copywriting

In short, brands are media. Marketers are editors, or at least need to start thinking like editors and producers if they don’t want to come up short-handed. So herewith, 12 steps toward editor-think to help marketers get beyond that accusatory Blank White Page and start thinking like an editor.

1. Know your audience

Couldn’t be simpler or more self-evident, but the importance of knowing who you’re producing content for cannot be overstated. Customers? Prospects? Fans? Industry peers? Colleagues? The media? Some or all of the above? Selecting topics and tailoring messaging is a whole lot easier when you know who’s on the receiving end.

2. Define key themes and messages

Now that you know who you’re addressing, what is it, broadly speaking, you want to communicate to them? Don’t just focus on your product, service or business here, but do some thinking as to how it relates to an audience’s real-world concerns. If you’re a local business, you may want to weave broader local themes into your content. If you’re hawking something with a high consideration curve, education and learning may be part of your messaging. Use your knowledge of your audience, your tone-of-voice, and the broader informational environment in which you reside to inform themes and messaging.

3. Establish a frequency framework

Half the journalists I know say the write for periodicals because they need deadlines in order to produce. In the trade, it’s called feeding the beast. You may not need to blog, or write, or tweet, or status-update every day, but once per month is probably not enough…and you risk the whole endeavor tipping off the cliff. Create a schedule for content updates and adhere to it. Map out potential stories, features, or other content in advance so that when the deadline looms, you’ll have a sense of what’s due. Falling into a rythm beats falling out of visibility altogether.

4. Create an editorial calendar

An editorial calendar plugs directly into the frequency framework. Just as your local newspaper has a fod and dining feature on Wednesdays, an expanded entertainment section on Friday, and home and gardening on Thursdays, mapping a type of content to your frequency framework is a great step forward in terms of making relevant content happen on a reasonably frequent schedule.

5. Develop regular features and rubrics

Creating a few regularly-appearing content elements is one of the oldest editorial tricks in the book. Comics, horoscopes, weather and film listings all help round off a newspaper’s offerings and keep readers coming back for more. Moreover, once you’ve got these regular features, they’re all but auto-populating. Highlights of the week, links out to other relevant content, a quote of the day are just a few down-and-dirty ideas to keep the flow of content coming.

6. Interview

Interviews probably belong up in item #5, but are notable enough to warrant discussion on their own. Are your own ideas drying up? Talk to someone else! Experts in your field, enthusiatic users, people in your company. Make a list of potential interview subjects, and consider making interviews a regular content feature.

7. Go multimedia

Content isn’t limited to text alone, of course. Images, photos, video and audio all expand and enhance your content offerings. Blogging? Posts accompanied by a graphic image draw attention to themselves. Don’t take my word for it, give it a shot — web metrics bear this one out.

8. Enlist contributors and provide them with guidelines

You don’t have to go it alone. Look around at your coworkers, colleagues, professional network. There are lots of potential content contributors out there. Often, all you have to do is ask, either for one-off contributions or regular features. User-generated content is, of course, a whole new route to ensuring content is created for you, be it comments, ratings and reviews, or contests. With clearly defined guidelines and expectations, and a little bit of polite asking, you may be surprised at how much content is created for you rather than by you.

9. Opine and editorialize

A frequent stumbling block to content creation is when the creators think they’re obligated to be first to break a piece of news. It’s a big internet out there and news is traveling at the speed of fiber optic cable. This is a losing game. Leave it to the pros. Divest yourself of the notion that you’re a reporter and instead become an expert observer and interpreter of what news means to your audience. Establish youself, your company or your brand as a thought leader, not a deadline reporter.

10 Turn on comments and feedback

Whatever digital platform you’re creating content for, ensure comments and feedback mechanisms are in place, easy to use, and monitored. This not only creates a platform for participation, it’s a gauge of how well you’re doing, what excites and interests your audience, and will doubtless feed in ideas for shaping and improving future content.

11 Listen

Listen to what others in your space are saying, and do so outside the parameters of your own comments section. Set up topic alerts for your relevant themes. Get out there and participate in what others are saying within your arena of expertise. It’s the social media equivalent of leaving the house.

Christmas indulgence is over and we’re all racing back to the office filled with positivity, enthusiasm and hopefully fading hangovers.

If you’re planning to plough this positivity into your website then great. You’re not too late to increase your customer base through the internet and, thanks to localised search and long-tail keywords, you can still compete with companies that have been online since the start.

So, if you’re one of the millions of companies with a static, dated website that barely brings you a customer a week, where should you begin?

Read on for my five top pointers, but remember that there are hundreds of other ways to enhance your website if you do have a bigger budget. I’m sure some of my fellow online marketers will add their preferred priorities in the comments below, so take the time to read them.

Rewrite your site

Before making sure people can find your site, make sure you’re proud of the content they will find.

I sometimes hear companies bemoaning the uselessness of the web at attracting visitors, and then I see their websites, which are often useless, static pages written without any understanding of keywords, often filled with poor spelling and grammar. They should be relieved no one is finding their site to see how rubbish it is!

So, work on your words. Rewrite your whole website and employ a copywriter if you’re not too skilled at creating appealing marketing text.

Redesign with SEO in mind

If you’ve written your pages without considering SEO, the chances are your website’s design is not up to scratch either.

You may well benefit from bringing in some outside help if you’re not hugely techie – and make it good help. Getting the receptionist’s teenage son to put a few pages together for £50 is unlikely to result in a Google-mastering website.

Speaking from experience, it’s very frustrating to be called in to work on a website’s optimisation just after a (completely useless) redesign. If you can’t do it, get help.

What kind of things should you or your agency be considering? Use keywords in your page names, optimise your website’s meta description tags, fill your pages with internal links. There are many small but useful ways to incorporate SEO into your web design.

Keywords, keywords, keywords

Of course, before you rewrite your website, make sure you know and understand the keywords you intend to use.

It’s really not all about stuffing your sentences with the most commonly searched for term. If you sell car insurance then you don’t need to stuff car insurance into every sentence you write about car insurance.

In fact, you’re likely to have more success with so-called long-tail keywords, more specialised phrases that are particularly relevant to your niche business. You can research your keywords using free resources like Google Adwords.

Understand your paid placement

Once your site is fit to be seen, you will want to start attracting visitors as quickly as possible. Organic search can take some time to get going, but with intelligently applied pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, you can immediately increase your visitor numbers.

Take some time to really research your keywords and then you can allocate your budget intelligently, balancing cost and popularity to ensure a steady stream of relevant customers.

Socialise online

I am not going to claim that using social media is free because, of course, it isn’t, as it requires a commitment from you or a member of your staff. Dedicating anyone’s time is undeniably an investment.

However, spending time on a relevant social platform can have excellent benefits. You’ll become a recognised name within your industry, you can answer potential customers’ questions and attract them to your website, and you can give your business a great dose of publicity.

Use forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, any relevant platform, and you should see an increase in interest and visitor numbers.

Of course, this can be a slow burning tactic, so it’s important to dedicate regular time on an ongoing basis. Sporadic socialising won’t work.

In a post entitled “The End of Hand Crafted Content“, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington states that he’s worried about the “rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the
portals and search engines“. This “fast food content“, he says, is “cheap, crappy” and produced by “masses of sub-par journalists” with “little or no editorial oversight“.

That sentiment is echoed elsewhere. Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb declares that “the bottom line is that the quality of content produced by these ‘content farms’ is
dubious, which has an impact on both publishers and readers“. And he wants Google to take action (good luck with that).

The arguments made, which one can easily sympathize with, are also slightly ironic. As well-known skeptic Loren Feldman points out in a vlog, many of the blogs bashing Demand Media and its ilk have themselves been called out for producing content of questionable ‘quality‘ and employing loose ‘editorial standards‘. Feldman’s most important point: most prominent blogs are guilty of pandering to Google. The problem? The Demand Medias of the world produce Googlebait on a much larger and more efficient scale than the vast majority of bloggers could ever
hope to replicate.

You could debate this subject for hours on end but I’m not sure how worthwhile the mud-slinging is. That’s because there’s nothing inherently wrong with fast food content.

Yes, it’s true that the content produced by companies like Demand Media is not going to win any awards and in some cases, it’s not very good by any honest standard. So what? A Big Mac isn’t the most nutritious meal, but reasonable people are not going to suggest that cities banish McDonald’s restaurants to the side streets so that only the ‘gourmet‘ restaurants can line the main strip.

There is a market for content of all types, just as there’s a market for restaurants of all types. You might scarf down an occasional Big Mac at McDonald’s, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never make reservations at the most expensive restaurant in town. And so it goes with content. If you’re looking for information on how to change the oil in your car, you could probably do far worse than the eHow article on the matter.

A common undercurrent in all of the criticism of content farms is that the content isn’t fit to be published. ReadWriteWeb’s MacManus comes right out and says it: fast-food content “often…lacks knowledge of the topic at hand“. This, in my opinion, is perhaps the most intriguing criticism since many well-known bloggers have no professional training as journalists, and were hardly world-renowned ‘experts‘ in their fields when they started blogging. But that doesn’t mean that they are incapable of producing content that has appeal to consumers. To the contrary, their passion and authenticity gives them the ability and freedom to offer different perspectives, even if they’re not always ‘correct‘.

Frankly, I there’s too much academic discussion of ‘quality‘. I’m the first to agree that quality content is king, and the Demand Media model isn’t something I’d personally want to get involved with. But we’re not talking about user-generated link farms or aggregated junk here. Love it or hate it, we are discussing original content. And there’s no monopoly on who can create it. You don’t need a Ph.D. in Journalism to write an article about changing oil, and there’s nothing scummy about Demand Media’s strategy of cherry-picking subjects with economic value. Monitor what topics people are searching for, evaluate their economic potential, and create original content to meet the demand if it makes money. You can call that ‘content farming‘ and ‘gaming the system‘, but I’d rather call it what it really is: ‘market research‘ and ‘common sense business‘.

Obviously, not everyone wants to consume fast food content, and not every writer is going to be willing to cook up delicious content for nickels and dimes on the word. You’d think that would be obvious. Given the fretting in the blogosphere, however, I would suggest that some of the ‘gourmet chefs‘ who are surprisingly worried about the new McDonald’s down the block may not be so confident in their menus.

Photo credit: Radio Saigón via Flickr.

Over recent years, many online news providers have had to adopt search engine optimisation (SEO) best practice into their articles in order to maintain their audience figures.
 
Yet I often see journalists and even some bloggers bemoaning the need to optimise their work, as though it means all the quality has been drained out of the article and replaced with Google-appeasing nonsense.
 
That’s why the first of my points is perhaps the most important. As long as it’s done well, SEO will not make your articles unreadable.
 
SEO is not the enemy of good writing
 
Believe it or not, the purpose of SEO is not to destroy your writing’s artistic integrity, it’s to make sure people can actually find your work to appreciate its genius.
 
I think that SEO is often misunderstood by professional writers, especially those who began their careers offline in the world of print and are suddenly having to adapt.
 
They end up believing that they have to cram key phrases like ‘Britney Spears’ into their serious article exposing the flaws in the government’s economic recovery plan. That’s obviously ludicrous.
 
Search engines are like a newsagent, they are where people find your copy. By bearing SEO tactics in mind, you place your article at the front, right next to the till.
 
Headlines hook more than humans
 
Journalists use their headlines to hook readers into the story, to convince them of the importance of reading this particular article.
 
However, most news websites will use the headline as the page’s title tag, which is one of the places that search engines look to assess the relevance of your article to someone’s search.
 
That means that if you can get the kind of words into your headline that people will search for, you’re more likely to gain a larger audience.
 
So, instead of something funny but inexplicable like ‘King faces whopper grilling’, use explanatory terms like ‘Mervyn King defends Bank of England strategy’.
 
Is SEO the end of the pun?
 
To an extent, this is bad news for the grand old tradition of the journalist’s pun. Look at a recent example. Poole Council replaced their town centre Christmas tree with a green cone that plays music and flashes inbuilt lights.
 
Naturally, almost every newspaper covered this story with the headline ‘Elf and safety’.
 
However, I heard the story on the radio and then Google News’d it at work. I searched for ‘Christmas tree health and safety’, so ended up reading one of the few articles that didn’t make that joke in its headline. (The Telegraph ran with ‘Poole axes real Christmas tree for safer fake one because of health and safety’. There’s a paper that gets it.)
 
I think SEO doesn’t need to be the end of the pun completely, though. There’s no reason a paper couldn’t use creative headlines for its print copy and optimised headlines online.
 
Use a keyword rich introduction
 
If your news story has a standalone introduction then make sure it’s filled with relevant terms. That doesn’t mean you have to make it incomprehensible to people, that will damage your reputation as a writer and increase your bounce rate.
 
To an extent it’s good journalistic practice, you want to summarise the main points and elements of your story to inform readers (and now search engines) what your article contains.
 
Write for your audience
 
There are some great ways of attracting inbound links to your article and getting it Tweeted or mentioned on social media sites like Digg or StumbleUpon. The web audience laps up ‘top tens’ and other list-type stories and are more likely to share these with their friends.
 
So, if you were planning to write an article about where to go for a winter holiday, for example, considering writing it as a ‘Top ten winter holiday destinations’ or ‘Five fashion crimes to avoid on the piste’.
 
These lists also allow you to use sub headings, which make an article more easily read by the online audience and are a great way of giving your targeted keywords an extra boost. Search engines pay attention to sub headings.
 
Consider keywords without curtailing quality
 
Your article doesn’t have to be stuffed with likely search terms but you can make it more search engine friendly.
 
Don’t abbreviate companies and phrases (unless they are as well-known as the full description, like SEO), and aim to use people’s full names.
 
This helps your article cover all the possible terms people are likely to search for and reiterates its subject relevance to the search engines.
 
Link descriptively
 
If you’re writing about the very latest development in an ongoing saga, it makes sense to link to your previous articles to give some background.
 
When you do so, don’t just link using useless text like ‘click here for my previous article’ or ‘for more information click here’ – use your headlines or relevant keywords.
 
Search engines look at the hyperlinked anchor text to help assess the relevance of a page to certain keywords. By linking using your (already optimised) headline, you give your last article an SEO boost.
 
Watch the competition
 
If your newspaper isn’t making its content work hard enough, your competitors certainly will. When even the mighty BBC News has to work to keep its articles visible in the search results, you know that there’s no room for complacency.
 
Soon, journalists who can’t write optimised copy for the web will be under-skilled for their changing workplace. In an industry that’s shedding staff writers all the time, that’s a dangerous position to be in.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are seen as opportunity for retailers to fix lagging sales numbers and lure early holiday shoppers, but as retailers jump the gun on holiday deals, it can get harder to see the impact of set shopping days.

Simon Dumenco at AdAge writes:

“This year, marketers have particularly diluted the meaning of Black Friday, given all the pre-Black Friday, and “better-than-Black-Friday” deals they’ve been plugging ad nauseam.”

And yet, many consumers still organize their shopping around the date of Thanksgiving. Barclays Capital analyst Robert Drbul tells the Wall Street Journal that this weekend can be expected to generate 10% of total holiday season sales:

“It’s hard to play catch-up. A lot of what you are seeing (in terms of store promotions) is surgical and tactical. It’s well-planned.”

That said, the concept of Black Friday is more concrete than Cyber Monday.  U.S. consumers flock to stores on Black Friday because they have the day off and often spend that time shopping. But as online and offline shopping merge, they don’t have to wait until Monday to go to the office and use the internet.

Dumenco notes that Cyber Monday mentions on Twitter are a fraction of those for Black Friday:

Black Friday has been subsuming Cyber Monday for a while. ComScore reported last year that traffic to online retailers was up 98% over 2007′s Black Friday, and getting consumers out shopping during the entire weekend is much more important than arbitrarily pushing them toward deals targeted to next Monday.

Survey research from Google and OTX found that 32% of consumers plan to do most of their shopping during Thanksgiving weekend. Google found that searches for “Black Friday deals” started around two weeks earlier than last year. According to PayPal, its first major spike in online-payment volume occurred 16 November.

Meanwhile, price wars have broken it out weeks ahead and retailers like Amazon began Black Friday deals early this week.

“Web (retailers) have woken up,” Fiona Dias, executive vice president of strategy and marketing for GSI Commerce, tells the Wall Street Journal. “What Amazon.com has realized is that if they wait till Monday, consumers will be broke…For online retailers to wait until Cyber Monday, they are going to be out of the game.”

Images: top, Shoes.com. middle, AdAge, Trendrr.

Teracent’s technology uses machine-learning algorithms to optimize display ads in real-time. Think of it as multivariate testing for display ads, fully automated. Ad elements go in and Teracent’s technology figures out how they can be combined to produce the best results:

Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns. In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers web users better ads and more ad-funded web content.

Google’s announcement shows the product of a Teracent optimization:

The ad on the bottom is the product of Teracent picking and choosing ad elements using machine learning, and ostensibly converts better than the ad on the top.

Google believes that Teracent’s technology “has great potential to improve display advertising on the web” and once Teracent is in the Google fold, plans to make its technology available to DoubleClick and Google Content Network advertisers.

Financial terms of the Teracent deal weren’t announced, meaning this was a smaller deal. But it’s more evidence that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is following through on his M&A plans. In September, he stated that “Acquisitions are turned on again at Google and we are doing our normal maneuvers, which is small companies“. Of course, he’s also doing larger companies too, having just acquired AdMob for $750m.

Google’s thirst for M&A is sure to be welcome news for startups and while Google has made some head-scratching acquisitions in the past, the AdMob and Teracent acquisitions hint that this time around Google is putting more emphasis on the business it knows best: advertising.

Photo credit: Yodel Anecdotal via Flickr.

Take this story:

• Headline: Paris is worried she’s not part of the in-crowd anymore. She is 28 years old.
• Keyword-stuffed HTML title: Paris Hilton Kim Kardashian Hollywood It Girl rivalry: 3am

Or:

• Headline: Alex Reid, coming to a TV screen that you won’t be watching at some indeterminate point in the future
• Title: Alex Reid Jordan Katie Price Peter Andew Bravo TV Show: 3am

And my personal favourite

• Headline: Now we’re all supposed to get upset about Dermot’s sick X factor jokes
• Title: X Factor Dermot O’Leary Jedward death threats Louis Walsh sexuality Britney Spears miming Never Mind The Buzzcocks: 3am

OMG! WTF! Etc.

When 3am launched, it was obvious that not much attention was being paid to SEO – and the all important title tag. In fact, one of the developers proudly told paidcontent.co.uk that:

We know full well this site won’t perform brilliantly in google. And guess what? we don’t care! (oooh… someone doesn’t think SEO is the be all and end all .. good grief, what a shocker).

We want this site to perform well over a period of time. Not live or die by how many times we can write Britney Spears or Michael Jackson into the metadata.

And a Mirror spokesman told the NMA that:

You need to have an audience but obviously we’d prefer a loyal and engaged audience rather than chasing numbers.

New tactic: keyword stuffing the titles

That’s all gone out the window it would seem.

Quick bit of background about the HTML title: It’s shown in the HTML but doesn’t show up on the page (although you can see it in the top bar of your browser). Most people on the 3am site won’t ever notice the HTML title.

However … the HTML title is what Google uses in its results, as the screenshot shows.

And Google also pays a lot of attention to the title when deciding what a page is about – you’re usually advised to ensure your relevant keywords are at the front of the title if you want to do well for SEO.

So one way to try and do better in Google’s results is to ram the title full of as many keywords you can think of.

When it launched, the 3am site had taken its anti-SEO approach so far, that every page had the same title, so each page looked identical in Google’s results. Now, it seems to have gone to the other extreme …

SEO, titles and personality

3am definitely had a point that concentrating on SEOing your pages can lead to bland headlines. What most sites do is set their HTML titles to be “page headline – site name” (as well as publishing umpteen stories with only small differences about the same celebrity.)

Then they write keyword-rich headlines – which can be boring and obvious, it’s true.

But SEO and personality don’t have to be strangers. I’m a Celebrity pages like this, this and particularly this combine good on-page SEO with useful content for readers and interesting headlines (someone tell ITV, quick). The secret is to SEO category pages – so you can concentrate on interesting headlines for individual stories.

Given all this, there is a case for small differences between headlines and HTML titles.

Using a headline like “Back and as desperate as ever” in the title is rubbish for SEO. Google can’t tell who the story is about, and searchers are unlikely to click on such a keyword-light title in the results. There’s a case there for tweaking the HTML title slightly to include the celebrities’ names – even if it’s not used in headlines or on-site links.

Google penalizes sites that stuff

But Google frowns on sites that overdo this:

“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking.

So stuffing every X factor and Britney keyword you can think of in the title runs the risk of google banning your site, and is generally not a great idea. Especially when you’ve got on your massive high horse about not doing SEO.

Grrrr! as they say on 3am.

If you’d like some tips on writing well for SEO, you might want to read my recent post 21 On-Site SEO
Tips You Can Give to Your Online Copywriter. There’s some good discussion in the comments too.

Your content is for search engines, not humans

 
Google is clever, but it isn’t a person. Filling your site with utterly useless but unique and keyword rich content will sometimes drive traffic through the search engines and onto your pages, especially for less competitive terms.
 
However, lots of companies seem to forget that, after they’ve risen in the Google ratings, they need to actually appeal to the individuals who have clicked onto the site.
 
If the content isn’t useful, doesn’t immediately direct them to something useful, or is badly written then they will leave and your efforts have been wasted.

Don’t forget that well-written articles and interesting, useful content attracts inbound links, which will help you in the search engine results far more than keywords alone.

Your content is badly written

I hate writing this because it’s an invitation for people to start proof-reading my own work!
 
However, in the rush to publish frequent content, many companies lose sight of the importance of quality and simply churn out articles.
 
Obviously there will sometimes be typos, that’s true even of the national newspapers, but a shoddily written article will alienate the visitor and make the company look unprofessional.
 
There’s a bit of a debate about whether or not it’s worth optimising for typos that are frequently made, for example ‘search egine optimisation’.
 
Personally, I tend to think this makes it less likely that people landing on your pages will move forward to use your services, as you’ll simply look too slapdash.
 
Your content is dull dull dull
 
To be honest, this is partly an extension of my first point. If you’re publishing articles simply to raise yourself in the rankings and without any concern for the hapless reader, then your content is likely to be tedious.
 
As an industry insider, you have the opportunity to create a trove of knowledge, guides, analysis and advice.
 
Such informative content would be naturally rich in your chosen keywords, it would be useful to your potential clients, it would attract inbound links and it would cement your position as an industry authority.
 
Dull or useless content will damage your brand in the eyes of the visitor. Take the time to create quality articles and they’ll work much harder for you.
 
Your content is irregular or non-existent
 
A couple of years ago, there was an eruption in blogging. Thousands of well-known brands leapt onto the bandwagon and it seemed every online firm in the world was battling it out for blogosphere recognition.
 
Then people realised it took time and stopped updating theirs.
 
Now, there are few things that put me off a website more than a blog that hasn’t been added to since 2007.
 
Subconsciously, I make all these assumptions about the company – it’s lazy, it’s not in control of its marketing, it’s cutting back on spending…
 
To be honest, I think it’s better to lose a blog entirely than have one that’s completely inactive.
 
Your content is just advertising
 
Of course I don’t mind advertising in the right place. A company’s website is where it advertises its products and services, nothing wrong with that.
 
However, sometimes a brand can be damaged by advertising in the wrong place. You can offend your reader by promising a certain kind of content and then failing to deliver value.
 
Oh, it’s fair enough to mention products and services, of course, but you need to offer something else.
 
For example, if I click on a guide to beating insomnia and all it contains is a relentless pitch for memory foam mattresses, I’ll be annoyed. I didn’t agree to be advertised to, I wanted useful information on sleeping aids.
 
One of the points could have mentioned a new mattress, even a memory foam one, but it needs to go beyond that, that’s why I’m reading a guide and not a brochure.
 
Failing to respect the visitors’ expectations and intentions is an easy way to gain a bad reputation.

Gourmet may not have any ad pages anymore, but advertisers are still interested in working with the brand.

Rick Wilbins, managing director for brand and advertising at American Airlines, works with TM Advertising and signed on to sponsor Reichl’s new TV venture. He told The New York Times:

“TM, talking with Gourmet, had suggested that there were opportunities
to be more directly involved in the production of a series. We’d be open to that, and since we also have had a
strategy of engaging with our, we call it our best fliers, our premium
and frequent travelers, that one of the ways we engage with them is
through food because food and travel are intrinsically linked. So this
is a perfect link.” 

American agreed to buy 30-second ads at the beginning and end of the cooking videos, as well as ads on Gourmet’s website and Gourmet’s TiVo channel. Two weeks before the premiere, Gourmet was killed off. But American is still working with the brand.

In its wake, Gourmet magazine has received plenty of good press. And
publicity about the magazine’s closing may have an upside in terms of
associated projects. According to Publishers Weekly, sales of “Gourmet Today,” the mag’s new cookbook, have
spiked since the publication’s closing. Meanwhile, the blog Eater offered to publish articles slated to appear in the magazine’s upcoming issues.

But it’s not all dying embers that have been given an escape route. Perri Dorset, a Condé Nast spokeswoman, tells the Times that Conde is “looking at a number of other expressions of the Gourmet
brand. We’re engaged in
very interesting partnership ideas around Gourmet — these are very much
on the front burner for 2010.”

Lagging ad sales do not erase the fact that Gourmet was a very popular magazine — and it’s editor highly respected. While the magazine had to compete with other food titles at its publishing house, the brand of Gourmet may live on in any number of other iterations — both online and off. Its assets could continue to benefit Conde Nast, whether it be through recipe books, online video or branded content.

Shuttered publications like Radar magazine and Vibe have died only to resurface online again. In the case of Radar, the new Radar online is a shell of its former self, while private equity investment fund InterMedia Partners bought Vibe Magazine and is working to ressurect the brand online.

If the Gourmet brand can retain Reichl and continue to make high quality products, it can add to Conde’s other titles and help the publishing house bring in additional revenue. Brands that close their main business can run into trouble when they start on smaller projects due to a lack of
focus, but Conde has the benefit of multiple titles, meaning that it can bring in Gourmet only on high end projects that will benefit and add to its other brands.

Conde Nast may not have been able to succeed with Gourmet as a magazine, but the brand could yet do them a lot of good.

Image: AP