thesis 2.0: publishing in a digital age

Time Axcess

According to a PRNewswire press release Time Inc. Launched Time Axcess in April 2009 as an alternative to third party ad networks. This "gives marketers the best of both worlds: the comfort that their ads will only appear in the well-lit environments of TIme Inc. brands and the confidence that they'll get the reach, scale and sophisticated targeting to deliver their message to the right audience at the right time."

"Time Axcess reaches an online audience of 27 million of the consumers most valuable to marketers. These are the engaged, in-market shoppers with a collective purchasing power to move markets and influence others. 

Time Axcess also provides insights, analytics and campaign optimization solutions.

Time Inc. is not the first to offer its own ad network. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has Martha's Circle and Condé Nast debuted its own ad network a year ago.

Here is a short AdAge video on Martha's Circle.

What I like about Martha's Circle is that she takes independent web sites and blogs under her wing and places client ads on them. This extended network helps draw in content that is in keeping with the Martha brand, content being generated by smart, witty individuals...not publishing professionals. And for the blogger it seems to be quite a nice alternative to adsense because instead of leveraging your name with a search engine company you're now rubbing shoulders with a publishing brand that carries the respect of its legacy publications. A good example of how a big media publisher is leveraging the power of independent bloggers in what appears might be a win-win scenario.

  

Quotable quotes

Spoken at the Magazine Innovation Summit, Oct. 14-15, 2009. New York City.

"By harnessing its [technology's] power we can transform the way we create content, distribute our products, develop new revenue streams, personalize and customize our magazines, position our brands, and delight our audience and advertisers. Innovation foes not mean abandoning our core values in pursuit of any new and shiny digital object that comes along. Innovation offers the ability to do business smarter and faster, and to find new ways of bringing our graphic and journalistic sensibilities to new platforms and new audiences." Nina Link, MPA President and CEO.

You are perfectly positioned to use all of this to bring to life what you do every day. If a publisher can do that by offering a daily download or a recipe at 4 p.m. or daily yoga exercises in the morning or some piece of valued content, a group of subscribers will opt in and be extremely valuable to advertisers. Michael Kelley, Partner, Advisory Services for PricewaterhouseCoopers' Entertainment, Media, COmmunications and Technology Sector.

If you're not pursuing a niche strategy you're not going to be here in five years. David Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of The Knot Inc.

Advertisers: Show us the metrics

I read Lucia Moses’ article “Panel: Uphill Battle for Traditional Media” and the gist of the conversation is not new:

Advertisers to Publishers — Show us the metrics! Build a new model for measuring audiences and we’ll show you the money.

It’s true, as Moses points out, that traditional media are valued for quality content. However, the problem I see is that people are beginning to realize that quality content lives on the web as well. Content by professional journalists and experts in field are easily accessible. News breaks faster online and journalists follow stories longer than a 10 o’clock sound bite permits. Links expand the information flow right at the reader’s fingertips instantly, requiring less effort on the part of the reader to follow a topic online than it does in print.

And print can’t target its audience definitively. So, shouldn’t publishers be tripping over themselves to follow its advertising dollars online? If advertisers are going digital because that is where they can find and target their audience, then don’t publishers want to find a way to continue to be the matchmaker between advertiser and consumer? Obviously they do, but why is it we haven’t come up with a revenue model that works as efficiently as the old print advertising model? Was it efficient? It certainly seemed to help fund media operations, whereas now some newspapers, for example, are banking on a non-profit or Venture Capitalist business models for success...making the journalism profession truly a public service. Not to mention some also rely on community involvement in order to continue providing quality content, for free.

Will there be a tipping point somewhere in the timeline of publishing’s future at which point it will be too late for publishers to attract the lion-share of advertising dollars? Advertisers are already using alternative means to sell; they’re quickly adapting to new media and by the time publishers catch up, will the new business model be too little too late in recapturing their ad dollars?

In the article Mark Ford said that e-reader devices will transform how publications reach audiences. But, why does anyone have to purchase a dedicated digital reading device if content can already be found online via computer or mobile phones with web access? Why does one need a dedicated reader to download collections of magazines or newspapers if one can get content aggregated online, updates delivered in tweets and feeds posted in social networking communities? Most pressing is the question of distributing digital readers. It poses an economic barrier to entry for those of us who can’t afford to pay more than an old fashioned cup of joe or fancy frappuccino for newspaper and magazine content. E-readers will certainly transform publishers reach audiences. And economic factors will determine which echelon of technology audiences will have access to, in turn further quantifying who advertisers are reaching with any given platform.