An Answer to the Magazine Business' Woes

As can be seen in many news headlines (example), the magazine business is clearly under financial fire. Recently, we have met with several large magazine publishing companies to talk about how they can use data mining to improve their revenue streams. Here is our thinking.

As I have mentioned before, one key challenge that the offline media most overcome to monetize their inventory is to sell the value of their inventory, not the tonnage of their inventory. When I say this I get a suprised look from others in the industry. Heck, magazines have been good a creating niche mastheads that resonate well with their targeted readership. But selling value is far more elusive than that.

There is a two-fold strategy that magazine publishers need to do in order to better monetize their assets. First, magazines need to start integrating their sales strategy and team. Not just integrating online with "the book", but also including events, direct marketing, community, and so on. They need to build a unified value proposition that articulates the value of their reader in terms of what advertisers are looking for. That is, they need to describe what the readers do during or after seeing an advertisement in a magazine. And they need to encourage that activity to create cross-media behavioral insights about how their readership.

Second, magazine publishers need to evolve their circulation systems into cross-media behavioral targeting and direct marketing systems that can enable advertisers to activate against the insights discussed above. These systems will then provide a real-time visibility into how readers are interacting with that magazines brand and ultimately which messages, content, or adjancy is driving the change in readerships behaviors or attitudes about a brand.

More can be read on how to do this in our white paper series: Beyond Ratings: Monetize Your Data to Drive New Revenue. Its a quick read.