Jason Abbate: I want to activate publisher audiences—data, events, direct buys. I’m looking for ideas—every time I call a publisher, I hear about their rate card—that’s not what I want. I will never read your rate card. It all comes down to reaching and activating your audience. When I talk about publisher assets, you have access to audience, and editorial credibility. That’s what I want to buy. I don’t want to buy video, I don’t want your content studio. When I see a white paper, that’s like content marketing from 2009. I want you to do a custom event that we can’t do.  When I see things like content studios, that’s taking money out of my pocket. 

On Wednesday, June 19, Connectiv teams up with ANA Business Marketing to bring leading B2B advertisers, agencies and media and information companies together in New York City for What Goes 'Round: Re-imagining the Media Marketer Relationship in a Digitally Transformed World.

“We invest almost all the money back into our business.” That’s a line that trade reporters often hear, typically with a great deal of skepticism. When it is true, it typically means a certain group or technology within the organization is receiving the lion’s share of that investment (as a cub reporter I remember hearing a CEO give our B2B division a motivational speech that boiled down to pointing to the then red hot yet soon-to-crash consumer apartment guides and saying, “Be more like them”).  

SECAUCUS, NJ (November 20, 2018) - Northstar Travel Group ("Northstar") announced the launch of Northstar Studio 90, a digital strategy team and content marketing team focused on delivering outstanding business performance for their clients' marketing investments.   As the market leader, Northstar delivers unrivaled reach and scale across the travel and meetings industries allowing Northstar Studio 90 to tap directly into the company's proprietary audience data and content expertise to fuel successful integrated marketing strategies on behalf of their clients. Matt Yorke, Chief Digital Officer is the driving force behind Northstar's ongoing strategic digital transformation. As well as reorganizing the existing teams and processes to deliver on this vision, Northstar recently recruited as the head of the marketing services initiative Jeremy Rueb, Vice President, Northstar Studio 90. Jeremy previously spent 11 years at IDG Communications where he built the company's first gl ...

Informa’s Infrastructure Intelligence Division has tapped CFE Media’s ContentStream, a SaaS tool that takes existing publisher content and acts as a content feed for advertisers. Twenty-two Informa brands will be using ContentStream to provide news, education and how-to information in areas such as engineering, manufacturing, power, infrastructure How it works: as publishers develops editorial content, it’s stored in a cloud-based content stream database—including text, video, research­—and catalogued by keywords, industries, even performance of the content. CFE sells advertisers a feed to that content which allows them to log in, select topics and preview content, which is initially streamed to the advertiser’s website but can also be repurposed for blogs, newsletters and social media. Publishers can license Content Stream in the same manner for their own markets (more than 40 publications are currently using ContentStream from publishers such as ...

Content marketing--—both the creation of content for clients as well as advising clients on their content strategies--—is a business in the “tens of millions of dollars” for HIMSS, the Healthcare Information & Management Society. Last week HIMSS announced the launch of its Media Lab, designed to help healthcare technology marketers crack the code on content marketing through distinct data insights into user behavior, purchase intent and even emotional response.

Content marketing is increasingly dominating the conversation (according to a recent study from Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, 76 percent of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing efforts in 2016). And with just 30 percent of B2B marketers considering themselves effective at content marketing (down from 38 percent in 2015), B2B publishers have a golden opportunity to tap into that hunger.

"I like people who know how to work. Done is better than perfect. So when people tell me [in interviews] about their weekend projects in their house, like the treehouse they built and they couldn't go to sleep until it was done, that's a cool thing." — Dottie Mattison, CEO of Gracious Home New York in a Q&A last week in The New York Times

It’s a tough market for content licensers—the near limitless number of resources online, an increasing willingness of some users to “borrow” content without compensation and a changing client base where the role of corporate librarians who know markets and sources is changing. On the bright side, advertisers are emerging as a new customer base for licensed content but that also means publishers have to learn how to sell differently.  

This week Chicago-based Cision announced that it will acquire news release distribution company PR Newswire from UBM for $841 million (the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2016).