RHC Media, the company that publishes Red Herring magazine, has found a way to get more out of its advertisers while building its brand.
In a program to launch this month, the technology business monthly is offering its top 20 to 25 advertisers an e-newsletter service with Red Herring content they can send to their clients.
The premium service is a reward for Red Herring advertisers who advertise in more than one platform, in the magazine as well as the Web site (www.redherring.com) or as a co-sponsor of conferences.
The service will also be used to entice prospects.
“We could probably generate 5% to 10% of our revenue over a two-year period and it allows us to create a more lasting relationship with our customers,” said Christopher Dobbrow, CEO of San Francisco-based RHC Media.
The newsletters, created, transmitted and maintained by Newton, MA newsletter company iMakeNews, will go out on behalf of Red Herring advertisers who can choose content from the magazine's 19,000 archived articles. The advertiser can then add its own content and direct the newsletter to its entire client base or a targeted segment.
An example would be a wealth-management company that wants to impart developments about the biotech industry to its clients. “The advertiser could serve up Red Herring's forward-looking research on biotech,” Dobbrow said.
“It's a smart circle,” said Cameron Brown, president of custom publisher King Fish Media, Salem, MA, pointing out that the magazine, the advertisers and the advertisers' customers all benefit. “The content is coming from a branded, trusted source in Red Herring. I have found that content with a brand name behind it brings people back.”
And because the content is coming from an authoritative source and is not self-serving, “the advertiser is now seen as an authority,” Brown added.
Reports on reader open and clickthrough rates will be sent to Red Herring so that it can track reader behavior over time.
No other publication seems to have embraced the same concept, but experts say it's only a matter of time until they do. “Technology and business are two categories where there are considerably fewer publications than were out there 24 months ago,” Brown said.
Gruner & Jahr, New York, has been engaging in a custom-publishing program for about three years. Using content from business magazines Fast Company and Inc., custom publishing is bringing in about 15% of the revenue for the two magazines' Web sites, according to Rob Roesler, managing director of Inc.com and Fastcompany.com.
The program, which uses archived content and produces e-newsletters, paper newsletters or Web content, is not geared specifically to advertisers. But many of the clients are the magazines' advertisers.
“The content in these magazines lends itself well to this program,” Roesler said. “The articles tend to be evergreen, not up-to-the-minute news.”
Ziff-Davis, which publishes PC Magazine and numerous industry-specific e-newsletters, would be unlikely to delve into the waters in which Red Herring is wading.
“As a publisher, our content is our most valuable asset,” said Jason Young, general manager of Internet properties at New York-based Ziff Davis. “We are extremely protective of that asset and how, when and why we license it to others is scrutinized very carefully.”
Red Herring's Dobbrow is careful to make clear that the program is not a giveaway. That's smart, said observers. “They are going to have to be careful to put a value on that e-mail and not to over-merchandise that content,” said Michael Della Penna, vice president of marketing at e-mail newsletter company Bigfoot Interactive.
