Content - Fall 2007 - (Page 12) Content The Magazine of the Custom Publishing Council PREMIERE ISSUE 12 PREVIOUS PAGE: JORG GREUEL, GETTY IMAGES the phone rang as michael zamba, a vice president at The Magazine Group, was taking his first sips of coffee one morning last spring. A few days before, a custom publication his company produced for Scripps Networks’ Food Network had been mailed to a select—if seven-figure—list of WalMart customers. Zamba was listed as the publisher on the masthead of the Easter-themed Get Fresh, and he now found himself listening to an irate caller from Kansas City. “My neighbor got a copy of the Food Network magazine and I didn’t,” Zamba recalls her saying. “I’m a bigger fan. I know all the programs. Rachael Ray’s my favorite. I love this magazine. Why didn’t I get a copy?” Explaining that distribution is based on intricate marketing criteria—not necessarily a person’s zealotry for the Food Network’s programming—Zamba nevertheless offered to make amends by sending a copy. “Oh, no, that’s okay,” the woman replied. “I stole my friend’s.” The anecdote neatly ties together two qualities that help to explain why Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s most recent Communications Industry Forecast pegged the growth of outsourced custom publishing at 21.1 percent last year—the highest growth rate for any marketing service including branded entertainment, public relations and direct mail. As media increasingly splinter into micro niches and consumers are pelted with pitches from all directions, databases allow marketers to precisely deliver information that is relevant to the way their customers and prospects are actually living their lives. And unlike the product-oriented advertorials of a generation ago, custom media can be so compelling to read, view and interact with that people actually look forward to receiving them. Half of all Americans see value in the service provided by custom publications, according to a survey conducted for the Custom Publishing Council by Roper Public Affairs, outpacing the expectations of chief marketing officers who were interviewed last fall. They estimated that one-third of the public would view the publications as valuable. Nearly three-quarters of CMOs—72 percent—themselves feel that custom publications are very or somewhat valuable. And 85 percent of Americans say that they would rather get information from a company in a collection of articles than in an advertisement, according to Roper. A lot of branded content is targeted to constituencies other than consumers, of course, including businesspeople, professionals, alumni and members of associations, advocacy groups and nonprofit organizations (see related story on The Century Council, page 14). Call it what you will—and there’s a raging insider’s controversy about that very issue—the custom publishing industry diane Clicks for Curves Despite a 30-year background in consumer marketing for brands like Coors beer and Domino’s pizza, Mike Raymond, president of Curves International, had no experience with custom publishing before he joined the franchise gym operation in 2002. “But I had a pretty good understanding of the fragmentation taking place in traditional media and the importance of establishing other touch points with the consumer when you’re building a brand,” Raymond says. It didn’t take long for Raymond to identify the benefits of publishing a magazine that “essentially represents an invitation into the brand.” He was delighted to discover that cofounders Gary and Diane Heavin had been thinking along the same lines, and they put out an RFP in late 2003. Rodale Custom Publishing won the business and suggested that the publication be named diane, after the Curves co-founder. Indeed, Heavin has been heavily involved in the development of every quarterly issue since diane launched in early 2004. The publication cele- is positioned smack in the center of all of the significant trends in marketing today. It embraces every medium from print to podcasts. It engages customers instead of interrupting them. Its practitioners are eager to talk about return on investment (see story, page 8). It’s capable of mass customization, including segmentation right down to the individual. Most of all, it’s all about branding—that often bandied but elusive quality that separates Aquafina from tap water. Custom publishing isn’t about trotting out brand ambassadors like the Geico gecko, or trumpeting features and benefits, or enticing trials with cents-off coupons—although any one of those tactics can be integrated into a custom publishing package. Rather, the product of custom publishing— or branded content, custom media, branded media, long-form content, content marketing or any one of a number of other terms vying to describe an industry that reached $4.47 billion in sales in 2006—aims to be the embodiment of the brand itself. It’s Hellman’s mayonnaise adding zest to a grilled fish tacos recipe in a Yahoo Food Channel video. It’s spending “three perfect days” in Paris on either end of an airplane flight—presumably on United Airlines—as lyrically prescribed in Hemispheres magazine. It’s a Patton Boggs partner providing his insider’s perspective on investing in African infrastructure in the firm’s Capital Thinking magazine (see page 8). “People don’t care that a brand is the medium; people care that they get good content,” says Fred Petrovsky, president, Custom Media, for McMurry. “In the future, more and more brands will be delivering that media.” Just look at Hallmark as an example, Petrovsky says. It has evolved from a creator of greeting cards to stores inside malls to a magazine to an eponymous
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