What I learned at Folio: 2005

Just back from the Folio: show in New York held Nov. 1-3 and wanted to share what I learned.

First, a curious observation about the show. There was no digital media/Web track. A curious omission, considering it's one of the fastest growing parts of our businesses. There were individual Web presentations (such as mine), but they were shoe-horned willy nilly into the Sales track, editorial track, circ track, or wherever.

The sessions themselves didn't seem terribly exciting...I only found a few that seemed worth attending, but then again, that's because I'm a Web guy and the pickins were slim.

One thing that was interesting: A potentially new way to prove print advertising ROI: Compare direct traffic to an advertiser's Web site vs. that of a non-advertiser. This gem came from Todd Christenson, Publisher of Electronic Products magazine at Hearst Business Media. His point: It's a fallacy (says he) that the single largest source of traffic to a given Web site is from Google. That may be the single largest source of referral traffic, but direct traffic (when people type in a URL or use a bookmark) always outweighs referral traffic from any given engine. And when you compare direct traffic of print advertisers vs. non-advertisers, the former outweighs the latter. In fact, Todd has set up his own Direct Traffic ROI Web site that illustrates the idea. If you are a print publisher or salesperson, contact Todd for his powerpoint with a case study. Well worth it.

Another stand-out was my fortuitous discovery of a vendor called IQR. Their value proposition is to help publishers unlock potential revenues in their circ files by using that as a starting point for building a proprietary database (buzzword: rich data). Most publishers (ourselves included) may have deep domain expertise in their industries or fields, but lack the expertise to identify and build out complex data sets that would have financial value. IQ purports to help in this regard, and they've already helped several publishers in Europe. They told me the have a project underway with IDG right here in the U.S. This seems to me a great way for publishers to get into the rich data game.

Finally, a nifty idea I picked up from email service provider Real Magnet. They purport to be able to track clickthrough activity of subscribers after they clickthrough to the advertiser's site. In other words, once they leave the publisher's site, a publisher can still continue to report how many pages (and which pages) the person clicked on the advertiser's site. How? By asking the advertiser to install a small snippet of javascript on any page on which they want to track activity from the publisher. I think this is a brilliant idea, and there's nothing magical about it. It should be standard functionality from all email service providers. Downside: Despite its appeal, my guess is that few advertisers would actually add special code to their sites (no matter how simple it is) for the sole purpose of tracking one specific campaign. We can barely get them to submit their ads on time. Modifying code on their Web sites? Not likely.