B2B and Beyond - discussion panel of business-to-business trade magazine executives - Interview

Brandweek,  May 7, 2001  

Tags: advertisement, B2B, brand, Branding, consolidationE-business/E-commerceindustryInternational Data GroupINTERNETMARKETINGSCHWARTZWeb

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There was a day when a trade magazine company could survive simply by selling ad pages. That day is history

Running a successful B2B company these days is a dizzying juggling act. Offline products like magazines must work seamlessly with online ventures. Trade shows must share a vision with database and research distribution. How to wed all these disparate disciplines? We invited Dan Ramella, president/COO of Penton Media; Frank Cutitta, senior vp, IDG; Stephen J. Schwartz, group vp/publisher of Chemical Week Associates; and Britton Jones, president/CEO of Business Journals Inc. to help answer this and other questions. What we got was a wide-ranging conversation on Web strategies, brand equity and, oddly enough, Ramen Noodles. Richard Brunelli, editor of Adweek Magazines' Special Report, was the moderator.

BRUNELLI: Dan, I'm going to throw this to you first. The B2B business has evolved significantly from the days when a trade company put out a magazine for its niche audience. Can you tell us how your business has changed in the last 10 years, 5 years or 2 years?

RAMELLA: How about the way it's changed in the past two months? I've been with Penton for close to 25 years now, and in my earliest days with the company, we focused on making great magazines. But the trend in the early '90s, which really accelerated after the last media recession, was publishing companies making a conscious decision to try and diversify. And that led to strategies to incorporate trade shows and events, databases and product information, newsletters and other things that were perhaps more predictable in uncertain economic cycles.

Today, most business media companies view themselves as integrated suppliers of information to the markets they serve. Now it's not just a page of advertising in a magazine, it's a fully integrated marketing approach.

The introduction of the Internet as a new medium that business media companies can take advantage of represents yet another challenge. Initially, companies just launched Web sites that kind of repurposed their editorial content. In 2001, it will be the year of accountability for the Web offerings, where business media companies look for both revenue and profit opportunities.

BRUNELLI: Dan brings up a good point about Web offerings. On the consumer side of magazine publishing, the Internet has generally not been successful as a revenue source. If consumer magazines can't pull it off, can B2B companies do a better job?

CUTITTA: Because of the nature of IDG's business, we're focused on information technology. I've been with the company for 17 years, and watching what's happened in information technology' during that time has been massive. We're fortunate that on the business-to-business side, those folks tend to have some of the more sophisticated installations of computer technology.

The big thing that we're interested in is what's happening with bandwidth--how quickly we can get messages out at high bandwidth rates. We've had our challenges on the consumer side like everyone else, and I think we've been able to handle those a little bit better than most because we're dealing with a technology-savvy audience. The important thing is that you've got to find creative ways to integrate your offline and online offerings along with the expos and, in our case, the research and book companies.

BRUNELLI: But when you're talking about magazines and research data and expos and whatever, how do you bundle it all together--both online and off--to create a successful brand?

SCHWARTZ: You want to try to balance your portfolio so that you're not completely dependent on ad revenue. But what that balance also does is keep your current customers by offering them the opportunity to do more with you. And it keeps somebody else from getting a foot in the door.

RAMELLA: I agree. It's really a function of just leveraging the brand equity that most of us established early on with our publications. When you take that brand equity and extend it to related and complementary fields such as trade shows, the readers are your show attendees and the advertisers become your exhibitors.

JONES: It's not only leveraging your brand equity, it's leveraging your expertise and knowledge of marketplaces. One of the keys in the future to our success and the success of our customers and their customers is helping them really understand the marketplace and the nuances of the marketplace.

CUTITTA: As far as branding goes, I think it's all coming down to the subject line [of an e-mail], because you're just going to have to promote this stuff through e-mail. If you don't have a strong enough brand where people see a subject line and don't open it up, you're dead--you're just not going to do it all with banner advertising, and you're not going to do it all with direct mail. E-mail is today's direct mail.

BRUNELLI: Some B2B companies have created long-term, broadbased business plans based on the hope that e-business would enable them to manage the company more efficiently. Dan, has the Internet allowed you to cut costs?