What’s a Large Publisher to Do?

Okay. Time for the last of three follow-on posts regarding what to do with the wealth of statistics, media planning tools, and modern maketing tactics available today.

In this one, I’m advising a hypothetical Large Publisher on what to do with this information and these techniques to maximize their results. This isn’t such a reach. I’ve advised companies as large as these publishers on marketing strategy—and created campaigns for them—in my day job.

What I’ll be doing differently here is that I’ll be talking to this hypothetical Large Publisher as if we were old friends—friends who were comfortable enough together to be brutally honest. So, buckle up. There will be no punches pulled here.

So, here’s what I’d advise a Big Publisher to do, in today’s marketing ecosystem:

First, get out a tumbler of your favorite single-malt, sit down, and say this aloud: “My business model is based on the shipping-around of slabs of pulped wood fiber, in a world where the current leading edge of entertainment, business and news are all in a shared electronic medium—a world that’s maybe 2 years away from a mobile-centric, persistently-connected information economy, and maybe 5 years away from large-scale deployment of augmented reality.” Does this scare you? If not, lean forward and look down from your corner office at all the people carrying smartphones. Compare this to the number of people carrying books or Kindles. Amazon may talk about “hundreds of thousands” of Kindles, but Apple wants to move 15 million iPhones this year—and that’s only one brand.

Think “Business Process Innovation.” You have something people want. There’s one big problem: today, you cannot control the distribution of the content; you control only the distribution of the physical books. And, for everyone who says “I like to hold a book in my hand,” there’s another who says, “I like to hold my entire library in my smartphone.” (Or, you know, ten others.) In a world where copying and transmitting your content is trivial, you have two choices. One: You can try to sue them into sticking to your old business model—but we all know how well that is working out for the RIAA. Two: you can look at new business models that deliver what they want in a way that your customers (and potential customers) consider high-value and easy to use.

Test these new models. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it takes effort. And yes, Tor is already experimenting with some social features on its site. But I’m thinking bigger. What about an all-you-can-read subscription model? Or an all-you-can-read ad-supported model—after all, your demographic is upscale, it’s easy to target by interest, and you should be able to command premium CPMs for ads placed in your electronic editions. Or a sliding-scale, pay-for-content model, where everything is nearly free, until it gets popular (the price of each ebook increases as the ebook increases in popularity, rewarding early readers). There are many opportunities to step outside of the current business model, most of which can be tested online before large-scale deployment.

Fire your agencies. No. Seriously. Full-page ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but not a single keyword buy? You have to be kidding me! Blowout ads with results that cannot be measured accurately (let’s face it, even with a bigpublisher.com/respondhere url, measuring the results of offline impressions to sales is iffy at best) are a service only to the agency that doesn’t want to be measured. And, seriously, none of your interactive agencies ever introduced you to Ning or Pringo as social network platforms? Or talked to you about widgets having 67% reach of the worldwide internet (this is a ComScore number, too). Or spoke to you about the value of getting into the social spaces in a meaningful, relevant way now, rather than waiting for someone else to do it? You have personalities. They have followings. This is an opportunity.

Create a marketing plan based on the new media realities. Focus on bringing in new customers rather than coddling old ones, or else your marketing will soon have a singular message: Please buy a few more books before you die. Think Buick.

Think loyalty programs, insiders clubs, and special perks. All of the advice we gave to small publishers holds true here as well. Though you’re going to find it a lot harder to gain a perch in people’s hearts and minds, unless you fragment your programs into genre- or interest-specific categories. The more you can make the book a ticket to an insiders club (though a virtual world like Neopets, or through local author events, or through special edition books designed to treasure) the better off you’ll be.

Stay flexible. The pace of change continues to accelerate. What we’ll see over the next 10 years will look like the last 20. And where was your cellphone, your email address, and your internet browser in 1988?

Is this the be-all and end-all prescription to end all woes in the publishing industry? Of course not. It’s just advice from one person. But really, think about the music industry. You don’t want to be their less-evil, lower-markup, higher-intrinsic-value, less-marketing-focused little brother, do you?

September 14th, 2008 / 1 Comment »