Page 9 - Engage -- Summer 2018 -- no. 13

Summer 2018
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Q: Let’s start with what has been the million- dollar topic for a magazine editor: What
are the modern challenges associated with getting your content in front of more people?
Jason Feifer: Today, we need to serve people everywhere. We are serving an audience that
is moving, not one that is platform or medium specific. We have to fill a need in the places where they are and with communications tools they want to use. That means the usual stuff—a print magazine, a website, a podcast, a video, and events. It’s also about making sure we understand and hear the audience as well as incorporate that into our own creation process. For example, my Problem Solvers podcast has seeded many stories into the print magazine. That only happened once we started to think of it as a feeder system, not a separate product.
Q: How does that sharing happen from one medium to another within your team?
JF: To create the Problem Solvers podcast, I need to interview people about the exact same thing that I believe makes good stories in the magazine: how people solve problems. When you start thinking like that, it makes distributing content feel less like a scramble to reach a moving audience and more like you are creating a self-sustainable ecosystem, where you’re telling stories in one way that can then feed into another channel. You’re also creating more entry points for your audience to engage with you.
Q: What does the future look like for magazines and other content producers?
JF: The future financial stability of a company is not going to be driven by the content. Advertising and subscription revenue is unstable, and I don’t think that’s ever being fixed. But content will become important in another way. It’s a relationship builder; it’s why people trust your brand. Now
the question is: How can media outlets create products and services that capitalize on that trust, and are relevant to the audience that the content has attracted? That is the future. And that’s what every media brand should be exploring now.
Q: How much of what you do is still based on the model of creating content (articles) that generates an audience and having advertisers pay to reach that audience?
JF: I think we entered into—and are now starting to exit—a model where media brands have tried to be everything to everybody and every media outlet has been putting the same exact story on their website. While I was working at a different magazine, the digital team would watch this piece of software that monitored Facebook. Whenever a story by a brand had better-than-average Facebook engagement, it would surface on the platform and the digital team would say, “That’s
a story everyone likes, and we need to put up a similar story.” That is unsustainable and a race into the ground. Today, you have to be a brand that is deeply relevant to your specific community, not everyone else’s communities.
Q: So, how will successful media brands deliver this deeply relevant content?
JF: It starts with being able to identify who the audience is and then finding ways to serve them as deeply as possible. Ten years from now, I don’t think we will have a bunch of Facebook Live events. I think we’ll have one-on-ones and video conferences. We need to serve people where they are, literally in their lives, and then connect them to things that matter. It’s time to start treating your audience like individuals.
I think we entered into— and are now starting to exit—a model where media brands have tried to be everything to everybody.
Q: There are some monetizable product- based brands that have become good storytellers too. Who stands out?
JF: Well, Red Bull got into content extremely successfully, but nobody would say they are a content company. Their content is building the audience and trust, and the product is the energy drink. Media needs to find their energy drink—that monetizable product that is not the content. Every media person needs to be thinking about that. That is the future of media. It’s not in trying to reach more people with your content. In fact, you may need to be focusing on communities and serving
a narrower band of people rather than juicing your web numbers to say you had 20 million unique views. Everyone knows those numbers are garbage! If one person clicked on one thing one time and spent three seconds there, it’s called “unique.” That’s not a meaningful connection.
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