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July 28, 2011
Meredith 360—Pathway to Women
To understand the new relationship between publishers and their marketers, we don’t have to go further than Meredith Corporation. I heard their presentation to the GenYouth Foundation last week in New York, and then followed up with Jeannine Shao Collins who runs Meredith 360 Marketing Solutions, and was Adweek’s ‘2010 Executive of the Year’.
I always thought of Meredith as a classic old-school publisher of important titles such as Better Homes & Gardens (7.6 million circulation), Family Circle (3.8 million circulation), Ladies’ Home Journal (3.8 million circulation) and Parents (2 million circulation). I assumed that the sweet spot of circulation was middle-aged mothers and non-working women. I could not have been more wrong.
All of their assets reach 75 million people, and its 50 web properties, including Recipe.com, reach 22 million (unduplicated) women per month. Their publications and web sites reach 19 million young adults, 12 million young family members, 29 established family members (with kids but beyond diapers) and 21 million empty nesters. “We talk to a woman trying to get a man and when she is trying to kick a man out of her life,” said Collins. “We engage women at every stage of their lives but particularly when they become pregnant and when they buy their first home.”
The company has established a complete circle of services emanating from its publishing properties. It has a database of 85 million people for customer relationship management. Its Better TV show, a daytime syndicated lifestyle show, is entering its fourth season and runs daily in 80 markets. It offers experiential marketing (example is FITNESS® Mind, Body + Spirit Games tied to United Nations Week on Health in September). The commercial opportunities include product sampling, t-shirt branding, celebrity spokespeople and video for use on the web.
Meredith can offer content creation in lots of forms through six centers of excellence, including Family, Food, Health, Gardening, Beauty and Home, where top class talent across all of the brands work together, “not in siloes,” Collins said. BHG.com is a perfect example of a “sub-network” in which food and home content are offered together.
I asked Collins how she works with agencies. She told me that Meredith interacts primarily with media buying firms and secondarily with creative ad agencies. PR firms are a distant third partner. It is obvious that the old adage, “He who has the gold makes the rules,” has been the governing factor.
How do we offset the inherent advantage that goes along with the media budget? PR people need to offer ideas that can be used beyond editorial content--into the basis for on-premise promotions or content creation. For example, Edelman helped Dairy Management National Dairy Council and NFL’s Fuel Up to Play 60 program cohost an event with the Washington Post in DC to bring together 160 of the nation’s foremost thought leaders on the topic of child obesity, and generated an ongoing conversation across social media (see the video below for more information about our client’s program). We should also meet with the media companies to understand the thematic plans for the coming year. We have the opportunity to move beyond our comfort zone of providing information to journalists. We will need to make a compelling case to the chief marketing officer, who is interested in PR programming based on research, insight, planning and predictive outcomes, and not just great creative or potential story placements. As the media is reinvented, the old walls are tumbling down. Let’s not be buried in the rubble!
Posted by Edelman at 1:13 PM |
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Great article! Just one general questions: as PR moves away editorial content and into content creation, how does the PR agency prevent itself form encroaching on the responsibilities of the internal marketing department? I foresee a lot of red tape and toes being stepped on! Thoughts?
Posted by: Greg at July 28, 2011 6:00 PM
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| TrackBackJuly 21, 2011
Walk Around The Redeveloping Ground Zero
In six weeks, the 9-11 Memorial will open in Lower Manhattan to commemorate the loss of more than 3,000 people in the World Trade Center. I have been involved with the 9-11 Memorial Foundation for the past three years, encouraging clients to become substantial donors and offering Edelman for pro-bono PR work which will continue through the opening. My middle daughter, Tory, is working at the Foundation this summer and organized a private tour of the Memorial and the Museum (note that the Museum will open on 9/11/12, a year after the Memorial) about three weeks ago. It has taken me this long to be able to write about my hour-long tour.
I have a personal connection to the Memorial, as do many around the world who lost friends and colleagues that day. Suria Clarke, a promising young staffer at Edelman, left our firm to go to work at Cantor Fitzgerald only 10 days before 9-11. We funded a memorial fund at her school in the UK in 2002. Edelman NY provided pro-bono support to Cantor Fitzgerald in staffing an information center at the Pierre Hotel for the bereaved families for a week after the attack. We also worked closely with Howard Lutnick, Cantor’s CEO, as he put together the remnants of his firm in borrowed office space, communicating his determination to move forward through the media. My wife worked for 17 years at Keefe Bruyette and Woods, an investment bank that lost 75 of its employees on that day, some of whom I knew well. Edelman worked on the first information campaign for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, creating LowerManhattan.info to provide updates on the rebuilding such as access to subways and sidewalks and the reopening of cultural institutions.
In the beginning, the tour had all of the makings of an outing at summer camp. We donned our hard hats, reflective mesh shirts and protective glasses; we were told to be attired in work boots and jeans. We were admitted to the site through the mass of construction workers breaking for lunch. Your first impression is of the immensity of the footprint; it will accommodate five skyscrapers, the two memorial pools, the museum and the Calatrava-designed transit center. Freedom Tower, the largest of the structures, is quite far along toward its eventual height of 1776 feet.
We then walked over to the two memorial pools which are built on the same ground as the original World Trade Center buildings. They are vast squares, growing sequentially smaller in stages below the surface, ending in a small square. Water cascades continuously from the top into the black emptiness of the void. The pools are surrounded by marble, topped by bronze, with the names of each of the victims grouped in a manner that recognizes their business and social connections, not by the spelling of their names. Think of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC for the closest comparison. Its starkness is softened only somewhat by the 400 trees that are placed around the site, including one tree that survived the disaster and whose new growth pushes through scars evident on its branches.
We went below ground to the Museum. The immense supporting wall that keeps the Hudson River from flooding into the site is the western demarcation of the facility, with the well-placed patches evident on the 300-foot-high concrete structure. There is a single beam of light from the surface from an aperture that will be used as the means of lowering into the Museum such important memorabilia as the crushed fire truck and police vehicle, the charred jet engine and the only two tridents of the hundreds that were architectural signatures at the bottom of the original World Trade Center. We saw the last standing steel beam, with the clear imprint of 1968 and American Machine Works. There will be video monitors throughout that tell the stories of heroism, fear, despair and anguish, as well as interviews with police, firemen, office workers and government officials.
I lost my composure on the “survivors’ stairs,” the last means of egress from the burning towers. The concrete stairs now stand alone, in open space, without the usual casing of an indoor emergency exit. As you walk up, you can easily imagine yourself in a cauldron of smoke and fire, straining to breath, praying that these stairs will lead you to safety.
For the three million people expected to visit the Museum and Memorial every year, this will not be an easy experience. Nor should it be, because it is the resting place of thousands of innocent people who were murdered by fanatics. But the real message is the determination of mankind to get off the floor and get on with life. If we had not rebuilt, the terrorists would truly have won.
I want to thank two of our clients for their generous support of the Memorial and Museum: AB InBev, which sponsored the police and firemen’s exhibit, and Scotts Miracle-Gro, which funded many of the trees surrounding the Memorial. And to all of my Edelman colleagues who have and will continue to volunteer their time to publicize the Memorial and Museum; I am honored to work with you. If any of the readers of this blog would like to help us on PR in the weeks before 9-11, please email me at richard.edelman@edelman.com
Posted by Edelman at 9:44 AM |
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Richard: a very different experience, but an equally powerful one, at the Pentagon Memorial in DC, to which Edelman also provided pro bono assistance as it was organizing and fundraising for a truly beautiful memorial. Due to the site, and the experience, the Pentagon Memorial stresses a contemplative and reflective approach to the loss suffered there, but through its serenity also supports survival as a way to honor those gone. If only our country could bring that spirit to the challenges we face today ...
Posted by: Carol Diggs at July 25, 2011 9:26 PM
Very compelling. Thank you for sharing.
Posted by: Bill Murray at August 31, 2011 12:55 PM
Thx, here europe we forget what had happened.
Posted by: Martin Bredl at September 2, 2011 4:46 PM
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| TrackBackJuly 13, 2011
The Africa Channel
I met with Mark Walton, a top executive at the Africa Channel, this morning in New York City. The Africa Channel was launched into the US cable market in the fall of 2005 by a journalist from Zimbabwe, James Makawa, working with Ambassador Andrew Young and former US Senator Donald Stewart. It is now seen by over 15 million people across the US, from NYC to Chicago to Houston, LA and SF. They have a High Definition service on in New York that is simulcast with the Standard Definition feed. Among the highlights of our conversation:
1) Corporate Sponsors to Date—These tend to fall into three categories: Countries seeking investment such as Cameroon or South Africa; Tourism Authorities or Airlines such as South Africa Airways or Emirates; Companies with large investments in Africa such as Chevron or Toyota
2) The NGO Play—The Africa Channel has made it a priority to connect with NGOs from The Carter Center, Dikembe Mutombo Foundation, Leon Sullivan Foundation, National Urban League and Basketball Without Borders Africa. The boards of these institutions act as a multiplier for programming by hosting dinners or seminars in key cities such as Atlanta.
3) Not a News Channel—This is not a clone of Al Jazeera or CCTV. By contrast, the bulk of programming is in arts, music and culture. “We are creating a cultural immersion for our viewers, from soap operas to a special on the Broadway production FELA,” Walton said.
4) Open for Sponsorship—For between $150-250,000, a company could work with The Africa Channel to create a half-hour show. Walton gave the example of a pharmaceutical company with an interest in HIV AIDS doing a program on progress of research labs in Africa and other parts of the world.
5) Top Shows—Africa Laughs, which Walton describes as “a day in the life profile of an African stand-up comedian, including comedy club performances featuring globally recognized talent such as Ghana’s Michal Blackson (referred to as Africa’s King of Comedy). There are also a series of music shows including Africa Soundstage and Soundtracks @ Red Kiva, and portraits of African artists as they travel the world. The show Filmmakers depicts documentary movie makers and the creation of shows such as the documentary on slavery, Stolen. The top soap operas are licensed from MNet (Jacob’s Cross) and SABC (Generations and Isidingo)
6) The Audience—The channel is aimed at a broad audience of Adults 25 plus interested in seeing a contemporary, balanced view of Africa, but will resonate well with African Americans and African expatriates. The Africa Channel is also available in the Caribbean and they have an affiliate channel in UK.
Many of us were transfixed a year ago when South Africa proved such a perfect host for the World Cup. Edelman is considering its options for the continent; it is the only place where we have no wholly-owned flag beyond our affiliates. I would predict that in ten years time, most of the major global PR firms will have offices in three countries in Africa (S. Africa, Nigeria, Egypt). I am also determined to make my first visit to Africa—most likely to Morocco—perhaps to hike in the Atlas Mountains.
Posted by Edelman at 3:55 PM |
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| TrackBackJuly 8, 2011
Search as PR Strategy
I had a meeting today with Edelman Digital’s Craig Kronenberger, who has experience at iCrossing and Digitas, plus three stints as an entrepreneur. My topic was search as a PR strategy. We have actually put search in the middle of our media cloverleaf (Mainstream, Hybrid, Social, Owned). Here are a few of the important points from our discussion:
1) Video Has Key Role in Search Rank— video is easier to view, ofter more shareable and drives higher click-through-rates. Google and Bing have continued to battle it out by giving more search results space to blended results, which gives more emphasis on video and images. Importance of video can also be seen in the Nielsen May Online Destinations for Video Report, which shows the impressive growth of Bing's marketshare in video content views and the increase in overall consumption of video.
2) Infographics Drive Search Rank— Infographics take complex topics and displays them in a visual format. Infographics are not only highly engaging, but are often socialized because of the visual impact, which ultimately drives higher positioning in search. You should also embed content linked to photo and presentation sharing sites, which are found more easily by search engines.
3) Social as Important Focus in Search—“Perishable content, such as Tweets during NCAA basketball tourney, tend to spike search results, then quickly fade away. Longer lasting content is a critical analog strategy and should be on company’s own site.” Understanding how long content lives and what value it can provide should always be an integral part of a company's communications strategy.
4) Include Paid Search —You can ignite the PR program by using key paid search as a catalyst. It helps the process of natural search get moving. Note that 70% of clicks are on items generated through natural search.
5) Why Site Stickiness Matters—“Google's analysis of perceived value to a user is becoming more critical than ever for search ranking. Bounce rates, click-through-rates and conversion all generate good marks from search engines. It means that you as a consumer found value. This leads to higher search rank…note that indexing is moving more towards social signals, reputation and credibility.”
6) Search Has Shifted from Nouns to Verbs— Bill Gates said that we want solutions to problems, not just what but how and where and when we can act. We can reverse engineer our PR content to give a roadmap. Listen to more about Nouns to Verbs with Entrepreneur Esther Dyson
7) The New Competitive Set—The leaders in Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search are iCrossing, 360-I, Rosetta, Covario, Performics and Razorfish. With Hearst’s acquisition of iCrossing, media companies are now integrating forward to offer full packages from classic print advertising to creative to digital delivery to a defined set of consumers. Hearst’s acquisition of iCrossing and the creation of a content studio is demonstrating the importance that content plays in search. Here is the press release for reference
8) The Mirroring Effect – There is a symbiotic relationship among SEARCH, SOCIAL AND CONTENT. We should offer a content strategy which will elevate a brand’s ability to be amplified through social and found through search. PR’s differentiator is to deliver this in an integrated manner. Note that Google is now seeking out content that is original, underscoring the need for clients to be thought leaders. We need to do this for all four facets of the media cloverleaf.
Search is a discipline that those of us in public relations must understand and utilize. At its most elementary, we can use terms in our press materials that yield higher ranking. But we need to raise our game by integrating more media options such as video, photos and slide shows that increase both engagement and relevancy. We can differentiate between perishable and long-lasting content, with social content driving short term impact and longer form materials encouraging long term, in-depth discussion. All of us, me included, have to move from intuition and instinct to more measured actions.
Posted by Edelman at 9:09 AM |