One of the best exchanges about online advertising took place this week on paidcontent.org and Outsell’s Chuck Richard raised some great points about it in our analysis to clients. What publishers need to do, he says is 1) demonstrate the power and influence they already have to attract, assemble, and prime critical messages/promotions/purchases to a valuable set of pre-qualified buyers and 2) to consistently and in some cases dramatically improve and increase that power and influence by creating limitless numbers of special-interest groups, enthusiast groups and engaging them with critical-to-their jobs content, applications, data and how-to’s. The problem with run-of-site and remnant ad thinking is that it treats all audiences equally, as if they’re just as likely to be excited about Irish Spring soap as they are about submersible sump pumps.

There’s another critical point here besides market education and proving the value of highly tailored audiences and Ed Dunn in a response to Spanfeller sums it up best…the whole notion of advertising is becoming antiquated as social networks, bloggers and conversations on the web create more immediacy for awareness, referrals and lead generation. In going where the money’s going, publishers can’t ignore the social movement, especially while commoditizing themselves using ad networks that in many cases can clearly hurt more than help.

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Respected colleague Colin Crawford wrote in his recent blog about the need for a Media Publishing Association. He says:

“I believe the industry needs an MPA – the Media Publishing Association. An organization that can get behind the value of print, online, mobile all vital but very different mass media with vastly different user experiences.”

I say here here! For years the Outsell team has been saying that publishers are too wedded to their containers and nowhere is this more evident than the litany of associations that serve and support this industry. (Full disclosure here I’m on the board of ABM and was active in the content division of SIIA prior) To name a few: ABM, SIIA, OPA, MPA, NAA, SIPA, STM, PA, AOP, PPA, DPA, IPA, FIPP, EADP, AAP, NPA, WAN, SISO, BMA, IAB. Each has their own constituency who are increasingly involved in others “containers.” ABM is orienting around all things b2b which is market focused vs. “container centric” – a positive. Many have their own conference and their own statistics programs. But they are increasingly stepping on each other as the world of content and publishers increasingly play across all these media/containers and as publishers’ budgets and ability to invest in all these associations gets crimped. To make things worse, just about each major country in the world has their own associations focused on a publishing “containers.’” It’s geometric geographic complexity—egad!

Each media, container, platform, delivery device, whatever you want to call them – have their own ideal use and value proposition from a user-experience point of view. But we no longer need a hodgepodge of associations serving each of them. The time has come for more collaboration and dare I say consolidation in the world of publishing associations, not so surprisingly, mirroring what’s happening in their constituencies.

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The information industry is full of weird money flows, particularly in scholarly journals. Scientists and academicians who do research or research and development across academia, the government, and corporate markets create and submit incredible content and scholarly works, in order to have them peer-reviewed and recognized, in order to have their institutions then pay large sums to procure the content back. Just recently I heard about one leading publisher who was working with a big-pharma company whose information manager and marketing manager finally got to talking. They both realized they were both ‘big spenders’ with the publisher – one as a buyer, one as an advertiser. They used this clout to get better leverage as a global account. This had nothing to do with the editorial process. They were simply realizing that together they were a bigger and better client.

In these tough economic times customers are looking at every opportunity to get more for less and it would have been unheard of for these two functions to look a publisher in the eye and ask for additional benefits in this type of light even two years ago. Crazy times make for crazy bedfellows. Publishers and providers need to be on the lookout for these kinds of “out of nowhere” demands from customers or better yet, proactively market these kinds of things. Too many companies we observe take the divide and conquer approach when they could show up as a company that is easier to do business with and a builder of longer-term good-will. Has long-term good-will gone out of style?

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I love the show, I love the characters, but most of all I loved this line from Don Draper as he cuts his power playing potential new boss off at the knees in the season finale by nailing this line. He gets to the core of what advertising is and isn’t –it is a means to an end – simple –sweet. It reminds me of Black and Decker saying they sell holes not drills. Advertising isn’t about lead gen, about brand building, about manipulating consumers to do unnatural acts or about ‘doing anything’ to them. It’s about serving consumers who need something, want something, and about serving marketers and advertisers who want to sell something. It’s not really about building awareness or building leads because at the end of the day the institution still want to generate leads and build awareness so people will buy something. Let’s call it what it is and stay focused on the end goal for everyone. Don simply cut through the clutter.

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Outsell’s Leadership Council is a confidential peer-to-peer membership service where leaders problem-solve, discuss case studies, learn from guest speakers and otherwise focus on the issues of the corner office. Members of all four councils met recently, and the dialogue revealed powerful emerging trends that continue to shape the industry. Key takeaways from our summer meetings:

• Paid content is increasingly being positioned, sold, and bought based on value-propositions for “risk management or mitigation” – the new buzzwords.
• Many government and healthcare information markets continue to do better than other sectors.
• The changes afoot in advertising are structural – exacerbated by cyclical downturn, but permanent.
• Leaders continue to be focused on exploiting the value-chain in their market and accelerating transformative change in their organizations.
• There is more emphasis on agile development, using open source software, and cloud-based computing to reduce costs and improve time to market.
• The recession has sped up change that was already underway and will not really end until the unemployment lag resolves – estimate Q2, 2010.
• There is renewed interest in China, India and Brazil as markets since it is clearer these are the biggest GDP growth markets going forward; but how or if they’ll be strong markets for information services remains unclear.
• Publishers and paid information providers who create and own their own content are increasingly willing to aggregate third-party content into their offerings in order to create more holistic solutions for their markets, but using someone else’s free content in paid content offerings remains contentious.
• Customers, whether of advertising or paid content, are demanding more in terms of ROI measurement; pressure for more accountability continues to grow.

The information industry is facing unprecedented challenges, and resolution of these and other issues will continue to be a focal point for member discussions, including at Outsell’s Signature Event, where leaders from all councils and from across the industry convene. If you are interested in joining these conversations, send me a note for more information about our array of leadership programs. I look forward to seeing you in Dublin.

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I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the information industry is bad at branding. I looked recently at an exhibitors listing for last year’s Online Information event, held each December at the Olympia Grand Hall in London and got dizzy trying to make any sense out of how providers and their products were branded, named, listed, and logoed. Take the event itself for example. It used to be called International Online but I couldn’t find that name referenced anywhere, even though most people I talk with refer to it by that name.

The event guide co-marketed two events – Online Information 2008 and Information Management Solutions (IMS) 2008. Two different URLs, two different logos. Inside the cover in the fine print it said that the two events are Incisive Media events © Imark Communications trading as VNU exhibitions. In a different spot I saw reference to “An incisivemediaevent” but with a URL that said incisive-events.com. This little reference had a different logo than the other two logos for the events being marketed.

Now I’m not picking on Incisive because the rest of the exhibitor guide was like alphabet soup. RefWorks referred to themselves as RefWorks-COS and as a business unit of ProQuest. Dialog’s entry made no reference of its parent (also Proquest) but made it a point to mention their “extensive collection of Dialog® and Datastar® databases.” Proquest referenced their many respected brands and then listed a dizzying array of names including CSA, UMI, Chadwyck-Healey, SIRS, eLibrary, Serials Solutions, Ulrich’s, RefWorks/COS (notice the backslash and not the dash?) and Dialog. Here again these are all trusted brands, but are they really needed? On a separate page we saw Gale, Cengage Learning. Its description made no further reference to Cengage but the email address for customer inquiries was emea.enquiries@cengage.com The URL? www.gale.cengage.co.uk . Do we expect anyone to remember these variations?

Then there was Google’s entry. That’s all it said. Google. The logo was the one we’ve come to know and love. The colors were the same and their description was the boilerplate that we’ve  come to know. In fact it comes out (pretty consistently) of any Google speakers’ mouth any time they are on a podium. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Simple, the same.

Our industry represents a hodgepodge of title names, product names, company names and hyper-consolidation that hasn’t rationalized an already irrational array of title names, product names and company names.  These brands are expensive to maintain, crazy-makers for customers to remember, and inconsistent and confusing. They make us look bad, unsophisticated, antiquated. They keep us wedded to the past and to names that frankly most customers could give a hoot about and we care too much about. It’s time to lighten the load and rationalize. If GM can do it publishers and providers can do it. It’s just time.

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