BoSacks Speaks Out: What Publishers Have Learned and the Airlines Have Not

BoSacks Speaks Out: Last night I mentioned my troublesome return home by air. Well, it got much worse after I signed off.  Not to bore you with the details of the incompetence of airlines, as you are all mostly likely aware of it, but I found it funny sitting in the airport getting fully abused as a big time experienced road warrior & long-time customer.  One of the most important topics discussed at the CDS Global Summit in Des Moines and specifically in my panel was respect for the customer. There are exceptions, but on the whole the magazine industry used to take their subscribed readers for granted and in an unprofessional way totally abuse them as "we already got you" as paying customers.  I believe for our industry that is a process that has been cauterized from our mutual insanity business plans.  Not so for the airlines.

It is not the weather related problems last night that I object to; it was the inferior crowd control and the total lack of sensible communication that offended me. Perhaps as a communication specialist I am overly sensitive on this issue?  Of the many things that I did see, I saw an elderly woman confused and in need of proper communication and directions rudely spoken to and just dismissed by an agent. I made sure she got help from another agent, but that isn't the point. 

For me, there was an unannounced gate change. If you have been to O'Hare airport you know it is big, very big. It can and does take 25 or more minutes to get from one side to the other, especially when the place is jam packed with confused travelers and unexperienced rookie tourists.  I sat at a restaurant/bar near my gate for hours and then, for an hour and half at my specified gate working and writing my editorials of the evening and just by chance, or perhaps by experience, I went to the board and double re-checked on my flight that was continually being delayed.

I was not alone as there were others on the same flight waiting, too. It is then that I saw the gate had been changed to the other side of the airport.  Not only that, they mysteriously stopped posting the expected delayed take-off time. How long did I have to make the trek? I had no idea! I asked the agent what had happened and why there was no PA announcement of the gate change, and all I got was a dirty, uncaring look. I told my fellow uncared-for travelers the new gate news and off we went. Thousands of unhappy customers everywhere in the airport running here and there like mice looking for the cheese of a return flight home.

I am happy that we publishers moved along in the proper 21st century customer respect formula years before the airlines. I guess one could say we are communication experts and they are not.  

      

Gone Native: The Magazine Whose Editors Write Ad Content

By Josh Sternberg

http://digiday.com/publishers/mental-floss-native/

Over the summer, Mental Floss asked its online readers what kinds of tricks or skills would they like to learn as part of the magazine's "How To" series. It then turned those ideas into posts, paid for by Dos Equis, which also had four display ads on each page.

There are many publications that have been experimenting with so-called native advertising - some as venerable as The Atlantic, Forbes and The New Yorker. But because of its less-newsy, entertainment-oriented content, Mental Floss has been more prepared than others to blur the lines between sales and editorial.

Mental Floss - which has a print publication just north of 160,000 and saw 2.1 million uniques in August - is wrapping up its largest-ever native advertising program with Dos Equis. Between early August and the first week of October, the website's editors will have created 20 pieces of advertising content on behalf of the beer brand - like this post of How To Send Smoke Signals and this one How To Navigate By The Stars - as well as eight sponsored videos, like How To Open Champagne With a Saber and How To Rip a Phonebook In Half.

It's been a success, at least in terms of traffic. Each of the first three videos in the series, for example, surpassed 100,000 views. But in virtually erasing any distinction between its editorial and advertising, is Mental Floss going too far?

Will Pearson, Mental Floss's president, certainly doesn't think so. The way he sees it, the Dos Equis-branded content is not advertising, but material the publication would have posted anyhow. Pearson argues that publishers and their advertising clients are simply better served having editorial people - not their marketing departments - create the content because the writers know their audience better.

"What you would describe as an ad, we look at it as an opportunity to produce more content that ties in nicely with the advertiser's message," Pearson said. "We wrote this content; we have editorial control over this content. It just aligns with their messaging."

And as an added bonus for that alignment, Mental Floss is now six figures richer.

Of course, as a Web property, Mental Floss is more like BuzzFeed than The Atlantic, so it is unlikely to court the backlash the latter did when it ran an off-brand sponsored article written by the Church of Scientology. No one bats an eye when BuzzFeed runs a post called "10 Haircuts Every Man Wants to Forget" sponsored by Target.

"It'd be easy for us to say, 'Everyone should do this,'" he said. "I recognize we're a knowledge brand, but we're also an entertainment brand. The goal is to get people something fun to read."

Prominent blogger and media figure Andrew Sullivan has railed against this kind of thinking. "Business models that treat journalism as a tool primarily for advertisers will kill journalism in the end," he wrote earlier this week.

Still, not everyone is wringing their hands, as long as the publisher is open. "There has to be a way for readers to understand what they are getting," said John McCarus, svp of brand content at Digitas. "The readers will tell them if they care."

Joe McCambley, founder of The Wonderfactory, concedes that Mental Floss is pushing the envelope by letting its editors create advertising content. But that may not be such a bad thing.

"It's an envelope that needs to be pushed," McCambley said. "I'm not saying the wall between church and state should be broken down. What I'm saying, if you're an advertiser and want content to look like editorial, you need to get into church. You need to start thinking like a publisher."

But he cautions publishers who go too far in opening up their CMS to brands and agencies.

"Everything averages out to mediocre in advertising," McCambley said. "Once you start ceding editorial product to agencies, you're on a train to mediocre."