Ask Redwood Publishing chief executive Keith Grainger where he hopes to see his business in three years’ time and you might be surprised by his answer. "I'd like Redwood to be as important to its clients as their above-the-line agencies are," he declares. "The big opportunity lies in clients recognising our approach to communication can be applied to all forms of content: press ads, store displays, posters, TV. I'd like it to be known as the home of great content."
Scratch the surface of one of the UK's leading customer publishing specialists and it's not hard to see why. 'Redwood: The Content Agency', trumpets the company's home page, adding for good measure: 'Inspiring Content: Print / Digital / Video / Interactive / Social Media'.
The company has certainly travelled a long way since it was founded back in 1983 by entrepreneur Christopher Curry, Fleet Street editor Christopher Ward and publisher Michael Potter to fill what they saw as a gap in the market: brand owner-backed customer magazines. Back then, loyalty programmes and relationship marketing were nascent disciplines, and the editorial quality of the free magazines that did exist was poor. Redwood re-wrote the rules, however, with a quality editorial-led approach to customer publishing. Expression, a magazine mailed quarterly to 230,000 American Express green card members, was the first of dozens of titles it rolled out over intervening years.
Clues pointing to the company's current ambitions, however, were not hard to find. Redwood launched its first client website - for Hasbro-owned Action Man - back in 1999. It won its first integrated contract - for Royal Mail, secured in partnership with marketing agency Proximity, in 2004. It launched its first membership club - Boots Parenting Club, the next year. And then, in following years, it produced its first client film - The Eclipse, for Land Rover; e-zine, for Virgin Media; and social network - for BSME.
Different to other publishers
"We're such a different business from a traditional publisher," explains Grainger, a former Emap ad controller who has been with Redwood since 1987 when he joined for the launch of M&S Magazine. "Two thirds of our output is still on printed pages, but we are zero dependent on newsstand revenue or copy sales. Everything relies on clients seeing the value of what we do, and on us delivering according to that brand's marketing objectives. We have evolved from customer / contract publisher to an agency producing marketing communications across all platforms for our clients, with content closely integrated into their wider marketing objectives and creative output."
Take the latest - Christmas - edition of M&S Magazine. It contains a rich array of content linked to the brand's festive marketing campaign. A celebrity fashion shoot was done during the main shoot for the store's all-singing-and-dancing Christmas TV ad. In addition, the issue features all the top-end, consumer magazine-style editorial content and design staples the discerning 21st century magazine reader would expect. Most people in publishing - unless they've worked for Redwood - tend to think of Redwood like a smaller version of NatMags, Grainger believes: "But we're a very different beast. Our focus is on client retention through client satisfaction with the work we produce - because we know that every day they have a choice."
Becoming a content agency
Redwood's 'content agency' positioning evolved around a decade ago. Ten years back, as the media world started to really change, it was getting harder for clients to reach and influence customers using any one channel on its own. "Recognition of the power of customer magazines started to really take-off as people began to acknowledge the cross-platform potential of great content," he says. "But at that time, as interest in what we were doing started to rapidly expand, I kept finding myself having to explain to clients what a 'publisher' was. So after a while, I started calling them account directors - which is what they had become, and the questions stopped."
The transition formally concluded two or three years ago, however, when Redwood stopped aligning itself solely with magazines. "Like all publishers, we'd asked ourselves, was the net an opportunity or a threat," Grainger continues. "We'd quickly decided it was an opportunity because of the growing demand it was creating for quality content across new platforms, yet it was all too clear that the emerging breed of digital agencies were not well-equipped to deliver it. As we'd been taking brands to customers through great content for 25 years and were already producing across a variety of different platforms, the customer publisher badge no longer really seemed to fit."
Semantics aside, Redwood's approach to creating content remains unchanged. "Ours has always been an editorial-led approach," he explains. "We begin with what the customer wants to know, then feed in what the brand wants to say." And despite the growing array of platforms the company now creates content for, print remains an important part of the mix and looks set to remain so - although its role has already begun to change.
Print holding up well
"We did fear a while back that print would decline but it hasn't - clients still see the value of it because their customers still want to read it. It's 'print and' not 'print or'," Grainger adds. "Although today, the role of print has extended into new areas: namely, as a driver of traffic to websites, and print content has become shorter, sharper, faster. Yet it still delivers strongly in terms of dwell time. You're unlikely to get 30 minutes of someone's attention on a website, yet our research shows readers spending up to 40 minutes reading some of our best performing magazines, which is not bad going in a 21st century media world. So, if anything, the role of print is becoming more valuable as time and attention become increasingly scarce."
Redwood's editorial-led approach gives it a real edge over other types of business now attempting to carve a niche in content creation - PR companies, digital marketing specialists, and so on, he claims: "We're also more joined up than many in our cross-platform thinking." Which he puts down to the way the company up-skilled its staff to deal with the opportunities and challenges of an increasingly digital world.
Up-skilling
"We've been lucky with the creative leaders we have in the business," Grainger says. "We didn't hire a department of digital geeks, we took the view we had to take our people on the journey with us because we couldn’t afford to let go of the in-depth client knowledge they'd already built. We didn't want digital expertise restricted to a dedicated department, so we decided to become digital people ourselves."
This is why clients are increasingly coming to Redwood for content solutions rather than 'just' a customer magazine, it seems. Which has certainly helped Redwood weather the worst effects of recession.
"Because our clients come from a number of different business sectors, the recession's impact on our business has reflected that," he explains. Car clients have been hit especially hard, for example. As a result, some cut back spending but, at the same time, other brands in different sectors didn't, while a few even increased spend. "Our response has been to emphasise our partnership role - demonstrating our desire to remain with them for when things improve by being flexible. For some, this has meant printing less copy or fewer pages. The priority has been to hold onto clients, although we've also won some new ones too - Fiat, Jessops and Esprit. We've continued to innovate where we can - e-zines grew rapidly during the second half of 2009. And in 2010, we've been able to get back to the position we were in when the recession began."
Growth of video
Moving forward, Redwood expects video to be an important engine for business growth. Social media may be all the rage, but it is having a far lesser impact. Meanwhile statistics for the rapid escalation in the time people now spend watching video content online are "staggering". "There's a video we did for Volvo which, if you saw it in the cinema tonight, you'd think had been produced by a top flight above-the-line ad agency," Grainger declares. "Customer publishers across the industry often fail to make the most of their strengths - the fact that at our best, we are practical, smart and develop things quickly while at all times thinking first about what the reader or viewer will want. All that's gold dust for a brand owner in the current climate."
So much has changed in the two decades since Grainger entered the customer publishing business. Back then, 'free' was a dirty word. Today, however, publishers have had to become more flexible and entrepreneurial and the best, he says, are those still willing to experiment and innovate - in anything from content personalisation to augmented reality. "The idea that something that’s free is somehow sub-standard just doesn't exist anymore - especially with the younger generation who have grown up with free media in a digital world. Free is no longer the poor cousin, not least because the calibre of top quality creative people now working in it. And ensuring we continue to keep attracting these people into the customer publishing business should be a priority for us all moving forward."
Despite the worst recession in living memory, customer publishers and the brand owners on whom their businesses depend are well-positioned to capitalise on current industry trends, Grainger continues: "The whole merging of what advertising, PR, marketing and digital agencies do now is making our primary skill set - as editors and creative thinkers - more widely recognised, and valued. Because when we are asked how to target a particular idea for a specific audience, we start with our knowledge through experience of what it is the consumer wants. The answer we come up with is, as a result, different to the answer an ad agency would give, and clients are increasingly embracing this."
