How will consumer marketers “integrate” into multi-media?

Creating an organisational structure that most effectively employs traditional and new functions is among the myriad issues confronting consumer magazine publishers as they push to transform themselves into media-neutral providers of branded content.

How might consumer marketers’ roles, in particular, change in the years ahead? Will they make a successful transition to cross-media marketing, or perhaps be left on the sidelines?

"When you see major publishers starting whole new digital divisions, you have to wonder, will consumer marketers be an integral part of multi-media initiatives?", said publishing consultant Chip Block, at a recent Fulfillment Management Association panel in New York, where the consumer marketing scenario was debated. "Will they play a strategic role in this arena, or be confined to circulation?"

"Publishers tend to think of multi-media in terms of ad sales," said David Leckey, executive vice president, consumer marketing for American Media, Inc. "They don’t stop to think that consumer marketers are accustomed to working across media platforms. We market subscriptions through a variety of media. We also market newsstand copies. And, within newsstand, marketing at the mainline is far different than marketing at the front end."

One team or two?

"It seems logical that publishers would expand the consumer marketing role and its accountability, rather than have two sets of professionals marketing to the same audience, based on the media involved," added Steve Strickman, consultant to Palm Coast Data. "But, if we look at the history, many publishers changed the title from circulation director to consumer marketing director, and then did not follow through on actually expanding the role."

Bill Baird, president of Baird Direct Marketing, Inc, which specialises in web-based marketing, noted that the lines between traditional publishing roles start to blur as publishers get into multi-media. "For instance, editors traditionally ‘own’ content, but on the web, consumer marketers are essentially marketing subscriptions on the ‘front page’ of the publication," he said.

"Consumer marketers can use their expertise to help their companies use multi-media most effectively and profitably, and support advertising revenue with consumer-generated revenue," Baird stressed. "Multi-media can be used to increase circulation profitability. For instance, how many consumers are going to be willing to pay for branded ring tones on their cell phones? Maybe not that many. But might we be able to use a branded ring tone as a premium, to generate a higher-priced, more profitable subscription? Consumer marketers understand these dynamics, but they need to aggressively articulate their marketing expertise to top management."

"It’s definitely getting harder to get people to part with dollars for a magazine subscription," observed Block. "The challenge, of course, is how to take our content and create new models — clubs, blogs, podcasts, whatever — that actually make money." Noting the difficulty of persuading consumers, accustomed to free web-based information, to pay directly for content, and particularly content that incorporates advertising, Block pointed out that one possible monetisation model is to package branded content as part of broader content aggregation services, as some magazine publishers have done through cable channel services.

"There are new models, and we can beat Google at its own game," Baird asserted. "We have better content. We can partner with interactive video companies and content distribution channels. But all of us, including consumer marketers, need to learn everything there is to know about new media in order to leverage these models. We need to learn how to provide our content to the right people at the right time and in the right place, or the right medium. There will be a learning curve, and clear models probably won’t emerge for three to five years."

"Consumer marketers can bring real value in helping to create and market these models," Block summed up. "But if they allow themselves to be kept in a corner, they’re going to miss the boat."

Ad sales dynamics enhancing current CM role

At the same time, all agreed that, within the core print publishing sector, the consumer marketer’s role has become both more complex and more integral to the overall corporate strategy.

Ad sales competition from a growing array of other media, increased negotiation pressure from media buyers and changing auditing reporting rules (eg. new rules requiring many third-party sponsored and public place-distributed subscriptions to be shifted from paid to non-paid status) are all contributing to this dynamic.

For example, in recent years, consumer marketers have been increasingly called on to accompany the ad sales team on media buyer calls, to convey the strengths of a magazine’s circulation and readership and help dispel misunderstandings about the value of certain types of circulation for the advertiser.

"In some respects, circulators are the best sellers, which is why we’re going on more and more ad sales calls," said Leckey." It’s become a much bigger part of our job," he said. It’s our duty to help educate media buyers."