Meredith's Media-Neutral Selling

Selling a single content asset is becoming a thing of a past.

By Bill Mickey
02/21/2008 -17:20 PM

MIAMI—During his morning keynote, Meredith Publishing Group president Jack Griffin explained the company's approach to selling via its M360º group. "It's a group set up to be media neutral. We're not selling a particular asset, but creating solutions for our advertising customers."

It's an approach that focuses entirely on selling integrated packages, no longer simply selling customers on a single media—print display advertising, for example. It's also one that other publishers are adopting. CMP has realigned its marketing services team to be customer-facing by region, creating customized packages that rarely come straight off a menu. "We have teams focused in the customer client regions, in the sales regions if you will, working with different customers to do that integration across different platforms—print, online, events, or deeper into a specific platform," says Scott Vaughan, vice president of marketing and research.

"Customers don't necessarily say to you ‘I want to advertise,'" added Elliot Kass, managing director, client content services. "They just say, ‘This is what I'm faced with and if you can help me figure out a way to solve this problem then I'm very interested.'"