Ad Age Custom Media Guide

KEEP CUSTOMERS BY MAINTAINING DIALOGUE

Custom helps marketers stay in touch with consumers

In recessionary times, it's a no-brainer: It's easier and cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. And branded content—whether in the form of custom magazines, interactive CRM programs or branded Web sites—is one of the most effective ways to maintain brand awareness and connectivity with your customers.

"You must maintain dialogue with your customers," says Eric Schneider, CEO of Redwood Custom Communications. "Branded content offers efficient forms of engaging consumers on a direct basis at almost any stage of the purchase cycle.

"When compared to the waste that occurs in traditional television or run-of-press magazine advertising—where you are hoping your product will stand out to the 1 [percent] to 5 percent of those readers who are already thinking about a transaction—you can be very efficient in using branded content to talk to your core customers," Mr. Schneider says. "You can communicate a relevant message to consumers with whom you have varied degrees of pre-existing relationships with very little waste."

Custom publishing is harder working than other media because it covers the entire purchase cycle. It allows brands to retain a relationship with the consumer even if it's not transactional—a magazine or Web site that is lifestyle-oriented, for example, and keeps the customer connected to the brand until he or she is ready to purchase again.

For instance, an automotive marketer might use a custom magazine to reach someone who has just purchased one of its cars. Content-based platforms can support the initial purchase, maintain a community of like-minded people and reinforce the purchase decision.

"Custom media can keep in touch with the customer as he moves along the stream," Mr. Schneider says. "That might be adding accessories, or providing maintenance tips. That up-sell opportunity can be extended by educating the customer on a broader array of products that might have relevance to someone else in the customer's sphere of influence, say a child who is looking for a first car. Eventually that customer steps into the next stage: repurchase. The marketer wants to help him keep up with new models, with what is in the pipeline that he should keep an eye on.

"Maintaining that relationship is worth the nominal investment after the consumer has made a $20,000 or $50,000 purchase."

Ever more sophisticated, branded content has arrived at the intersection of media and marketing services. In its own continuing corporate evolution, Redwood sits at that intersection, increasingly the most important corner in the marketing industry.

The question these days is, "Who is going to own this space?" Mr. Schneider says. "Will it be marketing agencies who understand the value of content and evolve to a point where they can create content? Or [will it be] publishers who understand this is a marketing communications endeavor—they have the content development capability but have evolved to use that capability for their clients instead of themselves?"

Redwood lives in both worlds. In the company's recent reorganization, Omnicom sold its interest in Redwood to Transcontinental, a large Canadian media company. Redwood consolidated its operations in Toronto and New York.

"Transcontinental is a media-based business, but they have evolved their thinking in terms of marketing communications competency," Mr. Schneider says. "It's a great example of a media-based business saying, 'We should be able to provide agency-type services to our clients and not just sell them territory in our own assets.' "

Redwood, with its long history of leadership in custom publishing, is the linchpin in Transcontinental's desire to create a marketing communications sector focused on providing clients with the sorts of thinking traditionally offered by agencies.

"We see custom publishing as a marketing venue that extends our clients' brands into a media experience that they own and control," Mr. Schneider says.

In the traditional advertising model, a brand will advertise in a syndicated environment that it does not own. There is a host brand—a TV network or a magazine, for instance—that the consumer connects with. In the context of that relationship, the advertised brand gets a chance to interrupt that relationship.

By contrast, Redwood's focus is helping clients recognize that content in and of itself can carry the characteristics of the brand. With the explosion of digital technology in particular, brands don't need to turn to media companies as intermediaries, but can disseminate this content on their own—creating a media experience they can control.

"The content can be entertaining. It can be inspiring from a lifestyle perspective. It can provide solutions or be educational," Mr. Schneider says. "But the key is that the content is constructed with the brand characteristics in mind."

The brand characteristics and the marketing objectives will determine what media to use, but these days Redwood uses some sort of digital media—Web sites, mobile, e-mail—in virtually every campaign.

"You need to consider what kinds of triggers get consumers to that digital environment," Mr. Schneider says.

No matter what the medium, branded content's success increasingly is built on what Mr. Schneider calls "the distinction between interruptive advertising media as an intermediary and agency services—where the focus is on building on a media property that is an extension of a brand that the marketer owns and controls."

A LOOK AT REDWOOD

Redwood Custom Communications is one of North America's leading custom publishing agencies, developing branded media programs designed to help our clients retain customers and drive incremental sales.

Redwood combines best-of-breed journalism, creative, and proprietary strategic marketing tools to develop targeted content programs. Creating custom, branded media programs based on customer relationship management and loyalty-program best practices is just the beginning. We use the power of content to affect consumer behavior and build meaningful relationships with high-value customers across touch points throughout the customer life cycle using magazines, direct marketing, digital and Web 2.0 platforms.

The result is a direct, impactful connection that bonds customers to the brand, maximizing loyalty, value and profitability.

For more information about our company and its products, please go to www.redwoodcc.com and www.redwoodcc.com/portfolio1