This article is part of an ongoing series profiling participants in the PubTech Connect conference, presented on Tuesday, March 6, 2018 by PW and the NYU School of Professional Studies Center for Publishing.
Marketing isn’t what it used to be—and it hasn’t been for a while. Selling your products or your brand today goes way beyond putting an ad somewhere and hoping your potential customers see it. You need content, partnerships, events, and an intimate awareness of your audience and what they want. You need to be where they are, as a true, active part of their community. This PubTech Connect panel gathers four experts in embedding where the the audience lives; they’ll share their secrets from the trenches.
Meredith Ferguson gets young people; it’s almost as if she can see the future, except it turns out that the future she sees is already here. In a blog post for TMI Strategy, of which she is managing director, Ferguson points out that today’s marketers need to be keyed in to new tech, from AI to voice search. She even advocates appealing to people’s sense of smell: “Dunkin’ Donuts saw a 29% increase in sales when it released its famous coffee scent on buses in South Korea,” she writes. It would certainly be an improvement if the subways smelled like old books.
Josh Stinchcomb was named one of Ad Age’s 40 under 40 in 2013 when he was 39. At that time, he was vp of corporate partnerships for Condé Nast. Since then, he’s been promoted to the role of chief experience officer, putting him in charge of 23 Stories, Condé Nast’s branded content division, as well as its licensing and it’s new events and experiences business. He’s an expert in how brands can collaborate with marketers to achieve their goals. “Consumers are increasingly less interested in traditional, disruptive advertising (and have the ability to skip it entirely!) so reaching them through opt-in story-telling is becoming more and more important,” he told IAB. He’s leading the way into the post-ad world.
With Epic Reads, HarperCollins made a bold move into branded social media; Epic Reads is a platform that connects young readers with HarperTeen authors using social community, engaging original content, and direct-to-consumer marketing. Jane Lee is the site’s senior manager of content and community. She came to HarperCollins from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, where she oversaw digital marketing and social media for NOVL, Little, Brown’s site for YA readers. A glance at her Twitter feed will show you she’s got her finger on the YA pulse.
Tina McIntyre, Hachette’s senior executive editor, also worked at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, where she was responsible for, among other things, marketing the Twilight books. She now oversees Hachette’s newly formed content development division, where she has initiated innovative partnerships, like pairing ambient music and sound effects with e-books and audiobooks, and working with the social reading site WattPad, with whom she is helping to produce audiobooks editions of Wattpad stories.
Keith A. Grossman, chief revenue officer of Bloomberg Media Group, the company’s cross-platform media organization, and formerly associate publisher at WIRED, will moderate a discussion between these four visionaries who are redefining what marketing means.
