CUSTOMISING A PATH THROUGH CLUTTER

Contract publishing is attracting a fresh set of categories, beyond the usual suspects in travel and banking. Mounting pressure to achieve cut-through, and a belief that consumers are filtering out advertising are driving growth for this once overlooked marketing tool. Clutter is one of the biggest challenges marketers face. As new types of media proliferate, it doesn't matter how creative your advertising, direct marketing or sales promotion may be - the number of people who simply ignore it is growing. The challenge is to persuade people that they want to absorb your marketing messages. One way to do that is to surround them with content that people actually want to read. It's achieving this cut-through is which is driving the popularity of customer magazines. Custom or contract publishing - the business of creating an editorial product, rather than just a brochure, and sending it to customers, business partners, or whoever - is a small but rapidly growing industry in Asia. Although custom magazines may seem like a fairly roundabout way of talking to potential customers, they can be very persuasive. The results from around the world speak for themselves. In the US, research by Continental Airlines among the 380,000 circulation of its 114-page magazine found that 71 per cent of them said they found the information in it helpful; 53 per cent said they read it every flight; 37 per cent said they kept pages for future reference; and 23 per cent said they responded to ads in it. When you add in the fact that Continental also makes US$4.5 million a year in advertising revenue from the magazine, it's a pretty powerful tool. Beyond the usual suspects in areas like air travel and financial services, companies in Asia have been wary of custom publishing until now. "There's definitely a strong demand for it," says Fjelddahl, managing director of marketing services agency Motiv8, which has a custom magazine division called Motiv8 Publishing, with clients including technology and telecoms firms Lucent, PCCW and MSN. "There's a maturity among clients, and a belief that advertising is being filtered out by consumers. Look at the whole debate on the internet with pop-up windows and other ways of interrupting people - that's how far the debate has gone. But that's absolutely the opposite of what you should be doing - you should be making people want to reach out and learn more," says Fjelddahl. Contract magazines come in various shapes and sizes, and can be aimed at a number of different audiences. The best-known are those produced by consumer companies such as credit card firms and airlines. Retail has also emerged as a strong growth area for custom publishers, says Jim Marett, Asia-Pacific director of Redwood, which prints 122 million magazines in 11 languages globally. But the fastest-growing area is business-to-business custom publishing, with magazines aimed at a company's clients, prospects, and other business partners. Then there are custom-published products aimed at staff and at investors. Roberto De Vido, managing director in Asia of Appleberg Publishing, a Swedish custom publishing firm, said business-to-business is where the real action is. "Those companies understand that the value of a relationship is much greater. Businesses are less fickle than consumers. "Not everyone is cut out to be our customer. We're suited to organisations that have a relatively complicated message, and need a longer duration of customer mindshare. Someone like Coke doesn't need a customer magazine." Appleberg's clients include American Express, Merck, the Hong Kong Tourism Board, Ericsson, ABN Amro and Disney. On the client side, MSN is an example of the new breed of custom publishing converts, recently signing a deal with Motiv8 to produce a magazine aimed at several thousand advertisers, commercial partners and staff. MSN's regional marketing director Rose Leng believes that it will be a powerful business-to-business tool. "There's still nothing that beats having a copy of something that's visually impactful and sits on someone's desk. An actual physical product is hard to ignore. We expect this to be a door-opener to advertisers we haven't dealt with before. If it only does that, I'll consider it a success." As well as MSN-related news, the magazine will also include general internet industry news, something Leng thinks is vital if the company wants it to be read by its target audience. The same view is taken by Kenny Chan, vice-president of investor relations and corporate communication at Hong Kong company Tradelink. A partly government-backed organisation, Tradelink is charged with introducing electronic trading to the city, as well as selling government technology services. The company has had a quarterly customer magazine, through Appleberg, since 1997, when it had just a few thousand readers. It now has 53,000, and is received by the majority of Hong Kong's big corporates and SMEs. Chan estimates that the magazine is about 50 per cent Tradelink-specific, with the rest made up of general interest technology information such as case studies and interviews with industry leaders. "We don't want to make it just a company newsletter - more people read it this way," he says. He admits that it's "a very expensive exercise", but adds that it has been a necessary expense: "When we launched it, we were promoting the benefits of ecommerce in Hong Kong, and understanding of those benefits was not widespread." Chan adds that the magazine's cachet in the market can be seen in its advertisers, citing the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq. Leng and Chan both take the view that high-quality editorial is crucial if a customer magazine is going to be effective. Working out where to draw the line in terms of credibility and trustworthiness is one of the biggest challenges for suppliers and buyers of custom publishing services. The issue of lying should be straightforward: the principles are the same as they are in ads or other pieces of marketing communication, which at least ought to mean avoiding outright lies. "We believe that magazines should be given an ethical editorial treatment, and that puts pressure on us," says Motiv8's Fjelddahl. "The client can't ask us to write something that isn't true. But we can choose which facts we include." The more slippery credibility issues are ones of tone and content balance. Obviously a customer magazine is going to cast the client in a good light. But if all it does is push products over and over again, then the client may as well have a brochure printed. "We've walked away from a couple of clients that basically wanted a glorified brochure," says Fjelddahl. "Although about half of the market believes in this, but the other half doesn't yet." "Our biggest enemy is people who are not interested in quality," agrees Appleberg's DeVido. "In China especially, you find so many multinationals that have high-quality communications at a corporate level, but not at all at a local level. "Custom publishing in Asia is much less sophisticated. People think they can just convert their brochures into magazines and that'll be effective. We preach that people should have magazines that have interest for the reader. If a piece of direct mail doesn't interest you, you bin it. But with a magazine, there could be stuff that's not about the company that you find interesting, and there's a greater chance you'll read it. It's got to be credible, or it's not worth doing. "We try to address the issue of credibility at the outset, in the process of creating the publication. The first question is: what does our customer want to communicate? The second question is: how can we make that a valuable experience for the reader? Yes, you can put in the sales specs from the brochure, but no one's interested. "If they're talking to us, they've got to have some understanding of how custom publishing works. We're not interested in preaching to the unconverted." In the same way, client attitudes towards researching a title and finding out what its readers want, both before launching it and after, vary widely. "Some clients are very methodical and say let's do it properly and spend three or four months defining the product the readers want," says Fjelddahl. "But there's also the typical thing of: 'I know my audience, just do it this way'." Probably the most sophisticated users of custom publishing are airlines, whose in-flight magazines are part of a bigger entertainment package. The biggest supplier of these in-flight services is Emphasis, which was bought in April by sales representation network Publicitas from Time Inc. Clients include Cathay, China Airlines, Thai Airlines, Dragonair, Malaysian Airlines and Korean Air, and the company works with more than 50 airlines globally. As well as producing magazines, the company sources other forms of in-flight entertainment such as films, and sells advertising both in the magazines and on other forms of ambient media. "All of the airlines are keenly aware that it's a competitive advantage to provide top-quality entertainment rather than just an advert for the brand," says Publicitas Asia CEO Barry Goodridge. "It's a different kind of contract publishing. Most contract publishing tends to reduce to trying to sell more things to the same customers. It's a bit different when you have the customer sat there for 10 hours - you can afford to be a bit more subtle." The backgrounds of other custom publishing suppliers in Asia vary; some focus on it solely, while others are from an agency background. Motiv8 is an exception: about 50 per cent of its custom publishing clients were existing marketing services clients. "What makes us different is that in the first place, we're an agency - we have an understanding of marketing objectives," says Fjelddahl. Irrespective of their background, most suppliers work on an agency-like structure, with the editorial and design departments analogous to the creative department, and account servicing people talking to clients. Charges vary according to the usual publishing variables, such as the size of the magazine, its circulation and its design and editorial coverage. Fjelddahl says Motiv8 clients pay between HK$500,000 and $5 million. Some suppliers work on a set fee, while others try and sell advertising in the magazine to third parties, allowing the client to recoup some or all of the cost of producing it - this most often happens with the big airline and financial magazines. Similarly, some suppliers will get actively involved in managing a magazine's circulation, just as an agency would help manage a direct marketing database, while others will leave the issue of who receives a magazine entirely up to the client. That custom publishing is attracting a number of blue-chip brands says much about the strides the business has made in the last few years. Redwood's Marett says the industry had a bad rap in the early years because custom publishers gave content away for free and lived off the advertising that the titles attracted. Redwood has spent the last three years persuading clients to pay for content, a fee that is partly defrayed by advertising. "We are in effect an ad agency producing specific content to position and brand the client rather than the generic stories which do little to market and brand our clients." Marett dubs content generation to meet specific client needs as the art of custom publishing. The science side of it lies with the research it encourages clients to undertake either on a per issue or quarterly basis to track their performance. Buyers of custom publishing services will get what they pay for. High-quality magazines cost money to produce, and going for the cheaper alternative might turn out to be a false economy. Similarly, while it may be tempting for clients to treat a customer title like a glorified brochure, ultimately it will be counter-productive because even the most forceful and persuasive marketing messages will mean nothing if no one reads them.

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