 Alex Baxter Frank Cutitta Paul DeBraccio Judy Franks Dave Hendricks Marko Hurst Jay Lauf Daniel Lagani Karen Macumber Diane Salvatore Ken Sonenclar Domenic Venuto Marta Wohrle Matthew Yorke |
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By Domenic Venuto, SVP/Head of the Media and Entertainment Practice, New York office, Razorfish
The ringing in of 2009 wasn’t joyful for print publishers. The financial industry collapse, the drying up of credit and general economic souring of the market hit advertising spending in newspapers and magazines like an anvil falling from the sky and landing on Wile E. Coyote. Newspapers have been struggling for some time, but the current economic situation has accelerated their predicament. The news is filled with filings for bankruptcies, papers moving to weekly print runs, reductions in editorial staff and the closing of bureaus and increased reliance on wire services.
Magazines, which once thought themselves immune from the anvil of fate that has already landed on newspapers, are now in its falling shadow. Instead of innovating, experimenting or increasing investment online, the reduction of advertising pages is causing them to focus almost exclusively on their print publications and strip their online endeavors bare. Companies like Condé Nast, Forbes, Hearst and a few more have drastically cut online staff positions and scaled back their digital efforts to focus on their print “core.”
If the stubborn adherence to providing editorial copy on printed pages continues, we will see these business continue to wither away and either disappear completely or be a shadow of themselves. What’s evident is that publishers have all the ingredients—the assets, the brands, the technology, the audience and the relationships with advertisers—necessary to reinvent themselves. In order to survive publishers must:
Match Content to Form
Readers consume printed content differently than they do online content. If behavior is matched with appropriate editorial, then magazines and newspapers should become more like each other across different distribution channels. A printed product has distribution lags but a longer shelf life, so newspapers might be served well by adopting magazines’ experiential layout, format, print frequency and longer-form editorial analysis. Online is immediate, interactive and supports multimedia, so instead of repurposing printed content online, magazines should take newspapers’ lead online and provide more news and time-sensitive information in all possible formats—text, audio and video, reference material and info-graphics.
Aggressively Create New Products
Look beyond the creation of content as the product to sell. More often the product publishers have, and their audience wants, intellectual and aesthetic distinctions the brand promises to deliver. Supply that aesthetic distinction in all forms, and you are providing value to your audience, some of which they may be willing to pay more for. Remix content around themes. Curate content from other sources. Extend the brand to physical products. Form partnerships with like-minded brands to provide services to your audience.
Develop a Unified View of the Customer
Do more than simply collect data about your users and their behaviors. Connect data from multiple sources and develop a complete picture of your customer across platforms, channels and brands. Use it to increase wallet share by up-selling and cross-selling products and efficiently renewing subscriptions. Reduce marketing costs by better targeting offers and promotions. Increase CPMs (cost per thousand people reached of buying advertising space in a given media vehicle) by providing full-spectrum behavioral micro-segments to advertisers. For consumers, use the data to provide additional value and service to personalize editorial content and their experience.
Remove Print and Online Silos
The continued practice of separating print and online editorial teams, along with separate sales teams, is a shortsighted endeavor that creates disequilibrium and propagates the perception that print content is more valuable than online. Editorial teams should be given responsibility for creating content that may reside on any platform—print, online or mobile—with the online editor free to edit the content as appropriate. Similarly, the sales team should be a united force educated to sell across platforms and quality of the aggregated audience.
Optimize Existing Assets
In an economy that will force publishers to do more with less, there is much opportunity to maximize revenue from existing properties and consumers to help drive higher CPMs on the sell side and increase overall efficiency on the buy side. Publishers should reevaluate their rate cards and examine the sales organization’s tactics and incentive plan to ensure alignment with business objectives. With the right tools in place, better traffic forecasting and inventory yield management could easily produce double-digit results.
One hope is that the laws of cartoon physics apply to print publishers, and external market forces only temporarily daze them so they can live to chase future advertising dollars.
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