Renetta McCann at FIPP

May 23, 2005

Renetta McCann
CEO, The Americas
Starcom MediaVest Group

"How Magazines Can Leverage Their Unique Relationship with the Consumer"
World Magazine Congress of the International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP)
May 23, 2005
New York, NY

Before I begin this morning I want to thank you for inviting me to share some thoughts and insights about consumers and magazines with you. It’s a pleasure to be here as we look at our industry and what’s ahead for all of us.

Let me correct that. I’m not here to look at what’s ahead of us. I’m actually here to talk about what’s already before us.

Too often, when I’m asked to talk about the consumer landscape and the changing media environment, I’m asked, "What does the future hold?" "Where are we going?"

The truth is we’re already "there." Tomorrow is today.

The pivotal question really should be, "Are you ready?"

I know it’s not a news flash to tell you that consumers have achieved an unprecedented level of choice and control. It’s only 9:30 in the morning and you’ve already spent two sessions exploring magazines in a multimedia, 24/7, fast-forward, time shifted, on demand, opt-out, all things digital world.

Forgive me if I cover some of that ground again in this presentation. My goal is to talk about magazines and consumers, and how the former can leverage the relationship they have with the latter. It’s a timely, in fact urgent question to answer.

To do that, we have to give some context and dimension to who we mean when we say "consumers."

We are all in the media industry. Some of you are publishers. Some editors, writers, salespeople. But you are also consumers. And you live with other consumers.

Let’s stop thinking, for a moment, like publishers, representatives and media professionals, and start thinking like consumers.

Only through the consumer lens can we begin to find the portals and spaces where we might inject ourselves with any success.

People today consume differently than they did when we first got into this business. They make fewer trips to the store, and more trips to their computer screen to shop on line. Day or night—store hours don’t matter anymore. Bandwidth does.

Consumers no longer rely on the morning paper, the afternoon drive, or the 10 o’clock news to keep them informed. They can log on to the Internet for news, read blogs or watch the headlines scroll across the faces of a growing number of digital screens on building fronts, inside elevators and lobbies.

To give this phenomenon some dimension, emarketer reports that 72 percent of the population will be online this year. It has also found that, among internet users, 74 percent get their information from the Internet, compared to 62 percent from magazines, and 29 percent from newspapers.

Prime time has become "my time." Networks no longer dictate when we can view our favorite programs in real time. Thanks to on demand services and devices like TiVo, we can create our own programming line-up.

Ours is a "my media" world, and we even design our own entertainment by virtue of our mp3 players, digital phones and personal digital assistants.

We have a world of information at our fingertips. The Search platforms created by Google and now delivered by Yahoo and MSN, have put the content we want at our fingertips, whenever we want it.

It’s a scary world, isn’t it? And if you really want to scare yourself, take a look at what your kids are doing. As much as people like you and me are exercising our need for choice and control, our kids are already entirely immersed in the digital world. They have total access to information and it is second nature to them to get what they need when they want it.

Today’s youth is entirely media agnostic and promiscuous in their use of, and control over, media.

Why is this?

One reason that choice and control are so fundamental to consumer behavior is that they are empowered by technology. The world is full of smarter gadgets and faster gizmos.

I’m going to give you three quick perspectives on technology. The first is what I call the Edmond Thomas formula.

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Edmond Thomas from the Federal Communications Commission talk a couple of times in the past two years, and he said we are working in a time when mass storage costs nothing. By that he means we live in a world where it costs almost nothing to put content and data into a device. Everything we can touch is essentially a hard drive, and the chips get cheaper every day. The software is the content, and based on what we purchase we elect what we want to pay attention to.

Whatever information or content we might be seeking, we can easily download it, toss in our pocket, carry it with us. So again, looking at this from a consumer perspective, it’s easy to see how people become media agnostic.

We can connect…or not…to whoever and whatever we choose.

The second perspective is what I call the explosion of technology.

Let me show you a picture.

A while back, one of my colleagues thought it might be smart to plot out….in simple chart form….what the proliferation of technology might look like from a consumer perspective. Not so simple, is it?

Let’s scare ourselves even more, shall we? Look closer at this chart, and you will see one common denominator across almost all of these platforms. It is the video screen, and this is the third technological perspective I want to share.

The ability to store data combined with the explosion of technology has given birth to an environment in which screens reign supreme.

Video assets are becoming ubiquitous: linear television, video billboards, video t-shirts, broadband video, cell phones, grocery cart video screens, the list goes on. And on.

If you doubt that screens are taking over the world, observe how quickly consumers are obtaining more of them.

Pay particular attention to the explosion of wireless devices and DVRs, the growth of on-demand and the saturation of broadband.

Screens, screens and screens.

We believe that consumers will engage with content primarily through these screens. They will customize all content to the screen they elect to engage with, and they will engage in it when and where they want to.

Clearly, this engagement will increasingly require an internet or wireless platform.

In a nutshell, staying connected to consumers will be all about screens, content and an IP backend.

Very little of what I just said is encouraging news for the analog world. Even for those of you who are beginning to operate on a digital platform, the consumer intersection will only get more complicated. It will increasingly require a strategic combination of sight, sound and motion. And content.

Candidly, I’m not even going to dwell on content with you this morning. I’m working on the assumption that you’ve got content nailed. You have buckets of content from which to choose. You probably throw away more great content every day than your readers consume in a month.

So, assuming the content is there, the question is, "What’s a magazine to do" to stay connected to consumers in a digital world?

I believe the success of magazines can and will be achieved. But it will pivot on three deliverables:

- Engagement

- Connectivity, which moves you toward addressability, and

- Accountability (measurement)

Let’s start with engagement.

Arguably, you are in pretty good shape here, too.

My colleagues at Starcom recently conducted an engagement study, which was simultaneously developed with a platform called A.C.E. That stands for Accountability, Connectivity and Engagement.

In the qualitative stage of the study, we talked to 36 women and teens about magazines. We sat in their living rooms and asked them to interact with magazines. We asked them to pull pages that they found valuable. Curiously, one-third of the pages they pulled were advertisements.

We saw how much they love you. How important it is to touch and hold the magazine. How much care they took in exploring the content and selecting what was most relevant and important to them.

We also completed a quantitative study of 7500 respondents in the Fall MRA, and have since partnered with Affinity Vista Partnership to dig even deeper into recall, brand association and readership. From this, we have identified six engagement factors that get us closer to an actionable understanding of what consumers really love about print.

Essentially, they crave your content. This has been proven over time. That’s why there are … what? One hundred new magazines in any given month? And why there are always 17 thousand or so titles in the marketplace at any time. From a content perspective, you give the people what they want.

Keep that up. And help us deliver more tools like ACE that can track and measure engagement.

The second factor in your long-term success with consumers is connectivity. Here the road gets rougher.

You have to constantly monitor and identify the key motivators that bring people into your magazine. Then you have to fine-tune that content and help marketers target customers with tailored advertising that has the most meaning for each of them. Find that intersection and you will deliver the highest levels of response.

Connectivity is all about understanding who the audience is and when they will be most receptive to your message.

It is about bringing all of the elements of the communications together in alignment and ensuring that all resources are leveraged to reinforce the connection.

The print folks at Starcom have created custom content pieces, formerly known as advertorials, by marrying the DNA of the magazine to the DNA of the brand through unique, tailored content. In doing so, they have provided a message to the consumer that is relevant to the individual, and authentic to the look and feel and tone of the magazine.

They did this with Prevention magazine for clients like Simmons Mattress and Kellogg’s Smart Start. They carefully customized the advertising message to resonate with the individual readers who read Prevention because they want health information. In doing so, they achieved the equivalent of one-to-one marketing.

The messages mirrored the tone of the magazine and spoke to the reader in a familiar language, all while remaining true to the brand’s voice and objectives.

Another custom piece ran in Fortune for Oracle. Oracle wanted to make sure that its message directly related to what was on the mind of a corporate decision maker. Starcom partnered with Fortune, which conducted some critical research. Then they worked together to develop a piece that spoke in the voice of the corporate types with whom Fortune resonates.

Let me be clear here. We are not interested in making ads that blur the lines of editorial. Instead we seek a voice and tone that will resonate and be consistent to the reader. Your readers are far too familiar with your DNA to fall for masqueraded advertising, and we can’t afford to alienate them when we are trying to engage them on behalf of our clients. Enough said.

My point is we are looking to you to provide connectivity.

We used to ask you for big ideas—bigger than life, ubiquitous programs that we could sell across our client base. And we still want those, of course. Our clients want and need the cache they get from participating in your signature events.

But more than that, we need customized, media first solutions that give us new ways to address our clients’ marketing objectives.

Help us build these avenues. Work with our buyers and clients to create new and individual ways to drive content to a more personal and individual level. Then make it more addressable.

That means, in the long term, you’re going to have to figure out how to give magazines more of a screen-based entry point for consumers.

I’m like you. When I started in this business, connecting to the consumer was all about which form you selected. There was the 30-second ad, the full or half-page 4/C bleed. The rest was just a matter of distribution, and the distribution methods were so powerful there was no question the message would get where you needed it to go.

But those days are gone. Technology, screens and visual media have created form and distribution source agnosticism. Consumers want connections and experience. They want to manipulate content. Control it. You will not be immune to this phenomenon.

Like it or not, you are now just another group of content providers. And to stay in the game, you have to deliver content that is malleable. I’m not asking you to swear off paper. That’s not necessary. But you can’t stand still and stay alive, because consumers are not standing still.

If you really want to win, you have to embrace the IP platform. Many of you are doing this to some degree. There are dot-com versions of many titles out there. I like seeing efforts like the September/Fashion Week issue of Vogue that drove readers to the Web site for exclusive discounts and information.

Those are powerful first steps, but rather than using digital to merely compliment the analog version of your brand, you have deliver more robust, interactive, screen-like behavior. The more the better.

I’m not a digital expert, so I can’t stand here and give you the prescription. The solution is probably a cocktail of ingredients, but consider some of the new avenues that are emerging.

For instance, consider the mobisode—the one minute video segment that can be downloaded and played on mobile phones. Think about how you can take your content and shape it into this format. Can your food editors present one minute recipes or cooking tips? Can your health experts create one minute relaxation or exercise programs?

Think about video on demand. Can you operate on that platform? Produce fashion programming featuring your fashion editors, and beauty segments with your beauty editors. Make the content liquid and let your biggest fans drink it up.

Those of you who publish entertainment magazines, could you create celebrity bites that can be podcast? Can you feature celebrity reviews of books, movies or music via broadband?

Can you manipulate the IP environment in a way that allows your readers to tailor their own issues of the magazine? As a subscriber to several magazines, there are lots of sections I love, and some I never read. Can I digitally create my own June issue customized just for me? And can I access it on my TREO?

Any minute now, airplanes are going to be wired for the web. Get there before I do. I have 8 uninterrupted hours on any given trip to Europe. You can’t imagine how much I would love a digital issue of your magazine to read on the plane. You can even send me promotions in the context of this opt-in relationship. I’ll even pay for the access.

On the subject of customer paid content, let me ask you this. If I paid you a subscription, would you let me create my own digital library of favorite articles? Create my own virtual archive? Remember, mass storage costs almost nothing. Give me access to a server that can store my personal favorites. Do this, and you not only please me, you can get digital knowledge about my behavior. You will know how often I’m interacting with your content, and how long I stay engaged.

You could even, if you were so inclined, send me a message on an upcoming article based on topics I’ve consumed before.

And then what will you have? Content, connectivity, engagement…all on a digital platform that makes it addressable.

If any of you are already thinking this way. Great. If not, I suggest you get a digital guru on your payroll as soon as possible.

Because digital delivers more than connectivity. It is profoundly measurable, and this is the third factor you have to address if you intend to succeed in the new world.

Go back to those stats I showed you before on the proliferation of video screens, and remember how they are taking over the world. Then think about the metrics that are so inherent to those screens. They are measurable. They are accountable. Profoundly so.

Believe it when I say, screens will still set standard for how print effectiveness is judged.

You will have to figure out how to measure engagement. Don’t tell us how many eyeballs were exposed to a page. Don’t tell us how many sets of hands might have touched it.

We need to know if the connection moved the meter on engagement and behavior. These are new metrics. They don’t currently exist. You’re going to have to create them. History has proven this to be a pretty tough proposition, and potentially cost-prohibitive. But they will be essential. Our clients will demand them, and we will invest where we can get them.

Having said all of this, I want to close by reminding you that I am a huge fan of print and magazines. I subscribe to many, and I savor the time I have to spend with my favorites. Truth is, as a consumer, I love you to death.

But I am also a media practitioner who has seen a fundamental shift in the way my discipline operates. The rules of engagement are changing for client. Consumers are evolving. Technology is expanding our options. As your friend, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring you a crystallized picture.

My fear for magazines is not that they won’t exist. They will. People are tactile creatures. They will always want to touch your 90-pound, glossy covers, perfect bound or saddle stitched. They will continue to crave the content you carefully elect into your pages. They will tear out your coupons and sniff your fragrances.

I’m also very confident you will figure out how to move your content out to your readers who want it interactively. You’ll break the code on the monitors, telephones, IPods, plasmas, elevators, taxi cabs, sticks in the sky and all those other screens I encounter more and more every day.

But please don’t let these accomplishments lure you into a false sense of security. We are your advocates, but more than that we are stewards of our clients’ brands. As they press us for greater addressability and more measurable accountability, we will need you to put your smart, strategic, creative brains on overdrive to deliver it.

I hope I’ve given you some fuel for thought this morning. As a fan, I’m eager to see what’s next for magazines. I know you won’t let me—or my client—down. I know you will figure out the future and stay on top of it.

Thank you.