Put your money where the profit is

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August 1, 1995 by Stuart W. Park

Major players in publishing - Hearst, Rodale, Time Warner and others - are committing heavily to multimedia exploration, striving to get ahead of the curve. Through a variety of multimedia offerings, including CD-ROMs and interactive television, these companies are attempting to create new vehicles and markets for core editorial content.

There's no doubt that emerging communications vehicles will spur massive changes in consumer markets. But for the immediate future, publishers must also overcome commoditization, restore rate stability and gain greater investment from advertisers in their core print businesses. Competition is squeezing advertising revenue from traditional print sources, while multimedia is calling for significant capital outlays.

At the same time, corporate America has raised the bar for sales professionals by implementing multimedia marketing programs of their own. It won't be long before advertisers expect the same from magazine salespeople.

The solution is multimedia marketing. Using it day in, day out, is the fastest way to raise the new media fluency of marketing, sales and editorial people. The more headway publishers make in multimedia product development, the more essential it will be to tell their marketing stories using the technology. This doesn't mean carrying, say, 16 Road & Track CDs into a sales call; it means opening a notebook computer, hooking up to a projector, and bringing the entire product story to life. Doing so empowers magazine sales forces, differentiates their franchises, and sells more ads. More over, it positions the publisher as a guide for advertisers who are striving to understand new media opportunities and establish sophisticated identities.

Magazine salespeople have a surplus of complex stories to tell, but their customers have no time to listen. The pressure intensifies to address a client's needs on the spot in an engaging and memorable way. Canned presentations - flip charts, transparencies, slides - simply cannot meet this challenge, no matter how expertly they're produced. Client questions about integrated marketing opportunities, in particular, force salespeople to stray from the script.

With a well-designed multimedia presentation, on the other hand, salespeople can customize pieces of the content and the order of the presentation without compromising the identity that corporate marketing has carefully crafted. These electronic presentations can be updated constantly at low cost without discarding an inventory of printed brochures, slides or videotapes.

Several major service providers are telling their entire corporate marketing stories via portable multimedia presentations. Rather than prolong the sales cycle by asking, "Can we schedule another meeting so I can present my other carousel of slides?" or "Let me send you the brochure on that," these salespeople marshal information immediately to overcome objections, answer questions and address concerns. Want to know more? Click on to a deeper level of detail. Need something else? Click into the subject of your choice. A hundred different presentations can be stored on the computer and called up as needed.

Marketing with interactive multimedia is a rapidly evolving discipline. Here are several of the lessons learned by companies who have moved aggressively into multimedia marketing solutions.

Don't go through the motions. Building a successful multimedia sales presentation isn't about a salesperson and a programmer working together in the media lab. It's a painstaking process that demands the attention of the company's top marketing minds. Publishers need to commit to it wholly, or not do it at all. Whether your solution involves a portable marketing presentation, a CD-ROM or a World Wide Web site, advertisers and/or readers will expect value in the form of timely, relevant and well-organized information.

Set a budget via corporate mandate. launching a multimedia marketing program is a long-term strategic decision. The sophisticated identity it establishes tells the world what the company stands for. This is not a repositioning, it's a total transformation. To do everything right in an interactive presentation-to create tools that inform, excite and empower the way a beautifully executed magazine does-means spending $500,000 or more in the first year.

Stick with top designers. Don't trust your future to an unproven enthusiast. It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that computer whizzes automatically make good multimedia designers and programmers. They don't. What's more, they're not usually good marketers. Most have never prepared a marketing presentation or produced a corporate video. Effective multimedia design requires that content be presented in an intuitive fashion for easy access by the uninitiated, or that it be fashioned as speaker support for use by salespeople only. You need designers with 10 to 15 years experience in high-end corporate design, and programmers who can demonstrate that they have worked effectively with video, digital audio and interactive multimedia.