Wiley Merges Old and New

Christine Dunn, director of marketing, John Wiley & Sons’ professional and trade division, talks about how the 200-year-old company’s marketing efforts blend new and traditional media.

June 2008 By Matt Steinmetz

At the end of the day, we’re all just trying new things in the online environment. Every time you publish a book, you’re going to discover a new community, a new list, a new place to put an ad … and when you go online, that just flows exponentially in a number of different directions.

So over the last year, we’ve really allowed that kind of experimentation, and are building our confidence and trying out new tools so that we can make better decisions down the road. As we [move forward], it’s going to be more about measuring what those experiments have done and then adapting them.

But, at the same time, when you’re a 200-year-old company, you don’t forget what works. So we’ve tried to use new media to enhance our traditional marketing efforts so that you’re really looking at a multimedia, multidimensional campaign.

How are you leveraging new online strategies like video and audio?
Dunn: We lucked out quite early and found some really nice outside partners who enabled us to explore a lot with video. You can’t go on any Web site these days without seeing some video. And what we’ve found is that if we wanted to ask another site to place a banner ad for us, chances are we’d have to pay for that. But if we say, “Hey, we have this video of one of our authors talking about entrepreneurialism. It’s two minutes long. Give it a look,” they’ll usually post that for free, because they see it as a value-ad. … And if you can keep someone’s attention online for 30 seconds or more, then you’ve made a lot more progress than by hoping you get one of those fleeting [online ad] impressions we’re all still not sure how to measure.

We’ve probably done more than 100 videos, and one of our more recent [videos] had more than 26,000 views on YouTube, so we’re excited about that. When you think about the impact of that versus a flyer or postcard or something, the costs are relatively the same, if not cheaper, so we’ve seen this as a good business decision as well—to migrate more ads online.

We’ve also done a few dozen podcasts. Throughout our experimentation, what we try to do is figure out how to multipurpose any activity we undertake. So if we do a video, we can upload the audio to iTunes or any number of places. Or, we can position it as a video podcast … or [use it as a] banner ad.

You mentioned there will be more of a focus on measurement. What other challenges do you face as a book marketer in today’s environment?
Dunn: Return on investment is important, and there are lots of different companies out there who say they can give you measurements, analytics and that sort of thing. But as we’ve grown in this new media environment, we’ve learned how to set up our campaigns in ways that measurement becomes a bit easier, so that we’re doing some of the prep work ahead of time knowing that we’ll be able to see results in a better way.

… Another [challenge] is just keeping pace with the vast numbers of ways people filter and absorb messages. It’s not just about reading something online anymore. There’s video embedded [and] audio embedded, there’s Flash animation, all those things. So it’s really all about understanding what people want to see in the context of content and the context of a book. Because a book still is a very intimate engagement with someone. And I would like to think that the online environment would encourage more people to want to get away from their screens, find a book, go sit in a quiet place, and just be a regular, offline person.

Do you find it difficult to obtain buy-in from authors to help market their titles through new media channels?
Dunn: Quite often, we take our leads from the authors. We’ll show them what we can do, and they can tell us what they want to do. Because, at the end of the day, if you don’t have their engagement—just like a customer—you’re not going to go very far with this. …

And it’s up to us, if we feel strongly that this is the best way to promote their book, to make the case for it, because it’s their time they’re giving up.