Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	October 31, 2007

Branding, Convergence and Digital Growth, Dubbed “The MagaBrand Revolution,” were the Big Themes at this Year’s American Magazine Conference in Boca Raton

Ok, so maybe not every editor attending the 2007 American Magazine Conference is now willing to call what they print each month a "MagaBrand," but as AMC conference chair, Men's Health editor-in-chief David Zinczenko points out, success in today's media marketplace means reaching beyond the newsstands to TV, radio, the Web, email newsletters, podcasts, webcasts, and live events.

And he should know. Zinczenko has spun the success of Men's Health into numerous platforms. He's the Editorial Director of Best Life magazine, author of the best selling Abs Diet books, newsletter, DVDs and website, author of Men, Love and Sex, The Complete User's Guide for Women, a Yahoo! column that has gotten play on the Yahoo! homepage on several occasions, with one post generating over 6,000 comments, and he's a Today show favorite. Whew! Just documenting that was exhausting. And we probably missed a few.

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So clearly, the MPA had the right person in charge of this year's conference. A power-packed line-up of speakers, from the within the publishing industry and beyond, were in total agreement with Zinczenko about the power of a MagaBrand. Nearly every speaker addressed the importance of bringing magazine brands to the forefront of the digital landscape. After all, magazines have been building communities for over 150 years. The transition should only seem natural, right?

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"We're too complacent"

The conference kicked off on Monday morning with guns blazing on the Internet issue. In a panel titled "How Publishing Companies Position Themselves for Growth: Best Bets for the 21st Century," panelists had some pretty passionate feelings about where they currently stand in the online space and where they need to be.

"I'm amazed that in 1994, we began the discussion... [and in 2007] it feels like we missed out on the Internet media scene," said Philippe Guelton, executive vice president and COO, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc. "We're too complacent," Guelton continued. "Just because you have a brand doesn't mean people who are searching online are going to find you."

"The consumer is way ahead of us"

Guelton was joined on this panel by Wenda Harris Millard, a former Yahoo! executive now serving as president, media for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. "This is a revolution, make no mistake about it. This is no time to slow down, because the consumer is way ahead of us," said Millard. The good news is, "brands have never had a better opportunity to strut their stuff. Consumers need an editor, they need a filter," Millard said.

Guelton said that at Hachette, they prepare an almost Google-like search of all their content. They tag and store every aspect of coverage to assure they are hitting all the consumer's hot spots.

"The Web is not new," said Millard. "We have undervalued our products for so many years and it's catching up to us now."

To make up for lost times, what magazine publishers can do, is take advantage of their databases. "Data is not the same as consumer intelligence - turning data into consumer insights, that's the magic," said Millard.

"Everybody is talking the talk, but not walking the walk"

Speaking on a panel titled "Will Marketing Ever Be Integrated? An Agency/Client Perspective" moderated by Ad Age editor-in-chief Jonah Bloom, MediaVest USA president of investment and activation Donna Speciale told attendees they must break down their silos. "Everybody is talking the talk, but not walking the walk," said Speciale.

Speciale and Brian Perkins, corporate vice president, corporate affairs, Johnson & Johnson agreed that publishers must to be willing to move monies around to different media channels in order to make integration work.

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"ADD is the new requirement for editors"

In a panel titled "The Editor as Octopus" moderated by The New York Times' David Carr, New York EIC (and winner of Ad Age's Editor of the Year) Adam Moss told attendees that he gets paid to be a dilettante. "The new requirement is ADD. What do I know about Web or video? I get paid to learn," said Moss.

When asked by Carr what else suffers in this new world of publishing, Moss replied, "You have to give up doing the things you love doing... and hope that the person who is doing it will do it well." Moss spoke on the importance of hiring well and "knowing when to disengage."

"Social networks have come to represent half of all Web traffic"

Former TIME President Eileen Naughton, now running Google's regional sales efforts, in a Keynote titled "Insights from Google", encouraged publishers to create branded video content and put it on YouTube. "Tag your videos and put them on YouTube," said Naughton. "It had 56 million unique visitors in the United States. It's an effective community."

"It's all about non exclusive, multiple partnerships"

In a Keynote titled "How your Web Presence Changes Everything" Arianna Huffington from The Huffington Post reminded publishers that the old fashioned idea of competing with everyone is being taken over by sharing content. "Linking, cross linking, sharing content, that's the future," said Huffington. "Increasing virality of content equals more eyeballs. The new model is cooperation, not competition," said Huffington.

Huffington also noted a new trend: disconnecting. "Longing to disconnect is the greatest new thing," said Huffington. She spoke about a day where the AMC would be held in a place with no cell reception and no computer connectivity.

Taking it to the Silicon Valley

Looks like Arianna's prediction of disconnection at a future AMC won't be happening anytime soon! Next year, the conference will be held in San Francisco, where we hope the industry will be able to report generating more than the current median of 3% revenue from the Internet. The figures come from Ad Age's Magazine 300 survey, and while the range of digital revenue was huge (33.3% reported by Entrepreneur magazine and 0.1% reported by Smithsonian and Flying) we hope the slow bunnies catch up quickly so they can bump that median up by the time they convene next year in the Valley.