To Publishers: Your Customers Don't Need You Any Longer

I had the pleasure of speaking to about 40 magazine and book publishers in New York last week for the Publishing Business conference. The presentation was called "Businesses Are Becoming Publishers: What Your Customers Are Doing with Content and How to Handle it."

I've given this type of presentation to publishers before. I especially like the slide that I put up, in all black, that states "Your customers don't need you any longer..." I was happy to see that only a few people left the room after this slide.

The point I was trying to make is a simple one: in any market today, no matter how niche, sellers can reach buyers without going through distributors like magazine and book publishers.

This is not a new concept to many who read this blog, but it was definitely a wake up call to many in the audience who haven't thought about their business models in that way before.

The choice I gave them was not an easy one, but one that I truly believe has much opportunity for publishers. It is the choice between trying to grow top line revenue within a business model that used to work well, but will be challenging to grow in the future - or - giving in to the new buyer behavior and help teach traditional businesses how to become their own publishers.

Both directions have risk, but by publishers morphing into marketing services companies, they can begin to take advantage of the large shift of dollars from traditional advertising to customized content production and execution. According to Publications Management, 27% of marketing budgets now go toward the creation and execution of content.  I would anticipate this number getting to 50% within the next decade.

The big reason I see this as an opportunity?: Marketers don't want to be publishers. Frankly, in my discussions with marketing professionals, the last thing they want to do is be responsible for the creation of relevant content. Almost all of them now know they have to create valuable and compelling content to stay competitive, but they really don't want to do it themselves.

This premise is one of the major reasons we launched Junta42 Match. Businesses must start creating their own media, but they lack the will and the expertise to do it right. Publishers can help them get there.

Here is the link to the entire presentation from Publishing Business.  We also took video, which will be up as soon as I get around to it.

Exciting times for sure...lots of opportunity, as well as lots of business models that either don't or won't work in the very near future.

Related Articles:

• Media Companies Are Waiting to Make You Publishers
• Corporate Content Will Take Over Media as We Know It

RSS Feed  I   Subscribe to the Junta42 Blog  I  Junta42  I  Junta42 Match