Remember Your CMP's
I am just back from the American Business Media annual conference in Florida. Since this is the leading association of business magazine publishers, I expected the mood to be dour. After all this, this is an industry that has remained stubbornly wedded to not just advertising, but print advertising, and has consequently been hammered in this economic downturn.
The mood I encountered was actually somewhat upbeat and distinctly resolute. This downturn, I heard time and time again, is forcing publishers to make hard decisions and take decisive action to evolve their businesses.
And what's the focus of this evolution? Interesting to me at least, it's not data. While these magazine publishers are increasingly appreciative of the stable, recurring revenues data products can offer, they remain largely outside their comfort zone. Instead, the conference buzz centered on the notion of magazine publishers evolving into marketing service companies. The idea is to move off a singular focus on ad pages to staging events and promotions, building websites, whatever the advertiser needs. As my colleague Janice McCallum notes, this isn't exactly a new concept, and it begins to blur the lines between publisher and agency.
Are there dangers in this? Most particularly, do publishers risk "biting the hand that feeds them" as they start to move onto agency turf? The conference panelists took a combative stance in response to that exact question, suggesting that agencies were moving onto what has traditionally been the turf of publishers, particularly in the area of building communities on behalf of their clients. No talk of cooperation or partnering here. Rather, the recommendation was "get them before they get you."I admit to being energized by all this talk of marketing services. It's a concept that makes sense, and the dollars and the margins being discussed are big enough to yield fast and positive financial results for many magazine publishers. My caution to these publishers, however, is to remember what's enabling this fast move into marketing services, something we call Central Market Position. Most business magazine publishers occupy a central, trusted, respected and neutral position in the markets they serve. Central Market Position provides a uniquely powerful platform to exploit any number of market opportunities. Moving too aggressively into marketing services risks damage to this position, and that could mean that the hunt for short-term dollars could conscribe future growth opportunities.
A Model of Excellence Winner Does Us Proud
I don't think you can gush too much about a data content company that has an army of hundreds of thousands of field researchers gathering company and executive information, data entering it all into a central database, and best of all, doing it all for free. That company, as you may have guessed, is Jigsaw, an InfoCommerce Group 2005 Models of Excellence winner, and the company is finishing up a very busy week.
On Wednesday, Jigsaw announced the launch of Data Fusion, a service that I think truly qualifies for the label "revolutionary." Simply described, Data Fusion hooks seamlessly to company CRM databases to perform continuous data scrubbing. This scrubbing goes far beyond merely standardizing existing data to deleting dead records, updating current records and even adding new records. Data Fusion is a SAAS (software as a service) offering, meaning no software to buy or install, and steady recurring revenue for Jigsaw. I've been in this business for nearly 25 years, and publishers have been fantasizing about an offering like this for at least 24 of them.
On Thursday, Jigsaw announced a deal to license its executive contact information to D&B. It's a pretty slick maneuver when you can turn a competitor into a sales channel, and if nothing else, it's a major validation of Jigsaw's data quality and increasingly comprehensive database. All-in-all, not a bad week!Lessons for the rest of us? First, you can build a trusted, quality database off user-generated content if you go about it correctly. Second, the users who contribute data to you don't seem to mind at all if you aggressively monetize the resulting database, provided they continue to see value in participating. Third, with a well-crafted licensing agreement, it is possible to do business with competitors, so don't rule out this possibility without thorough examination. Fourth, software can add tremendous value to data when it empowers the business processes and workflow of your customers. The goal, as I like to put it, is to move from reference-oriented data to "data that does stuff." Jigsaw is showing us all that success in data publishing isn't puzzling at all.
Mark your calendars now to meet this year's Models of Excellence companies at the InfoCommerce Group's annual Data Content09 conference, October 27-29, at The Ritz-Carlton, Philadelphia.
2009 Model of Excellence Award Nominee: Telnic Limited
We're pleased to announced that Telnic Limited has been nominated for a 2009 Model of Excellence award for its "dot tel" product.
Click here for our full MofE product profile.
Fresh Ideas from a Stale Sector
Pinch me, I must be dreaming: I am seeing product innovation and fresh thinking coming from a most unlikely source: a major yellow pages publisher, in this case, Idearc.
I wrote several weeks back about the new Idearc "Super Guarantee" program. Participating yellow pages advertisers get (for a fee) to run a special logo in their ads that guarantees customer satisfaction with Idearc as the arbitrator. If a consumer is dissatisfied with one of these participating advertisers, Idearc steps in to mediate. If no happy compromise can be arranged, Idearc will pay the consumer up to $500. Now here's a real reason to use a specific yellow pages product.
A recent FT.com article points out a host of other innovations, starting with a "Super Trade Exchange," an online barter site for the exclusive use of Idearc advertisers.
But perhaps the most intriguing idea out of Idearc is to re-position itself as "an ad agency for small businesses." The company's vaunted salespeople have been re-branded as media consultants, and they're being trained to help small business advertisers with all their advertising needs, including direct marketing. Idearc is even contemplating the idea of becoming a sales rep for its arch-enemy: local newspapers.
I've talked for many years about this notion of buying guide publishers filling more of the advertising needs of their small business advertisers. In fact, many online buying guide publishers are already driving significant revenue by helping their advertisers build and maintain websites and manage their search engine pay-per-click programs. Key to the success of initiatives like this is a simple fact: almost nobody talks to small businesses about their advertising and marketing needs. Anyone who reaches out to this community has an immediate opportunity. That's why yellow pages salespeople, who at best visit their advertisers once a year, can still morph almost overnight into trusted advertising advisors: there isn't anybody else out there. Buyers' guides in vertical markets are arguably in even a stronger position, because they know the industry's products, its issues and its lingo.
Keep an eye on Idearc. The ideas are strong, they're being put to use quickly, and execution looks strong. Maybe someday they'll apply some of this creative energy to developing a better company name!
Labels: Idearc
You Are Here
Yesterday, I stumbled across a press release from a German company called NOUSguide announcing its new deal with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. NOUSguide develops interactive museum guides that can be viewed on iPhones and other devices, and that can be distributed on-site at museums via Wi-Fi, or globally via the iPhone App Store.
I don’t usually pay too much attention to specialized products like this, but this is noteworthy because it flips the whole concept of guidebooks on mobile devices on its head. Think about it: all the buzz on mobile devices for the last ten years has been on coupling them with GPS capabilities to make it easy to figure out where to go. The classic example is an online yellow pages that helps you select a nearby restaurant and then directs you there. What NOUSguide does is exactly the reverse. Instead of telling you how to get somewhere, it tells you about where you are.
I immediately thought about city visitor guides. Imagine an online application of the city guide that was centered on telling you about what’s around you at any given moment. It’s surely more interesting, useful and valuable than the traditional endless lists of everything you can do in a ten mile radius. With a good database behind it, an online guide such as this could even be programmed to beep or send alerts when the user was in range of a certain type of museum, store or restaurant. There would be endless potential ways to add even more value to such an application. If such guides currently exist, I am not aware of them, but it’s clear we’ve only begun to explore the explosive possibilities when you marry mobile devices database and geolocation capabilities. You can look forward to learning more about taking data mobile at InfoCommerce Group’s annual conference, Data Content09, October 27-29, The Ritz Carlton Philadelphia.
Labels: datacontent09, nousguide
Who's Hiring?
The Folio Alert in my inbox yesterday had as its headline "Questex lays off 40." That's just one of an almost daily parade of layoff announcements I am seeing from the world of B2B publishing. It would be easy to conclude that B2B publishing is, to use the words of industry pundit Paul Conley, "in a death spiral."
That's why a news item that noted Bloomberg is on track to make over 1,000 new hires this year is so noteworthy. Why all the hiring? It's primarily to support future growth on the data side of its business.
One thousand new jobs. And this in the midst of a steep economic downturn. From a company that depends on a decimated industry - financial services - for its revenue. It's hard not to be impressed.
So what's Bloomberg doing right? We can start with being a subscription-based business with multi-year contracts that lets it ride out economic downturns more easily than most. We see a strong brand and good quality content. We see a product that is integral to client workflow. We see high-value information that drives high stakes business decisions. But most importantly of all, we see data.
Labels: Bloomberg, Folio Magazine, Paul Conley