I’ve been lucky enough lately to have some very nice coverage of my book and want to share what’s new in the past week or two.

First, I wrote a guest blog post for 1to1 Media, a division of the Peppers & Rogers Group. I can think of no organization that has supported meaningful relationship marketing for longer, so it was a real treat to be featured there. I chose to tackle the issue of “scale,” which continues to bedevil big, traditional marketers. Check it out here.

Second, David Kinard invited me to join him in a podcast interview about my book and the Marketing with Meaning concept. That’s available at this link.

Finally, Ambal Balakrishnan published her e-book of trends and predictions from content marketing thought leaders last week. I am very honored to be included in her collection and encourage you to take a read here.

So the next evolution of marketing rolls on…. Thanks, dear readers, for supporting us from the very beginning.

As our customers turn away from the traditional model of interruptive, impression-based advertising, most companies have chosen to continue to spend most of their marketing dollars in this way, while they hope that some scalable, new-media alternative takes hold quickly. But a handful of organizations are not waiting for others to build the next model. Instead, they are investing their money and time into creating new media platforms in which their marketing itself adds value to consumers’ lives. In my book, I share specific examples of how brands as diverse as Nike and The Partnership for a Drug-Free America have shifted their approach this way over years of testing and learning. Today, I wanted to share another killer example: Kraft.

In both my book and this blog I have written about how Kraft is producing some of the most meaningful marketing in the CPG business. The company has created an impressive website with everything from money-saving recipes to instructional cooking videos. The company has at least 15 million people in its email database. And who could forget its recent foray into iPhone apps, where its $.99 iFood tool blew away expectations and continues to serve as one of the best examples of useful, branded mobile marketing. In fact, the company recently announced that it will launch a 2.0 version and says that 60 percent of people use the app regularly, which is impressive given that only 30 percent of apps are used after the first day they are purchased.

Increasingly, Kraft marketing efforts are looking like the central strategy of this CPG leader, rather than just a series of experiments. Last week Advertising Age shared a video segment of the Kraft VP for Global Media Services, Mark Stewart, in which he shared a few words about how the company is becoming a media platform. The entire video is worth watching, but some of my favorite quotes include:

• “We’re in the food solutions business.”
• “We’re a scaled marketer and a scaled publisher.”
• “In this new world… brands have to stand for more than the functionality of their product. You have to provide real solutions and real services.”
• “The future is really about how do you add utility to your brands, which is way beyond what the product delivers.”

For perspective, these words are coming from a person who spends $800 million in measured media each year (i.e., putting Kraft brand ads on others’ media platforms). This means that all of these in-house efforts still only represent a fraction of consumer marketing, but it also shows how far Kraft could go if it started carving a large chunk of this spending for its owned-media business. And the company certainly appears to be headed in that direction. It’s once-free magazine for database members, Kraft Food & Family, is now becoming a subscription-based magazine. And the company is launching other branded apps, including something called “Triscuit Small Plates”—a partnership with Wine Enthusiast that gives tips on pairing wines with snacks and cheese.

This move to a meaningful media+marketing strategy fits well with the overall company strategy. With its focus on premium food brands and the wide range of categories in its stable, a scalable marketing platform makes a lot of sense. Ironically, while Kraft was expanding its media platform last week, another major multi-brand CPG marketer, Procter & Gamble, learned that its owned media platform was being canceled. Its long-running show, As the World Turns, was shuttered by CBS. Recall that the soap opera was invented by P&G as a platform for radio advertising for its brands in 1933.

Why would one owned-media effort rise while another falls? I’m sure part of the story is that tastes are changing in favor of digital tools and are moving away from daytime dramas, but I think the bigger story is that Kraft’s new efforts put the brand in the center of the meaningful content, while soap operas are merely a package for interruptive advertising. Interestingly, while its soap opera business has been failing, P&G is making new investments in sites such as Petside.com, which offers pet health information and provides a meaningful marketing platform for its Iams brand (which has health benefits and claims). This changing of the guard it but one example of how the world is moving toward Marketing with Meaning, and I expect both Kraft and P&G to continue to lead the way in the years ahead.

Last week a group of us at Bridge Worldwide got to spend some time with a team from ExactTarget. ExactTarget is a leading provider of one-to-one communication services, with particular leadership in email delivery. A former colleague of mine at P&G, Tim Kopp, is now the CMO of ExactTarget. Great things are happening with their business: The company’s revenue growth is accelerating, and it recently raised $70 million in funding during one of the worst periods in market history. I love the services the company offers and we’ll be exploring ways to work with them in the future. But for this post I wanted to share something special that stood out in their presentation last week: a chart (above) that shows the evolution and payoff of meaningful marketing.

I apologize if this is a little difficult to read, but the visual above is an incredible way to diagnose where your brand lies in the evolution of one-to-one communication. Many brands begin at the far left segment, blasting out the same email to everyone in their databases. But over time, some discover the need for and benefit of adapting their communication by using customer profiles—information such as age, income, and purchase history. Some then do research into the goals of their customers and progress to Persona-Driven models. A small number of brands are using historic and real-time behavior to adapt messaging, and a rare few leaders have modeled their entire database of customer activity in order to predict the rhythms of customer engagement and give them the content they want before they even know they want it.

As this graph shows, case study after case study proves that the more sophisticated companies become at serving meaningful communication to their customers, the higher the return on investment. And this is a payout with increasing marginal returns. For example, a blast email that creates a 1X return on investment might move to a 2X return through Persona-Driven modeling, and to a 10X return with Predictive Messages.

As one might expect, the companies that are doing the most in this space are those with heavy e-commerce businesses, such as Retail and Travel. The reason is that the impact on sales from these adjustments can be measured through actual purchases in real time. To date, industries such as CPG, Healthcare, and Automotive have been slow to adopt sophisticated personalization of messages because they are a step or two away from the final purchase, and the purchase might not ring up for weeks or months after the email arrives.

It takes a leap of faith to make the financial and time investment to turn your one-to-one marketing efforts into something more personalized and more meaningful. But the accelerating benefits make this very difficult to ignore for much longer. Fortunately, companies such as ExactTarget exist to help do the dirty work of making sophisticated marketing happen, and I look forward to working with them in the future.

As I’ve said here many times before, Marketing with Meaning is not limited to consumer brands with multimillion-dollar budgets, but rather it can be the basis of business-to-business strategy as well. Several weeks ago I wrote about the example of the word-of-mouth agency, Abraham & Harrison, which sent me a valuable piece of data in order to get on my radar. Today I wanted to provide examples from Ari Rosenberg, who writes that publishers have a meaningful marketing tool lying right under their noses.

In an article that I’ve been hanging onto since April, Rosenberg writes that publishers need to be “buying what [they're] selling” by leveraging their great content into something that ad sales targets will find useful. According to Rosenberg:

If I am Business Week, I am using my editorial clout to host intimate business insight conferences for advertisers and agencies on the industry of advertising. If I am any one of the cooking brands out there, I am creating a catering service to feed a different agency’s media department once a week throughout the year. If I am Weather.com, I am sending emails or text alerts every Friday to all of my clients who opt in for a personalized weekend weather report. If I am a finance brand, I am conducting investment seminars tailored specifically for the media buyers I call on.”

Sounds a lot better than another round of cold calls, eh? What I love about these examples is that each one leverages content and expertise that is already sitting in-house at publishers’ offices. Further, these meaningful services completely reinforce the unique expertise and brand positioning of the brands that offer them.

Other business and industries are slowly moving to this type of model—essentially getting a B2B sales meeting by bringing something relevant to the customer. For example, a few years ago my team at Bridge Worldwide created a series of books on understanding the 65+ consumer that P&G pharma sales reps brought in to share with their physician customers. Because of an influx of 65+ patients resulting from the Medicare bill, these physicians had a need to improve their understanding and skills. P&G was able to leverage its core strength in understanding consumer behavior, and get many more meetings than those who just wanted to talk about a drug, or paid for a pizza lunch. P&G and many other large consumer products firms do something similar with their B2B retail customers by putting marketing people on the ground in their headquarters offices—with a charge to drive the retail customers’ total category sales, not just those of P&G brands.

So if you’re a consumer marketer that sells to a business as well, how can you offer something uniquely valuable to your B2B market that leverages your core product or strength?

I love it when readers share stories and examples of meaningful marketing. Last week I discovered a pretty interesting new way for lawyers to promote their services in a meaningful way; it’s an interesting concept that represents a big opportunity to move toward a new model of content aggregation.

Emilie Cole at LaunchSquad, a PR firm focused on new products and services, emailed me about her client, JD Supra, which is hoping to provide a way to serve useful information to people in a way that helps build the businesses of law firms. At JDSupra.com, lawyers can upload articles, court papers, legal briefs, and other documents so that they can be read by visitors to the site. The general idea is that people who are in the market for legal services will do some online research before hiring representation. If they find something useful at JD Supra, they may be especially inclined to hire the firm that uploaded said document. (See the nice coverage from The New York Times.)

Cole makes a great point about how this might revolutionize the way lawyers advertise their services:

[In the old model] they have a website… and maybe a terrible phone book ad. Part of their problem is that they can yell about how great they are until they’re blue in the face, but that still doesn’t convince you or me that we should seek their services. And how would we know if they’re any good anyway?”

Overall, this concept fits very well under what we call Solution marketing, which happens when brands find a way to provide some kind of value-added information for consumers, which is related to the brand or category itself. Anytime a brand creates an article or a consultant writes a blog (such as this!) we are marketing in this way. We all hope that by providing useful information, customers will repay us with their business.

But JD Supra creates further value through its content aggregation service. The problem with blogs and websites is that they live on isolated islands and depend almost entirely on personal networks and their position in Google searches for visitors. Brands have a hard time standing out, and consumers often don’t find the best information on Google. A growing trend is to aggregate content under a semi-walled garden, where higher-quality information is stored and well-tended. Wikipedia is a great example, as are Squidoo and Alltop. Search engines such as Google actually send more traffic to content aggregators, in turn, because they provide more of what the user is looking for.

WebMD is a kind of content aggregator as well, and it clearly has succeeded as a first-search source for millions of people. The downside of WebMD, though, is that it is a fully closed information marketplace. The company “owns” all of the content, which means huge cost, complexity, and lack of outside voices.

I had a chance to speak with the founder of JD Supra, Aviva Cuyler, as well. She started the firm after working for 12 years as a litigator and realizing that fellow attorneys were drafting the same documents over and over again. She pointed out that with so many legal services becoming commoditized, this service can help law firms work more efficiently so that they can cut costs and spend more time on value-added advice. Cuyler described four key business benefits of the service to contributors:

1. Attracts clients who are searching for information and end up impressed by the expertise of contributing firms
2. Improves networking, as lawyers search for specialists in specific areas, who they may hire to help out on a specific issue or refer business their way
3. Gains attention from the media, which is increasingly subscribing to JD Supra’s feeds and using the site for their own research. Reporters are starting to reach out to law firms that are submitting documents, and by quoting them, might generate further business.
4. Drives strong search results (SEO), as each uploaded document means another link back to the law firm from a trusted, valuable, high-traffic source

The service is expanding its usefulness by embracing the latest social networking tools as well. A Facebook app that it created allows members to show their contacts whenever they have uploaded a new document to JD Supra. And it has several specific Twitter feeds with news around topics such as Tech Law and Banking Law.

JD Supra even has a business model: While contribution is free, lawyers who submit documents must pay anywhere from $450 to $750 per year to add links to their profiles, websites, and email addresses. Hey, that’s less than a couple hours of work billed for most of the lawyers I know! So even one client landed through this effort could pay out this investment very quickly. The business model element helps ensure that the folks behind JD Supra keep improving the service continually.

I’d love to see something like this in the marketing world. There are countless agencies, consultants, and bloggers such as us out there talking to a relatively small audience. We all hope that some article is read by the right person with a huge following who, in turn, links to us. Instead, it would be incredible to have a central place where marketing experts could leave articles around specific topics. Readers would find and rate the articles, and the best thinkers and writers (rather than the best networkers) would see their work rise to the top.

Until then, I’ll keep doing my best to keep you coming back here, dear readers!

If you’re not a regular subscriber to Wired magazine, it’s worth the 5 bucks next time you’re at the airport if only to read the feature article on the new Fox/NBC online TV venture called Hulu (or you can just read it for free here). The Hulu story is a great lesson in new product marketing by not one, but two large, stodgy corporations with much of their business stuck in the status quo. Jason Kilar, the 36 year-old Hulu CEO managed to throw together an online television program with thousands of shows in a matter of weeks.  Hulu is growing rapidly and starting to challenge YouTube.

Aside from the outstanding innovation case study, Hulu is serving as a new benchmark in the future of advertising and mass media. The company is still showing advertising, as expected, but it has significantly decreased the number of ads as compared to traditional broadcast television. According to the article, Hulu is charging more but serving far fewer ads.

Let’s say the average prime-time cost per thousand viewers (CPM) ad rate is $25, which is a reasonable estimate. Television shows are averaging 8 minutes of commercials for every 30 minutes of programming, which means 16 30-second slots at $25 each. This makes the “effective” CPM for a program equal to $400.  On Hulu, the company claims that ad rates are “two to three times” that of broadcast TV. Let’s call it 2.5 times on average, meaning the ad rate is $62.50. However, Hulu is only showing two minutes of advertising per 30-minute show, or only four 30-second ads. As a result, it’s take is $250 per show, meaning that for every viewer who watches The Office on Hulu instead of regular TV, NBC loses 47% of its ad revenue.

You can’t protect old business models artificially.” – Peter Chernin, President, News Corporation

How is Hulu getting away with this? Well, the company realizes that the only way to win in online video is to put its consumers first and provide more value. And it believes great content and a modest amount of advertising will be satisfactory for the greedy online video viewer. The hope is that viewers rely on Hulu versus YouTube and other free and/or illegal options such as BitTorrent. The results seem strong so far: One analysis suggests that Hulu could beat YouTube in revenue this year.

Aside from dramatically cutting the amount of advertising per program, there are some other user-friendly marketing options here. Hulu sometimes offers the chance to select which ads you see. And there is a thumbs-up/thumbs-down button for advertising, which supposedly helps ensure that you receive better interruptions in the future.

I certainly do not believe that Hulu represents Meaningful Marketing.  It still relies on an interruptive advertising model that gets in the way of the content viewers actually want to see. But Hulu’s moves and early success are proof that the only way to win in the future is to get closer to what people want.

Side Note: While Hulu shows a dramatic decrease in advertising, the Chicago Tribune just revamped its newspaper to increase advertising to 50% of the total content.

I discovered upon returning from vacation yesterday that this very blog has been ranked as #39 on Junta’s list of the top 42 content marketing blogs. Just a few weeks ago, one of my star Group Account Directors, Jason Ruebel, nominated Marketing with Meaning for the list, and sure enough here we are. It’s a great sign that we’re onto something, and I’m proud to share the honor with everyone at our agency.

I think this blog and the overall concept of Meaningful Marketing fits pretty well under the category of “content marketing.“ Wikipedia confirms a general definition of “content” in new media circles. At the time of this posting, it called content “information and experiences that may provide value for an end-user/audience.”

It is ironic that just today another team of mine at Bridge Worldwide was discussing how we could help a key client build meaningful marketing into its existing process of brand planning. We talked about how this client is a big believer in maximizing the “Context” of communication; in other words, picking media placement where the target consumer is most willing to pay attention to and act on the brand’s message. This is a smart approach, and likely results in higher return on the media investment. But it’s missing something…

I believe Marketing with Meaning is less about “context” – or finding the best time to get in front of a consumer’s eyeballs – and more about “content” – or creating something that people find valuable in itself. By definition, a good “Content Strategy” must be meaningful and is judged by consumers’ engagement level rather than eyeball impressions. We’ll be helping this client create a meaningful content strategy that should take marketing planning to an even higher return on investment.

Thinking about what content a brand can provide for its consumers is the kind of exercise that leads to best-in-class work like Nike+ or Wrigley’s Candystand. It gets brands to move out of the routine of 3-month initiatives and TV copy, and more into long-term relationships, services, and, well, meaning.