Content - Fall 2007 - (Page 6) Content The CPC’s Pearl Awards on display, below. Award Winners Strut Custom’s Stuff The Custom Publishing Council’s Pearl Awards honor the best in custom publishing and illustrate how far the medium has come in substance and style. BY TERRY KELLY as a growing number of companies adopt custom publishing as a marketing tool, the medium has grown increasingly sophisticated in look, feel and content. Pick up a custom publishing piece today and you’re likely to see something that resembles a national consumer magazine, complete with compelling cover lines and a clean, fresh design that incorporates highquality photography, illustrations, and a refined use of typeface. Nowhere has that evolution been more evident than in the winning entries in the Custom Publishing Council’s Pearl Awards. Now in their fourth year, the Pearl Awards honor three areas: excellence in design, editorial, and strategy. The judges include marketers, designers, editors and teachers of relevant disciplines who are not necessarily CPC members. More than anyone, they have observed firsthand how the quality of custom publications has changed over past years. Pearl judge Karen Danziger is executive vice president at The Howard Sloan Koller Group, a magazine industry executive recruitment firm. She points out that early custom publishing tended to emphasize design over content, but publications now read better than ever. That’s not easily done, especially when it comes to topics like health care, she notes. “The challenge in a health “More and more [custom publications’] content has become compelling information, interesting, worth reading and wellpresented,” says Pearl Awards judge Karen Danziger. publication is finding something people haven’t read a million times before,” she says, adding that she’s also seen improvements in categories like travel and hospitality. “More and more, the content has become compelling information that is interesting, worth reading and well-presented.” Pearl judge Marianne Swallie, a marketing director at Ernst & Young, also sees more research going into content decisions. “They’ve actually got some backup research that says employees are asking for information, and then they’ve done the research after the fact and found they liked it,” she says. “So it’s not just creating something in a vacuum.” It’s also about making real connections with specific readers, says Pearl Awards judge Kathy Hays, a 20-year veteran with the marketing communications company KJ Hays & Co. “The relationship-building piece is what custom publishing is all about,” she says. The improvements are the result, at least in part, of higher-level talent leaving the struggling consumer magazine industry to the benefit of custom publishing. “Over the last five or six years, there’s been a big migration of top editorial talent moving from magazines to more commercial endeavors,” says Marc Myers, principal of Marc Myers LLC, a marketing and media consulting firm. “At the same time, people have become more magazine-savvy, and they no longer accept sub-par custom pieces. They’re increasingly demanding more legitimate-looking publications.” THE 2007 PEARL AWARDS This year the CPC’s Pearl Awards received almost 600 entries in the various categories of competition. The awards will be handed out at a gala dinner on November 8 in the Rainbow Room of Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan. The CPC will also present the Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award to an individual who has made significant contributions to the development and promotion of the custom publishing industry. The award was instituted last year and is named in honor of John Caldwell, an early pioneer of custom publishing who died in 2006. The Magazine of the Custom Publishing Council PREMIERE ISSUE 6
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