The Multimedia Imperative

Hershel Sarbin is a publishing consultant and senior director at Stamford, Connecticut-based Marketing 1 to 1/Peppers and Rogers Group.

Print-only models of custom publishing are giving way to an integrated-media approach that emphasizes Web content and e-mail. In other words, custom communications.

There is a new wind blowing in the world of media, reshaping what we used to call, and often still do call, magazine companies.

We all know how re-labeled media companies have acquired or started trade shows or conferences and affinity products that broaden the companies' appeal to their original sets of customers while adding significantly to profitability. All kinds of events, in partnership with multiple brands and sponsoring magazines, create new impact while strengthening the connection between audiences and advertisers.

More and more publishers, bending with the breeze, are positioning themselves to provide many types of services that adapt to the new integrated marketing strategies of major brands.

Custom publishing grows up

Custom publishing (as you've read in these columns and in other FOLIO: articles in the past year) has become a huge, billion-dollar-plus business. Custom publishing is a wonderful way to serve advertiser brands and others with editorial products that are tailored to customer groups that the sponsors want to reach without being exposed to competitive messages.

Recently, however, custom publishing has taken on much larger meaning. Custom publishing, when it means only print, is just too limiting. Custom communications--serving advertisers in building long-term customer relationships through multiple channels with a growing emphasis on Web content and e-mail--is the new imperative. Increasingly, and with good reason, custom publishers are re-positioning themselves as integrated marketing agencies or marketing services agencies.

Broader customer relationships

Sometimes opportunities to serve clients in nonprint ways have nothing to do with the usual budgets we look to for our revenues. The connection between the client and the publisher almost always grows out of a relationship first built through print that is now expanding into other areas.

Major publishers like Meredith, Hachette, Time Inc. and Hearst have major investments in the digital world that include, as a part of their mission, serving these broader customer relationships.

Fluent Communications' parent company, TPD Publishing Inc., started life as a print custom publisher, but has moved rapidly to demonstrate, quite profitably, its electronic publishing skills. Microsoft Visual C++ Developers Journal (VCDJ) and Conference caters to a relatively small, highly specialized segment of software developers. The Fluent unit has developed a series of paid conferences and roadshows; a free controlled magazine; and a free Web site and email newsletter for Microsoft. The VCDJ team uses a centralized database to develop cohesive communications and dialogue with customers, and to allow a highly personalized experience for each.

For example, the VCDJ Web site (http://www.vcdj.com) allows users to select which editorial content areas they are interested in, and to have their version of the home page personalized to reflect these interests. Very soon, the monthly e-mail newsletter will also reflect these preferences, delivering each user a personalized table of contents with embedded links to individual stories, news items and promotions. Future plans for the program include delivering personalized printed magazines that contain only the information chosen by the user, based on their specific interests--in other words, information delivered in customer segments of one!

Expanding editorial uses

Particularly fascinating to me was that each medium used by the program (printed magazine, Web site and email newsletter) makes use of the same editorial content, which can therefore be created just once, but used many times in various formats.

Hanley-Wood Custom Publishing, which has many print projects, moved early into the CD-ROM space with its advertiser/clients. Home Planners, the largest provider of stock house plans in the United States, provided house plans to about 30,000 consumers and professionals in the construction industry last year, and did it very successfully. Delivery was both print and electronic, enabling builders and home owners to conveniently review those plans and narrow their choices more easily.

One group of customers that Home Planners knew was special was the Preferred Builder Network, the professionals with whom they wanted to strengthen a steadily growing relationship. Hanley-Wood helped develop an electronic catalog into a relationship-building tool. They not only gave the Preferred Builder Network the ability to search, but added sophisticated document-generation functionality that the group could use in its own businesses. This gave the client, Home Planners, a new way of winning loyalty and led to a decision to produce two more CD-ROMs in 1999.

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