Publishers Must Think Like Agencies

Digiday reporting:
Paul Rossi, the managing director at The Economist, has spent the last quarter century at the venerated publication. During that time, he has seen the industry thrown into turmoil  by the shift from analog to digital media.
The big overriding challenge he sees is how media companies have become brands. That means giving value to customers wherever they are, which is increasingly everywhere. “Media companies have to think about how they manage their brand and customer beyond the printed page,” he said.
The twin challenge is making advertising fit better. Call it “native advertising” or even “content marketing,” the modern publisher will need to act more agency-like for its advertisers.
If media companies have become brands, are publishers also starting to act more like agencies?
That’s right. Over time, what you’ve found, the agency world moved toward publishing, and the publishing world moved toward the agency world. It’s a combination of both. If you think of the driver of that change, it’s traditional advertising becoming less valued by marketers, and social is driving the need for engagement for different ways. I think native advertising has always been around in the simple form of advertorial. It’s not particularly new. The role it plays in the marketing mix makes it more compelling today than five or 10 years ago.
As you point out, “native” advertising isn’t particularly new. But is it significant?
It’s significant; it’s the new hot thing. It’s significant is that it’s part of a bigger trend. If you look at the real challenge that most media companies are facing, if you look at the traditional client-agency relationship, it was based on marketers having a problem, briefing an agency and then putting an ad in front of the audience. If you look at marketers today, they are building relationships and audiences direct through Twitter and Facebook. If you’re a marketer and want to talk to your customer, you don’t need an agency. As part of this bigger trend, native advertising fits into the trend as getting close to customers, but don’t necessarily have anything to say. The opportunity for media companies is to create content that’s compelling for users on behalf of advertisers. That doesn’t mean it has to be native, but the skills in telling stories are quite valuable to marketers as they build audience themselves.
Should every publisher get into the content-marketing game?...
http://www.digiday.com/publishers/why-publishers-need-to-think-like-agencies/