The Media Minute 07.24.2018

With a new platform comes the recurring decision for skeptical publishers: How much should they care? And in the case of a new platform from Facebook, there’s every reason to be wary.

Are you ready to grow your digital revenues? We all know we need to launch new digital products to diversify our online income sources in these challenging times.

There’s an old saying that, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
I goofed. I’ve been advocating the use of a “hammer” to help magazines reverse a decade-long advertising slump. I should have been talking about what we need to build.

A few months ago, I was asked to attend a conference to speak on the direction and future of newspapers. Then, a month ago I was approached by a different association asking if I would consider being a keynote speaker for their convention; the subject was once again about the future of newspapers

Last month, Folio: celebrated the Top Women in Media awards and highlighted achievements made by over 100 women across the industry. From Up & Comers to Corporate Champions, these women have done everything from achieving new revenue streams for their companies to building new brands from the ground up, and Jeanette Bennett is no exception.

RockYou Media continues to fine-tune its pivot from social gaming to digital publishing.
The 13-year-old company has been attempting to make the shift over the past few years, but its efforts really began to take shape in November 2017 when it launched Vocally, a digital publication for multicultural millennial women that RockYou Media CEO Lisa Marino described at the time as the company’s “first non-game proof point in a business model we have spent the last three years developing and scaling.”

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The Media Minute 07.17.2018

It’s a message we’ve been hearing percolate through the industry now for years: programmatic is the future of advertising. Brands, in search of more control over their media buying activity, have embraced technology-based approaches that promise efficiency, precision, flexibility, and superior ROI.

Facebook  is giving advertisers new ways to show off their products, including with augmented reality. At its F8 developer conference earlier this year, Facebook announced that it was working with businesses to use AR to show off products in Messenger.

CommonWealth magazine, the 22-year-old quarterly published by Boston-based nonpartisan think tank MassINC, is going all digital. The Summer 2018 issue, out today, will be CommonWealth‘s last, editor Bruce Mohl revealed in the issue’s editor’s letter, arguing the magazine will more effectively serve its organizational mission—that is, coverage of the policy debates that impact lower- and middle-class Massachusetts residents—by devoting the bulk of its funding to its growing digital channels..

By now, everyone understands the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is here to stay, and businesses must make themselves entirely compliant in order to avoid fines of up to four percent of total global revenue.

Your mom might not know who Daquan is or what Goalslayin is about, but a lot of teenagers on Snapchat do — and Snap wants to work with the companies and creators behind these brands. Take London-based Fanbytes. The 18-month-old digital media company has four organic accounts on Snapchat — MakeupTuts, Goalslayin, Couples365 and IRelateQuotes.

A little more than a month after staffers at The New Yorker declared their intention to form a union, the magazine’s top editor said that management won’t stand in the way.

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The Media Minute 07.11.2018

At a time when the publishing industry faces intense economic pressures, audiobooks have become a rapidly expanding – and lucrative – revenue stream.

I am going to suggest something crazy: Objections are actually good in the digital ad sales process. I say this because almost every sales call will have some. It’s going to happen. And those objections can teach you a lot about what your prospect really needs.

Lead management is a general marketing term that describes the process of optimizing lead-based marketing activities. Most of these marketing activities typically entail modern, inbound strategies for producing sales leads or “hot” prospects.

Since it launched in December, News Corp’s ad platform News IQ has gotten a workout from advertisers looking to prove that the ads News IQ hosts led to business outcomes.

Publishers have historically touted ecommerce as a golden opportunity to increase their topline revenue. In this age of digital disruption, where major platforms like Facebook, Google and increasingly, Amazon have asserted their dominance, publishers of all sizes have had to work hard to reconfigure their business models to adapt.

Showcase houses aren’t a new concept for shelter magazines. Generally viewed as a natural—and expected—extension of a brand, it’s not atypical at this point for a magazine to participate in the nearly three-decade long trend by building part or all of a house of its own.

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The Media Minute 07.03.2018

The 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica scandal, and GDPR represent a tidal shift in how the ad tech and digital media industry will monetize their audience moving forward. And it’s overdue. Demographic data doesn’t define a person’s identity.

The conventional wisdom on digital magazines is that they’re dead, at least as a custom format, separate from print and enhanced for the tablet or phone.

The DoubleClick brand is going away, along with AdWords. In their place are three new brands: Google Ads, which now identifies what was AdWords, Google Marketing Platform, which encompasses Google’s products for enterprise advertisers, and Google Ad Manager for large publishers.

When Doug Olson, the president and general manager of Meredith magazines, reaches for an analogy to describe the launch of The Magnolia Journal, his mind goes immediately to O, The Oprah Magazine.

As direct-to-consumer brands from Brooklinen to Curology try to wean themselves off of Facebook ads, commerce-focused publishers are trying to help fill the marketing gap..

For publishers, getting quality traffic to their online properties is itself quite a big challenge, especially in the current environment of turmoil in the digital landscape. Next month onwards, things might get even more difficult for some.

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The Media Minute 06.26.2018

Email marketers have issues. Less than a tenth are free of challenges, and over a third have open rates of 10% or lower, according to The State of Email Marketing, a study by Return Path and Demand Metric.

At The Magazine Manager, we are thrilled to see our talented clients shine. That’s why we’d like to say “hats off to you” for winning multiple prestigious awards recently from CRMA and Folio.

As the role of audiences in digital marketing becomes more important, it’s critical for publishers to not just gather data, but understand what they have, and how to best utilize it.  Smaller publishers in particular, whose teams and budgets may be more limited in scope, must navigate audience-building, targeting and marketing in a way that makes the most of their team and budget.

Facebook has been flirting with video monetisation for a while, with beta tests of ad breaks in live video, in-stream video ads, and ad breaks in on-demand video. Till now, these were mostly available to a limited set of partners. Now Facebook is rolling out monetization products they are building to a wider audience.

New York Media wants to grow its audience like every other publisher. But it also wanted to make sure its growth was based on returning visitors and not just one-time hits. The publisher broke traffic records in four of the five months of 2018, reaching a record 53 million unique visitors in May, according to Google Analytics, New York said

TOKYO: Emotions are important in B2B purchasing decisions just as in B2C and new research reveals the role different emotions play along the B2B path to purchase.

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The Media Minute 06.19.2018

“The Times publishes countless stories across news, opinion and features every day, and we’re focused on finding the best ways to introduce readers to the breadth of our journalism,” stated Alex Rainert, head of product and design at The New York Times.

The Content Marketing Association (CMA) — the UK industry association for marketing, publishing, advertising and social agencies — has just released a comprehensive report on the Key Content Marketing Trends in 2018

Condé Nast’s Self announced Thursday the formation of a new partnership with The Players’ Tribune—the media platform for athletes by athletes launched by Derek Jeter in 2014—under which the two brands will produce a series of personal essays and videos celebrating women in sports.

Vox Media likely wouldn’t have been able to sell its upcoming show, “American Style,” to CNN without the help of Hollywood talent agency WME. Vox Media formed its Vox Entertainment division and signed with WME in 2015 to break into the TV business. Chad Mumm, vp at Vox Entertainment, had seen how WME helped convince HBO to buy a show from Vice when Vice was little more than a print magazine and digital publisher.

“In three years, none of this will be in print,” a senior publishing executive told me, six years ago, about two magazines that are still profitable and still in print. Mr. Print Is Dead thought magazine publishing would soon be all about apps and the web. (You see, kids, back then there was this thing called the iPad that … oh, never mind.)

A few years ago, in 2014 to be exact, I wrote a post about what publishers should be doing to transform their businesses to a new multi-platform business model. Many of the tasks mentioned in 2014 remain the same in 2018, but a few have changed in light of new innovations and best practices. An updated list is presented in this post.

 

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The Media Minute 06.12.2018

Michelle Lee is Allure’s Editor in Chief and a pioneer in many aspects of magazine publishing. Her progressive approach has gained plaudits across a wide spectrum and led to Allure being awarded Magazine of the Year by Adweek last Autumn, with Michelle herself being awarded Editor of the Year..

Audience growth is the mile-by-mile marathon that makes all things possible with your business – New Advertisers, New Revenue, New Markets – are all predicated on your ability to grow your audience.

This article is a free preview of the new issue of Digiday magazine, our quarterly print publication that’s distributed to Digiday+ members. Click here to find out more about Digiday+ and to subscribe now.

Columbus Monthly, Seattle Met, and Denver’s 5280 earned top prizes for General Excellence at the 33rd annual City & Regional Magazine Awards, administered by the University of Missouri School of Journalism and announced Monday at the City & Regional Mag Association’s annual meetup in New Orleans.

After a decade of lagging behind the rise of digital content consumption, the floodgates on digital ad spend opened wide around 2012. Much of this has been due to a tide of brand dollars flowing through automated pipes, with eMarketer estimating that over four in five US digital display dollars will be spent on programmatic channels this year

Hearst Newspapers has hired Cox Media Group’s Mark Medici as its executive vice president-Chief Marketing Officer. Medici, who will be based in Houston, is the first to hold this newly created position. He will oversee consumer-marketing strategy across all platforms for Hearst’s 24 dailies and 64 weeklies.

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The Media Minute 06.05.2018

When preparing to launch a startup, the first essential step entrepreneurs need to take is put a marketing strategy in place. However, for many startups marketing on a limited budget is not as easy as it sounds.

At this year’s Ops in June, we’re going to be talking a lot about the ways in which advertising in B2B can be similar to B2C (there’s a place for branded content, and for programmatic!), and how it’s dissimilar (scale is always one of the kickers).

A journalist, on average, spends 6 hours a week transcribing audio, which not only slows down the reporting process but also decreases newsroom productivity.

Last summer, in a hunt for new product ideas, Politico turned to its employees. The publisher held a “Shark Tank”-style competition, a first for the company, where staffers from across the organization pitched ideas for new and improved products.

Publishing Executive has released the results of its second annual survey on which technologies publishers plan to buy, the objectives behind their investments, and which technologies they expect to drive the most revenue.

Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, gave her annual Internet Trends report presentation at Recode’s Code Conference yesterday, revealing more declines in print ad spending.

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The Media Minute 05.29.2018

As the co-founder of a business-to-business (B2B) agency, things have become more difficult over the last few years for both our agency and our clients.

Under pressure from falling ad spend to media businesses and tooth-and-claw competition from rivals for subscription money, publishers are having to scale back both the types of content they cover – and that’s a good thing.

The already fading interest in the “Yanny vs. Laurel” debate to which we were all subjected a week ago lends further credence to the idea that social media’s one universal truth is: “What works today, won’t tomorrow.”

Tear down those old, traditional database silos of print and digital. Think instead about an integrated audience database.

Facebook’s new ad-labeling policy has come under fire from publishers who are concerned that their news articles will be treated as political advocacy ads.

There are countless free newsletters in B2B publishing, as well there should be. Newsletters do great things.

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The Media Minute 05.22.2018

Here’s a fast fact:  50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting. (The B2B Lead)

IDAHO FALLS, IDAHO—Cloud-born media content may be all the rage these days, but if you’re looking for substance, it’s hard to beat the purely organic experience of thumbing through a quality full-glossy magazine.

If you are working in today’s challenging publishing industry, chances are you could use a few shortcuts for boosting profitability. After all, publishers are masters of creating high-quality content, but great products do not always equate to making more money.

It may seem strange that we are seeing a resurgence in independent magazines in an era where traditional print has never been more unstable.

Digital advertising is competitive and the subscription business is tough, but digital publishers are finding hope in small-dollar donations.

In the summer of 1973, as I was preparing to enter my junior year in college, Harper & Row published “The New Journalism,” an anthology of articles and book excerpts by the likes of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson.

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