There is a lot of experimenting going on. Good magazine, launched in 2006 and shut down
a few months ago to predictable headlines, is coming back to life as a
community platform named Good.is. According
to a variety of published reports, Good.is will leverage Jumo, a social
activist platform acquired from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.
I have no idea whether this will work. What I find interesting is the effort to
develop a community, aggregate this muscle, and in turn create branded
sponsorships around calls to civic and social action. This seems an ingenious, viral and legitimate
“social” way to bring brands into the conversation in a manner that will extend
the brand and help underwrite the business. The effort might take the form of branded
challenges. Apparently IBM, Toyota, and
UPS are interested.
I’ve sat through too many meetings where the very thought of
using what is called “deep advertising content” was dismissed out-of-hand.
Three cheers for the companies that are re-visioning content
and re-thinking their business models from the ground up in elegant and
profound ways.
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