Jeff Pundyk, a fellow and advisory board member at The Conference Board, in this op-ed considers the fundamental shift underway in publishing and the way it can best be used to support marketing goals. Publishers must become more accountable to readers, and less so to advertisers, he argues. Pundyk was also senior vice president of global integrated content solutions at The Economist and, before that was publisher of The McKinsey Quarterly. He consults with publishers and brands on their content strategy.A lot has happened in the five or six years since marketing pundits started preaching that every brand should “act like a publisher.” Most notably, neither marketers nor publishers can rely any longer on their consumers to blindly trust them. As a result we are seeing a new tone in the way both marketers and publishers communicate, putting more of a premium on transparency — and even acknowledging their co-dependence.
For publishers, the shift has been dramatically accelerated by the steady shift in ad dollars to the big social platforms, making it perfectly clear that the long-term survivors will be those who best serve their readers, not their advertisers.
For marketers who embraced the ‘everybody should be a publisher’ mantra, many have learned that it is easy to publish, but hard to build a trusted relationship with an audience. Whether it is text, video, interactive or social, there are tools that make it easy to publish.
And there is no shortage of writing and production help available. What’s harder than acting like a publisher, however, is thinking like a publisher. Marketers have largely applied an advertising mindset to content; they speak of “campaigns” and measure success through “reach” rather than focusing on establishing their credibility over time.
Publishers have recently begun to realize that their readership is something much more than a set of demographics that they can aggregate to sell to advertisers. Their readers are a potential source of direct revenue, but only if they are convinced that the publisher is, in fact, accountable – both for their work and to their readers....MORE
In an effort to build new revenue streams, publishers are shoring up their circulation businesses, often reframing it as membership. One consequence of shifting the business model to reader-generated revenue is a parallel shift of the editorial product based on better serving those readers. For publishers, this is a significant change as it aligns the interest of editorial and the business model. (In the old model, editorial served the readers while the business model largely served advertisers.)...“The best publishing is a service, not marketing.”
