Frank Anton, CEO, Hanley Wood: B to B publish which serves the construction market. Worry about the “secular” forces and the movement to digital media. Succeeded because of two things: ad pages and exhibit space. On best magazines had margins of 45%, trade shows were always profitable with margins of 75%, but are becoming challenged. Wonder if Hanley Wood will ever get back to the glory days. Invested 10 of millions of dollars in digital media and margins are no where close to 45% and 75%. What they are going to have to do in the future is very hard and if they are very good at it margins are about 20%. Wonders if traditional B to B companies ever get back to what they were before 2005. In their market, when the advertisers get leads, but they sell to dealers not the end buyer, so often their advertisers don’t know what to do with the leads and the publishers will have to figure this out for them. Their customers value their websites more than the magazines as a way to get to customers. Need to sell to customers in different ways. One person must be able to sell all products and put together a complete program that serves customers’ needs. No longer have a tradeshow salesman, e-leads salesman, etc. Most magazine publishers have diminished in a noticeable and clear way the quality of the magazine in order to save money. This drives readers away even more. Very foolish thing to do.
Samir Husni, Director, Magazine Innovation Center, Univ. of Mississippi: moderator.
Don Hawk, President, TechTarget: online publisher for the enterprise IT market. Have 90 websites which are free. 9 million users and follow users very closely to see what they are researching, down to the individual level, and this is the key to getting advertisers. Real evolution in the expectations placed on them by advertisers. Are known for their lead generation which was handed over to the advertisers. Looking at how to insert themselves into the workflow of advertisers to do more than just lead generation. The old business model of high margins is gone and is not recoverable. It is very hard and takes a lot of work to keep up margins. Get good margins but margins are under pressure every day. Skill sets that are important are product development and innovation. In general CPMs are low, but since are in a niche can get them in $50 to $100 range.
Hugh Wiley, Publisher, Bloomberg Business Week: big question is how to keep the brand relevant. Less competing with other magazines than competing for peoples’ time. The magazine enhances Bloomberg’s brand as much as the other way around. This was the first acquisition Bloomberg has ever done. All of Bloomberg’s stuff was internally developed until this. This was a way for Bloomberg to really own the business audience. Got Bloomberg 4.5M readers worldwide, while its terminal business only services 300K. On the other hand it gives Business Week the ability to tap into Bloomberg’s news gathering business. Interesting that Bloomberg has never been able to get an interview with a sitting US President and after the Business Week acquisition got 3 of them. Trying to wrestle with how to weave content over all their various mediums and do it right. Need to build common content platforms among the various mediums that advertisers will like. Advertisers want an integrated operation. iPad will be a fascinating area of convergence and will be doing an iPad launch in two weeks. Won’t be a PDF version of magazine and isn’t overly complicated like many of them. Navigation is easy. There will be a related-bar on every story and this will enable you to drill into the Bloomberg news empire. Trick is to keep your audience engaged and within your walls and never let them out. When Bloomberg merged had two websites: Bloomberg and Business Week. This causes confusion and there are pricing problems. Bloomberg’s CPM is about $12 and Business Week CPM is about $20. Made the decision to have one person redesign both sites and using one person to make sure one site does not tread on the other. For iPad app it well be free for subscribers to Business Week and others will pay on a monthly basis. On the ad side are being very reasonable on how price sponsorships, $75K for platinum and 50K for gold in order to get up and running fast.
