Custom Publishing | Custom Media | Imagination Publishing

Once again, traditional advertising agencies and their weekly trade magazine Advertising Age have proven that they just don’t see the marketing changes that are sweeping them into irrelevancy. This week’s issue (1/4/10) of Advertising Age focuses on “Ad Land”  and the changes and trends that will continue to negatively affect traditional agencies in 2010. Much is said about key marketing categories and traditional media channels such as direct marketing, print and television but all of it misses the point and is pretty gloomy stuff.

I applaud Ad Age’s attempted discussion about the rapid emergence of custom content as primary marketing tool. But their attitude about custom content seems to dismiss it as really only serving those who already know what they want and are ready to buy and not really about creating demand.

I couldn’t disagree more on both points. First, engaging and converting those who are ready to buy into measurable revenues is not only a mandate for marketers in this depressed economy but it will remain as a primary objective far after this recession is a distant memory. Second, as we have seen with our Fortune 500 clients, custom content does create demand. By providing value and targeted custom content to target customers, the return on marketing investment results far surpass those of traditional mass media. That is why custom media, according to a recent study, nearly doubled over the last two years while traditional media plummeted.

Advertising Age while acknowledging the growth of custom content failed to point out the phenomenal growth of custom publishing agencies over the past five years. Unlike traditional agencies, custom publishers offer a full range of strategy, creative and measurement services that are all centered on producing and distributing original, results-producing custom content through whatever delivery channel is most effective for each target customer. Custom publishers like Imagination Publishing continue to add new clients because we have added expertise to our custom content print and digital arsenal such as rich media, social networking, community management and SEO.

The shift to content agencies that understand how to create and distribute custom content to target customers has only accelerated over the past year. It’s time that traditional agencies wake up to what their marketers already know about custom content….it works!