Remember the rule of thumb all direct mail campaigns produce a 2% response. That was never true unless you knew what you were doing – certainly it was never automatic. Still, everybody would tell you 2%. The same thing is happening with click-through rates (CTR) and we are doing ourselves no favors.

Recently publishers were outed for dumping banner ads deep below the fold, never to be seen. Some see justice in burying ad network banners in particular, based on lowball rates. It’s a vicious cycle. At the B2B Audience Network we see more and more campaigns looking to pay B2C rates. Is it too late to stop B2B banners from sinking that low?

We must begin to inject more reality into what we are selling. Display ads have always been about branding and we must always include that in our pitch. But in our search-ad weaned world only clicks will do. Fair enough – but who thinks that every ad, merely because it is an ad, deserves the same CTR? That’s nuts.

Managing expectations

Are we putting our ad salespeople in the position of promising unrealistic results? Most buyers see “good CTRs” as 0.15%, or as high as 0.25%. I have heard buyers who believe 0.2% is the norm.  Very funny seeing the same false number from 30 years ago. (What’s a decimal point among friends?)

Okay, let’s say an advertiser paying a fair price expects that. Maybe they even have provided compelling creative and an attractive offer. But I am seeing advertisers who plan to pay a $1-2 CPM (net to you) and get the same results.

The other day I spoke with a RTB ad network looking for B2B space at a $0.85 CPM “only on responsive sites” (> 0.1% CTR). Get this:  they would just run one ad per viewer. Not only did the reader need to respond, they were allowed no repeat views to think about it. At that insulting price can’t the salesman educate the buyer to run 3-per-view? At any price, it is how people respond.

Recently a buyer quoted a high CTR they were looking to achieve advertising automobiles, cars which cost more than $50K. I did the math: no. of impressions x CTR. Then I looked up how many of that brand had sold the previous year. In order for this one campaign to hit its numbers, it would have taken 4x all U.S. buyers the previous year. One campaign to get a response from, more-or-less, every potential buyer in America. What marketing genius came up with that goal? Worse – who promised to accomplish it?

If we let false expectations become the norm it will ensure the oft-predicted demise of the banner. I’m convinced much of this is trickle-down pressure to harried (fearful?) salesmen and the dreaded, clueless media planners. Maybe we can be part of breaking this cycle before new, false market “truisms” are firmly entrenched.

Business-to-business started out as adjective, as in b-to-b publishing. Then it acquired the (now quaint) geek acronym B2B. Along the way the concept of B2B has been stretched and twisted.

When I heard Penton Media was about to merge a consulting firm with an online information resource, it looked like they were taking business-to-business literally. It has the elements of a case study with multiple ideas other B2B publishers should think about.

Chicago-based GreenPoint Partners, the company in which Penton made an equity investment, analyzes energy use for building and facility managers. They make recommendations how clients can generate significant savings by retrofitting lighting systems with new technology. I love the idea this content is now being repurposed into a publishing product. It will become a functional tool called Green PSF (Green Per Square Foot), which Penton VP Warren Bimblick described as an online marketplace to help owners “figure out how to make their facility more efficient.”

The first takeaway is turning content into a lead-generation resource which goes beyond that of white papers and webinars. I’m a sucker for old fashioned usefulness to readers. The fact this effort takes advantage of established brands like National Real Estate Investor and American School and University is the ribbon on the package.

Having built a database of several million related readers gives Penton the chance “to aggregate volumes of people to use these tools,” Bimblick noted. In the future the platform will add HVAC, motors, solar and other potential areas for facility upgrades. I’m thinking there will be some calculators and analytical tools tailor-made for extension to mobile devices.

The oft-overlooked multiplier
The clincher on this is how it enables Penton to dig down into a vast reservoir of marketers who have never advertised with them. My personal rule of thumb in B2B publishing is “manufacturers advertise, service providers don’t.” (Yes, exceptions to every rule; yada, yada…) I use service provider to encompass the local and regional channel partners, system integrators, distributors and, in this case, contractors who actually do the work.

One obvious reason for this advertising divide is hardly any of the service providers are national, while most industry publications sell national, if not international, advertising. Yes, now ads can be delivered with geo-targeting; but in practice it is not worth an ad salesman’s time to chase that sort of business. Yet most publishers forget the fact that, depending on industry, for every manufacturer there are 20-50 service providers.

Warren Bimblick says, “the whole angle is about (buildings and facilities) becoming more efficient and contractors generating greater revenue.” Enabling contractors to bid on business turns lead-gen into revenue-sharing for the publisher.

How can you tap into the far greater base of non-advertising service providers in your industry?

Of thousands of vertical B2B publications, at most a few dozen can afford to have fresh, original articles five days a week. Many of the better vertical sites hail from monthly magazine backgrounds, neither culturally nor organizationally conducive to daily news.

Is there an alternative to having a vital, dynamic publication website? Yes; it’s called ‘slow bleeding.’

The phrase “feeding the beast” has gained currency regarding the need for dynamic, daily content.
You may ask, “What is there to say every day?” in many verticals. Plenty for a good editor with a budget.

Last week I saw one site which labeled a section “Breaking News” that only contained a handful of pieces dated 2012. The “Top Story” grouping on one technology magazine’s site featured pieces two months old. Another respected publisher’s site I reviewed last week runs a good dose of current news, but the first video is from spring 2011.

Budgets prevent publishers from running the robust content their businesses crave. Blogs can be great, of course, as is user-generated content; and the price is right. Press releases fill in the gap for many. Is what it is; but better than nothing. If the choice is no daily content vs. running press releases, no contest.

Strategic creativity

Once you factor out budget limitations, the difference between the haves and have-nots comes down to strategic creativity. Some rewrite press releases to make the stories sound, well, not exactly like press releases. Best practice: To enhance a release make one phone call to a relevant industry member, maybe a competitor. Add one quote, mix in a new sentence or two, fresh head—voila!

Some websites run headlines with links, whether to their own site or not. Some add blurbs giving the highlights, which is at least a kind of content. Outbrain is making some inroads offering these to editors and paying a nominal fee per-click.

Recently a respected industry analyst thought I was nuts to suggest publishers would run content found in other publications. He is right you would never see that in print; but it is quite commonplace on content-starved websites. Of course, each editor chooses carefully which publications to borrow from.

Kimberly Jorgensen of Cygnus Media was proud to show me their recently overhauled websites, rich with news. They do a great job mixing in staff reporting with rewritten pieces with such varying origins as associations, congressional reports, daily newspapers and, yes, press releases.

Advantage Media of New Jersey has an interesting approach. They pick up stories from academic journals, universities, scientific societies and research institutes. They gain gravitas while not promoting anyone that sells advertising.

Here at Publishing Executive I spoke with Lynn Rosen, content director. She explained each Napco editor has free choice what publications they pick up news from. Pub Exec uses sources as diverse as a general magazine like The Atlantic and an industry blog called GalleyCat.com. She spoke of their increasing use of original pieces and interviews. Lynn laughed when I asked the likelihood of seeing a link to Folio any time soon, but there was a story from Digiday, which does sell competing ads.

When it comes to aggregating to keep commercial magazine sites fresh, these are not always easy calls.

People not in our business have a difficult time understanding, or believing, the rock-solid resistance editors and publishers have to anything that hints of selling out. It’s a business – why wouldn’t they do anything they can to increase profits? Am I supposed to believe they are saints?

Many of us came up calling the separation of editorial and advertising “church and state,” bestowing a constitutional importance on it. When I recently asked in a Linked-in group whether we should consider new ways of profiting from content, I was digitally tarred and feathered. The nearly unanimous response was there are the only two choices, editorial and advertorial. Period.

This is a critical time to entertain this discussion. The evolving business called content marketing is taking more and more money directly out of advertising budgets, reducing the share of the pie allocated for publishers. Those selling content marketing define it as specifically excluding publishers. (See sidebar.)

We have stretched the definition of publications to include websites, emails and smartphones. Are we kidding ourselves to think we have not already entered uncharted territory beyond new platforms?

Let’s take a moment and question our own actions. We already color outside the lines as they were drawn years ago. I think it is worth aligning our intentions with our actions to find clarity and, perhaps, opportunity.

Take “blogs.” Blogs are a critical part of the mix and help “feed the beast,” as one editor describes what it takes to keep his website vital and fresh. Did we start calling columns blogs in order to relieve ourselves of the burden of (much) editorial oversight? I am not inferring we violated any ethics. If the blog sucks we kill it, needless to say. But I have yet to see any B2B pub kill good content that gently mentions the blogger’s own activities.

There is no trade publisher which does not routinely run vendor-originated content. It’s a given none of us would run a piece which says ‘buy me, buy me’ or which does not offer value to readers. But there is no escaping they are supplied by marketers who have promotional motivations.

Cut to today, where we all serve a growing group of “content marketers” who are out to eat our lunch, who advocate against ever spending a dime on publications. Insult to injury, they get paid when we run their content. This is not the old PR business, “same old thing but digital.” It is more sophisticated and insidious.

All I know is we have the integrity to at least consider new definitions, whether or not we find any. And we know right from wrong, editorially speaking.

Originally appeared in Publishing Executive

That used to be the universal publishing call to juice up your headlines. The opposite was the headline you'll never see: "Plane Landed Safely."

The last time I started a trade magazine, about eight years ago, we broke a controversial story on the cover of our first issue. We had found a potential deal-killer within a ground-changing industry event. With old-fashioned, solid reporting we came down pretty hard on Intermec, a supply chain and mobile-computing technology leader. We played it for all it was worth and got instant attention—the kind of story that makes ad sales directors cringe.

I'll never forget that a senior vp at Intermec called his marketing director and said, "I like that new magazine. Give them some support." A response which had been "we'll consider you for next year" turned into an important inside cover placement in issue two. I love all my advertisers; but that was an especially classy move.

I've been keeping an eye open for industry-rattling stories in the dozens of trade magazines and B2B websites I review each week. I don't see any. The technology, medical and industrial verticals I mostly spend time with have some terrific content and useful service features. But most seem to tow the line on industry news and announcements.

Variety, Automotive News and Advertising Age. In fact, most Crain publications are known for breaking real news. Monthlies and online-only publishers don't need to sit on the sidelines.

True, being muckrakers is not our job. It's not that we are cheerleaders when covering an industry—if you can't be upbeat, encouraging and most of all, genuinely excited about your beat, what's the point? But it is our job to be interesting and it is in our interest to be compelling. That is achieved with good reporting and the occasional big and/or controversial piece. They are always there if you look for them.

Readers beget advertisers; advertisers never beget readers. So don’t worry about alienating an advertiser.

Upon closer look I realized there were indeed stories that might be attention-grabbing. I'm just not sure the editors noticed. They had no more emphasis that a product announcement. Rarely do I see an web headline size variation that draws attention to one story over another. Add to that most, vertical B2B websites are choking with offers of white paper and webinars. This may be genuinely worthwhile content, but rarely does it get the blood racing.

I'm suggesting you add sizzle to the steak. Call someone out when warranted, just because you can. Our world of aggregated news and corporate content can make editorial on sites serving the same industry look bland and repetitive.

One site focused on a particular medical specialty ran a story about a NIH study proving a widely used medication did not work. In that field, this was huge. Some companies were about to lose money. For others a new opportunity had opened. A couple of calls to likely winners and losers could have generated a juicy quote to spin the article on. Instead, this story was lost between one about an NYU grant and a mundane association announcement.

Earn the respect – and attention – of your industry and you can never go wrong. Those results are easily worth the risk of burning a bridge.

Originally appeared in Publishing Executive

Lists have been the lifeblood of publishing. I wonder if we are all on the same page as to where lists end and data begins.

Building lists, nurturing them, testing, segmenting . . . truly a juncture of art and science in publishing. The essentials never really change, just the availability and quantity of data and the means to use it.

A publication's success depends in no small part on the size, freshness and quality of your lists. This motivates all sorts of creativity. A fabled editor I knew had a reputation for derring-do in obtaining lists. The best stories involved him raiding trash bins after trade shows, scoring discarded registration lists.

I've spidered lists off the internet, a cleaner, dignity-saving version of dumpster diving. Now data-scraping is the buzz. Do you know the difference between spidering and scraping? Me neither; but free lists are free lists. I have a simple line I draw. If published data states nobody should copy it, I don't. Otherwise I see everything on the internet as free data.

Changing values The first controlled circulation, B2B magazine I launched was in 1978, a time most trade publications still sold plenty of subscriptions. The more our industry embraced controlled circ, the less direct revenue per-name initially. It was still important to have quality subscribers for our advertisers, to be sure; but they no longer wrote us checks.

Now it is more likely you are using lists to build conference attendance or provide lead generation to advertisers. This has made the data attached to each name and address the real value, so we gladly trade magazine subscriptions for that data.

With data exchanges becoming increasingly powerful and tracking cookies now pervasive – and more ad revenue moving online – does anyone care about your lists? Do they still have the value they did 5-10 years ago? Are you renting as many lists, of any kind? Is your own list-rental income what it was?

Last year I had access to a list of ten million business readers. I asked a major B2B advertising player what that was worth to them. Mailing lists rent for $120-150 per thousand; and this list would have been sold, not rented. Yet this company said millions of names were worth nothing to them. They believe most business names worth knowing have already been gathered by the data exchanges, using IP addresses. Using specific B2B publishers to reach specific business buyers is not of great interest to them.

In the view of an increasing number of B2B marketers, your lists (i.e. audience) are not nearly as important as those lists data-exchanges like Exelate and BlueKai provide the industry. This enables advertisers to chase the IP address of potential buyers with their ads, rather than finding a healthy group of prospects on a website aimed at their target audience.

Have you unintentionally undermined the value of your lists, and by extension your audience? If you allow ad networks to use your subscriber and registration data, might your publication slowly bleed to death? Do you have agreements in place limiting the use of your data? If you do, have you any ability to enforce them? Once enough publishers share their hard-earned lists and data, the toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube.

Originally appeared in Publishing Executive

A large, and growing, publisher who recently received more than $20 million in funding wondered how ad agencies will survive. Offering enterprise solutions to advertisers is an important element in their growth plans, he told me two days ago. In his vision, there will simply be little need for agencies.

Then yesterday a tiny, niche technology publisher also told me sales of marketing services has become essential. In fact they intend to offer it to their readers, as well. Like many vertical B2B publications, their audience includes solution providers, VARs, distributors and others who could use marketing help.

"The whole web thing is about a conversation, a continuous dialog, which exists between a company and its target audience," offered Paul Caplan. The Cygnus Business Media Senior VP doesn't see advertising as about CTRs, but rather "the level of engagement a reader has with advertisers."

Going operational with marketing services
Okay, so it's unanimous—we all are selling marketing services with our advertising, or know we should be. How do we blend this into our publishing operations? How do we pitch this and move the needle with advertisers?

Brian Ceraolo also advocates "it is imperative" to offer services along with ads. The Executive Vice President of Peerless Media advises, "You need a business plan behind any approach you take, so it does not become just a cost center." Their current approach grew from value-added offerings of market intelligence and lead generation. Now they have staffed up the Peerless Research Group which offers marketing services. Advertisers can pay separately for what they need and buy additional lead-gen products.

"Lead-gen has always been what B2B publishing is about. Marketing services is an outgrowth of where those leads go," adds Cygnus' Caplan. "Are the leads being properly utilized? This leads to Marketing as a Service (MaaS) and lead nurturing."

Mr. Caplan felt the industry hurt itself in the early 2000's. Before that marketers had paid for market research; but then publishers started bundling it into advertising packages. With the rise of MaaS, research is just one arrow in the quiver of publishers. Publishers like Cygnus offer services which include social media help and video production. After all, unlike agencies "we have a channel to distribute it through to a relevant audience."

The pitch
This approach "is new to a lot of advertisers," Brian Ceraolo says, "so we talk through goals which enhance our relationship with them. . . You've got to be a lot more creative and more focused on the content we create." He advises to make the point you are allowing marketers to tap into your expertise as publishers.

"It is not a magazine pitch," Caplan agrees. "We make sure we know what strategic initiatives a client has and we present a holistic concept. When an ad rep walks out of a marketer's office, our goal is for them to feel 'those guys really get it.'" To that end, Cygnus merged print and digital sales forces five years ago so buyers have a single point of contact for a full set of solutions.

Offering marketing services may be nothing new, but the tools available to publishers are expanding exponentially as data and the ability to capitalize on it for marketing success expand. Why shouldn't we usurp the role of ad agencies? They've been dissing us forever, anyway, routing our calls to entry-level media planners. Payback's a bitch.

Originally appeared in Publishing Executive

"It has never been cheaper to get a piece of content in front of a B2B buyer," said Sybase VP Mark Wilson recently. We are now at or near the tipping point where non-publishers eclipse competitive titles as a B2B publisher's prime competition for dollars, if not for advertising dollars.

Marketers not only have more channels available to reach buyers than ever before, they have become content publishers themselves. It started as a few pages on their website and a monthly newsletter, but manufacturers' involvement in producing and distributing content is evolving quickly.

Undervaluing what we do is nothing new. Do you think any profession on earth is expected to provide as many services to non-customers as publishers are? Who else is asked for free stuff all week long? Complete strangers expect us to list their meeting, announce their new product or some piece of business they have won. Most never spend a dime on advertising in our pubs.

Then came "Internet 2.0," which was all about your site visitors generating content?a literal invitation for marketers to give themselves free content in your online publication. Add the social media boom of the past few years and a website can end up with a veritable open door allowing businesses to reach their hard-won readers.

Who is getting paid? We've been our own worst enemies, widely distributing "paid content" while we are not the ones getting paid. Everywhere I look I see MarketWire and PR Newswire and press releases simulating news and features. Truth is, some content originated by commercial sources is indeed useful to readers.

With blogs, "studies" and analysts reports, you need a scorecard to discern the motive behind a particular article. Many of us remember the old 'church and state' mentality, where the only proper dividing line between advertising and editorial was a clean, uncrossable one. That ethic has never left me, though it provides scant dignity as editorial budgets force a more liberal position on using industry-generated content on my own websites.

Some say all this is just the 21st Century version of advertorials. But at least we got paid for advertorials. With "Content Marketing" advertisers produce content, and your salesman expects you to run it at no charge. Worse, there are times when running non-advertiser content offers an ass-backwards version of editorial integrity?at least you're not selling your editorial space. Huh? B2B publishers better figure out how to monetize this trend, because apparently we are going to keep distributing it anyway.

The publishers' edge All is not bleak because we have a built-in advantage. After all, B2B publishers invented content marketing, or whatever it is we call this. Most of us have been marketing content for years: researching and writing white papers, producing webinars, selling training and certification programs. Our choice is whether we grab a bigger market share of advertiser-produced content or sit by as others shape the future.

Advertisers are hiring professionals to write their content, often under the guise of marketing agencies or PR firms. Now may be the time to take off the gloves and purposefully compete with these companies?or find partnership business models where we do not abdicate our role in business content production and distribution.

If you never lose an ad sale to your competition—are they your competition? The digital world can reduce or eliminate competitive advantages the largest publications enjoy in print.

My own online niche-technology publication lived in the shadow of the industry's big kahuna for years. Yet we never once lost an ad sale to them. True, all marketing dollars began after their annual trade show was budgeted for; but we never had a head-to-head showdown for online ads.

Then there is a unique online phenomenon for a surprising number of B2B category leaders: ad space is often limited. This provides opportunities for those who still have space to sell. (See: The Cap on your Ad Sales)

The competitor which directly hurt us most was Google. How many non-advertisers among your prospects spend $2-10,000 a month on Search?

There are not many Digi-Keys. They take my prize as the most widespread banner advertising I see on industrial and technology sites. But only a handful of advertisers have so many different ad-sellers competing for their dollars.

Our new competitors fly under the radar&nspb; In talking with publishers lately about the marketing services they offer, the differentiation of advertising value within vertical industries is increasing well defined. Unique programs offers less apples vs. apples conflict. (See sidebar.)

Are there finite budgets we fight over? You bet. That will never change. But we aren't just competing with other publishers anymore. Technology companies offering advertising wizardry are trying to outflank you. Have you ever heard of BlueKai, Netline, RevResponse, Quantcast, AdAgency1, Accelerator and NetShelter? They may not all impact your sales; but I guarantee there are others who are out to eat your lunch.

I'm finding that B2B publishers working together have plenty to gain, not much to lose. There will always be one or two competing publications you'll never work with, on principal if nothing else. That still leaves dozens of others where, for example, mutual traffic building or content sharing is a win for both. If your supply chain website gains 10,000 new readers from one such partnership, do you really care if your new trucking website partner gains 20,000? If you are sharing readers and not losing advertisers, what's the problem?

Originally appeared in Publishing Executive

More and more "marketing services" is becoming the flavor of the week in discussions about B2B publishing. American Business Media made it the theme of their 2011 conference in Austin. In some industries, the buzzword is Marketing as a Service (MaaS).

Lately I began asking publishers if this was a hot-button issue for them. I was met with a collective laugh. It was unanimous-everyone has been doing this for years.

Certainly my own recent publishing includes researching and writing white papers for clients. We produced webinars, from production to marketing. We have sent video crews and provided all production necessary to create training materials for clients' channel partners.

After all, there was a time most publishers assumed this to be the province of marketing firms and ad agencies. The Web rearranged everything like the beach after a wave. Marketers and agencies became publishers; paid and aggregated content proliferated; mailing became "free." Sheer survival was good incentive for publishers to take a fresh look at the landscape. Guess what? We have the most experienced skillset, and best lists, of all contenders.

"This is really an extension of the custom publishing realm," said Keith Larson, VP of content and group publisher of Putman Media. Their longest standing custom publication just reached its 12th year.

"Things got messier when they moved to digital platforms," he observed. "It went from selling a series of ads (i.e. six pages) to managing campaigns for clients. For expediency sake we began handling more creative functions just to get it done. We take part of the agency role, all the way to creating websites."

"Come in as a consultant. Make sure you take the time to ask them what has changed, how can you help them," is how Allied Media president Dennis Triola sees it. One advertiser asked about a digital program, but was shown a print supplement would serve them better. They now buy inserts every year. Not for the first time, a client recently bought a single-sponsor issue, adding a 10th edition to a 9x-per-year magazine.

"I want to go to advertisers and partner with them, get them whatever they need," Triola added. They aggressively sell custom publishing and even printing services, seeing opportunities each time an advertiser attends a trade show or introduces a new product.

To launch video sales online, Allied has added video creative services. They repurpose their reporting from newsletter articles to create scripts. The goal is to remove all production obstacles for the client.

At Putman Media, Keith Larson finds the planning stage with advertisers are key. "It allows us to have that conversation up front about expectations." That way, whatever package of marketing services is decided upon, "it is then easier to satisfy them and keep the client happy."

Originally appeared in Publishing Executive

It does not take a publishing expert to tick off a list of changes magazines have undergone converting from paper to pixels. But with as many digital publishing truisms those of us in the business already take for granted, I've barely heard a word uttered about the root concept of "readership."

Who cares about readership anyway? Is the concept of a publication having a reliable group of readers relevant in a world of uniques, social networkers and tweeters? Most planning is about turning website visitors into leads to generate and data to track. The idea of readers has been so dumbed-down that most websites call them users. Boy, do I hate that term except when applied to eBay or Travelocity. For a publication, it's disrespectful and discourages empathy with the audience.

By the Numbers
I've never been on a magazine staff where we kept our fingers crossed that each reader would look at seven pages. We didn't delude ourselves that they hung on every word, but feedback told us they looked through each book in varying degrees even if to see the ads or the pictures.

Online, two or three page views per site visit is the average. When publishers can show their average is seven to nine pages, it merits a bullet point in the media kit. Does that mean if you look at three pages of my online publication occasionally you qualify as one of my "readers"?

Subscriptions have always been one measurement of print readership. With controlled circ the norm in B2B publishing, there is arguably less of a readership commitment, but the front and back covers alone give you two "page views." Even if they don't open the magazine, you have technically done as much communicating as the average website.

Say what you want about lack of "accountability" and "metrics," nobody will ever convince me the vast majority of magazine subscribers, controlled or otherwise, do not view many more pages than the average online visitor. True, I cannot tell you which pages, but seven to nine is not a tough benchmark to beat.

Adding insult to injury to the deteriorating concept of readership, web marketers are increasingly more interested in reaching certain readers who happen to be visiting your website?but not because they are visiting. Though more universally true in the B2C marketplace, advertisers now follow prospects identified by keywords they've entered into search engines or forms they filled out somewhere.

One way for advertisers to overcome the lack of readership affinity to any particular website is by planning a campaign across multiple websites. Most B2B publishers have not yet opted into the pervasive data exchanges that enable such across-the-board ad planning. Ironically, this less-cookied, more insular approach might be a retaining wall helping maintain whatever semblance of readership is left online.

What's Love Got to Do With It?
For any publishing executive reading this who never experienced the commitment and passion a readership invests in a good magazine, I'm sorry.

Have you ever loved a magazine? I have?more than a few. Readerships can love business and trade magazines, too. Smart advertisers can capture some of that and make it rub off on the advertised product.

Can readers love online publications? Do they? How important might answering that question be? Thinking about what "readerships" are may be a good first step.

Publishers have wondered just how often they should change a magazine's design to keep it fresh. Three to seven years used to be the consensus, though I have not had that discussion for a while. So how often should we change the designs of our websites?

Online it is more important to constantly rethink how to better monetize our websites while maintaining editorial value. Let design changes flow from there. As we optimize each pixel of our websites, let us not forget the humble banner ad.

Sophisticated publishers often include banners in packages with videos, microsites, sponsored sections or lead-gen of various types. This makes sense and reflects the true value of what publishers offer. But selling sponsorships which happen to include display ads is not the same as selling ads.

Banner advertising used for branding should be a strategic tool, not an afterthought. When we first started creating websites to support our magazines, we were not quite sure how to sell them. I remember offering banners as a perk when you spent a certain amount on print. We'd use banners as a closer for print sales (which they are still good for).

No matter how successful your time-based sponsorship sales are, mixing in CPMs provides more flexible market options. Plenty of publishers I speak with have no official CPM rate. Certainly sponsorship sales are useful for masking ultra-high CPMs.

Has CPM, the venerable cost-per-thousand, outlived its usefulness? Here is why I draw the opposite conclusion:

Benchmark price – CPMs are an objective common language among publishers, a universal measurement tool and point of comparison. You are specifying a value even if you do not sell by CPM. Whether the rate card says $40, $75 or $120 per thousand views, buyers assume that is what some others must be paying.

Gain more impressions to sell – Now you have an actual rate to refer to. Rather than selling ads for a month or quarter, "include" $1K or $5K (or whatever) of banner advertising in that month or quarter. With careful planning you can open up more impressions to sell instead of being stuck with a full month of just a few ads occupying every spot. Being sold out is nice; but it also sucks.

Integrity saver – As we publish endless white papers, product listings, sponsor-produced content and press releases, having actual advertising units provides a place where unabashed product-promoting belongs. Keep the most egregious claims out of your editorial.

Banish boring – Page after page of the same two ads gets old real quick and I see that on scores of B2B sites. Is that even a great advertiser benefit? Sophisticated advertisers don't want their ads to appear more than X per-session. ("First prize a week in Omaha. Second prize, two weeks in Omaha.")

Weapon in your arsenal– Branding is not a myth. Advertising makes lead-gen more successful, because buyers are more comfortable with brands they know. It makes all sales more successful. Non-strategic deployment of ads also limits your growth. Why would you limit any option you have when it comes to higher revenues?

Originally appeared in Publishing Executive

If the value of your product was about to drop by a factor of 20x-50x – with no corresponding drop in demand – could you stop it from happening?

We B2B publishers must consider this question after watching B2C ad values drop to dirt in the name of "advertising efficiency."

I remember when the CPMs of consumer titles, long before we thought to call them B2C, could exceed $200. When I published Polo, at the time official pub of the U.S. Polo Assoc. with reader income north of $450K (in 80's dollars), Rolls Royce, Dom Perignon and DeBeers were buying double-trucks with CPMs too high to measure.

Recently I've had "wholesale buyers" tell me that for "good" B2C websites they might pay as much as 80¢/M. That may even be generous when you consider the alternative is running 99% of your ads free, and getting paid for 1% of them when someone clicks.

Going by true, street ad rates, online B2B publishers are like islands of value in a draining sea. Most of those I speak with every day are getting CPMs closer to $100 than the $1 some B2C sites covet. Of course the ads may not all be sold on a strict dollar-per-impression basis, but the pricing differential is glaring. Why would we think B2B is safe from the devaluation of advertising? On the contrary, those prices make us a target.

Can you think of any other price—anything—which has imploded as drastically as B2C advertising rates, dropping from $100-$200 to less than $3 in two decades? I'm not suggesting advertisers go back to paying inefficient rates for undefined results. Still, that's one helluva hit. Just today I was offered a campaign at 10¢/M – that's $100 per million!

Can B2B publishers save themselves from the same fate? I think so, but not if we don't start planning now – as an industry. No matter how brilliantly strategic your own company may be, once the bottom falls out of industry rates, yours have only one direction to go.

You can't really fault our B2C cousins. Who could have seen it coming the first time? After Y2K the internet bubble had just collapsed and the survivors were trying to find solid ground. The parallel growth of ad networks, data exchanges and internet market-measurement mavens like comScore sounded promising, even exciting. Everyone was determined to get the business model right this time, not like those crazy 90's.

The stage was set for that Siren called "advertising efficiency." It sounded great; who could be against that? How did everyone miss that advertising efficiency = less money for publishers? Not lower overhead, just lower revenue. How did the B2C publishers not stand up at some point and say, "What we do has value beyond clicks!"

Our B2B islands of high-value advertising are starting to erode. Now is the time to start eyeing each new "advertising technology" announcement carefully. Remember the B2C cautionary tale and beware embracing new technology for technology's sake.

Digital and cross-platform publishing was, not surprisingly, covered in many sessions at Publishing Xchange, a new conference held here in D.C. last week. But my biggest take-away was: Follow the Data—and there is more to data than tracking cookies.

Content is king; sure. The not-so secret sauce which will determine your online success is data. The thinking goes if you can track and analyze what your readers are doing as you deliver content to them, it will enrich your understanding of what they like and don't. And of course data will drive your delivery of ads.

Data can inform editorial decisions and add metrics to what had always been based on gut feelings and experience. It manages what content you deliver and when you deliver it. I do not advocate we abandon editorial instincts – I'll leave that to the robo-editors – but wouldn't we be foolish not to consider every data point available, especially if the competition was doing just that?

Print revenue vs. "other"
Bob Sacks and David Renard, co-founders of Media Insights, said print revenues are falling faster than their 2009 research predicted, currently averaging 80-85% of publisher revenue. Since you can chart the drop of print in advance—they say it will go down to 58% later this decade – their point was you'd best manage that change.

"The substrate is the least important element" of your publishing business, said Renard. "Most important is how you can monetize delivering your content and advertising."

There are two good reasons so many B2B publishers already rely less on print. With controlled circulation the norm, there is no subscription revenue stream that B2C publishers have. And with disproportionately dominant conference revenues for many, it is not simply a choice of print vs. digital when it comes to percentages.

Larger B2B publishers lead the way in monetizing content—and data—away from hard "substrates." This conference's producer, Questex, expects print sales to flatten at 20-25% of their revenue by 2014. Matt Yorke, president of IDG's Strategic Marketing Services, said print revenue was already less than 20% for IDG.

IDG supports its remaining pubs by "charging readers in data." I'm not sure if Yorke was speaking literally, but he said subscribers had to fill in a total of ten pages of data to get a print edition. By monetizing the data through lead-gen and targeted advertising products, IDG finds data a worthwhile price for the magazines.

What really underscored the data-value theme was the environment of the event itself. This grew out of On-Demand Expo, a pioneering digital printing show now with a sister show called Info-360, featuring exhibits and sessions on data and document management. Everywhere you turned were examples of the seamless connection between content, printing and publishing – and data is the Velcro connecting them all.

When it comes to King Content, taken to the extreme data will enable you to deliver different content to each reader. Ironically, when I reflected on the first On-Demand Expo many years ago which I happened to attend, they said the same thing about printed content.

Talking about data in direct marketing, Chris Bondy of InfoTrends reported 82% of marketers – i.e. your advertisers – never track or monitor marketing campaign results. So if we must become data mavens to thrive, maybe helping advertisers with their data usage will become the best value-added growth opportunity of all.

Lead-gen – it's all about lead-gen today, isn't it? Be careful; there are a dozen reasons why just selling leads is literally painting yourself into a corner.

Trade publishers have always been ideally suited to bring customers to advertisers. Producing trade shows and conferences can be your most profitable lead-gen brand extension, of course. Catch exhibitors after a trade show. Flush with business cards and badge swipes, lead-gen smells sweet.

After those leads are put in SalesForce and the follow-up is done, you will sometimes hear grumbles about "how lousy the leads were" – as if the salesman and the product had nothing to do with the outcome. If the prospect was properly qualified, the outcome of the sale did not suddenly make him unqualified. How did that become a "bad lead?"

Webinars and white papers are lead-gen products tailor-made for us as publishers. We get paid for our content expertise and deliver the information in a package paid for by advertising. It's all good.

There's nothing new about lead-gen. We used to run bingo cards in our magazines; but none of us ever got paid per returned card. There was no 1:1 relationship between rates and response. Advertisers understood the value of branding display ads offered. Now a generation of ad-buyers raised on Google per-click ads doubt the concept of "branding."

Switching to pay-per-lead
Recently I met with two chiefs of a B2B publishing firm who tell me their advertisers are demanding lead-gen – or else. They plan on making lead-gen their exclusive advertising model before long.

Ouch. Run the numbers and you'll see it's a dead-end. Based on their rate card, one website had $27,300 worth of ads on it that month. At $100 per lead, that site would need to produce 273 leads a month to break even with today's CPM sale; 546 leads at $50 per. These are not clicks—these are potential buyers filling out an entire form. Nearly 6,600 leads needed every year just to break even with today's sales. Is that realistic?

You think you have advertiser complaints now? Wait 'til they are paying $100 per lead. They'll be judging each one: measuring, complaining, asking for make-goods! You can hear them now: “But four were grad students...”

Implicit in any demand for lead-gen is the concept that advertisers can come to identify your leads as a fixed cost, so every time they advertise they make a profit. In other words, they expect you to be an alchemist and manufacture gold out of advertising.

Meanwhile, you will be promoting these lead-buying companies way beyond what you can get paid for. What about the hundreds of thousands of future buyers who happened not to fill out a form, but became familiar these products? Because your buyers don’t value branding, are you going to buy into that? Educate them.

For example what culpability should advertisers have in getting a response? What will you demand from the advertisers? The ad above caught my attention on more than one website. What possible response can this ad get with no offer, no benefits -- even if you need shaft seals? No matter what an ad contains, when “they don’t work,” it is always “your fault.” Wait until it is per lead. And are there really 20 good leads every month for this product? 50? When you turn yourself into an advertising actuary, the discussion changes from value to arithmetic.

There are excellent ways to offer lead-gen as part of a comprehensive program where you get paid for content and branding also. Becoming a salesman for your advertiser is not the business you are in, is it?