Walking the Line

By Bill Mickey
Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Fulfillment houses are still expected to, and do, provide the bedrock fundamentals of the traditional services. However publishers are now demanding a suite of services that support what’s become absolutely critical in today’s media environment: Product diversification and development, marketing and message management, and deep, unified customer views. Much of the transformation is driven by the changing role of fulfillment in the business operations mix. Once considered a system on autopilot, fulfillment pros are riding the coattails of technology expansion straight into the sales and strategic planning processes.

All of this reflects the growing media demands of customers and the diversification of magazine publishers to meet that demand. Consequently, print, live events and digital products are all converging on the back-end, placing new imperatives on a flexible fulfillment system that can handle a variety of tactics—from label-pulling to an integrated customer database.
And more often than not, publishers want the independence to access and leverage customer data and promotional campaigns on their own terms.


All-Important Integration

A good example of this changing dynamic is Technology Review, a 150,000-circ bimonthly produced out of MIT. Over the last few years the magazine has adjusted its business model to focus less on the magazine brand and more on the brand’s entire product platform. “We tried to envision what the future of publishing would be and we tried to become it,” says Heather Holmes, TR’s circulation director, “which is a Web site community with a print magazine on the side as a companion.”

Holmes readily admits her publishing operation is on the smaller side, but for her that just emphasized the need for a nimble fulfillment system that matched her company’s tech affinity—a need that culminated in switching fulfillment providers earlier this year. “Now we are a very strong Web site with a daily news content presence,” she says. “So we need a lot more cross-platform integration with our fulfillment house and with our offerings to our audience.

Whether it’s print or digital or even a Kindle reader, we need to make sure we’re doing everything we can to pull everybody together.”

Important to Holmes was access to real-time data. This is an area where fulfillment directors tend to have differing needs, but for Holmes, it was essential. “I had to have access to real-time data. If I did a 500,000-piece direct mail and I wanted to see day-by-day how we were doing I had to go onto a DOS-based system and hope the flash counts based on what the mailroom was seeing were close to accurate. And then I would wait a week for the file to update to see response reports.”
Now, Holmes can log in to a Web-based interface and literally watch the numbers tick. “I’m able to see the performance of my mailing lists better. I can see if my mail house didn’t drop the mail as soon as they said they did, and I’m able to troubleshoot and make better decisions quickly.”


Custom Products, Custom Fulfillment

Publishers often cite an increasing push for custom products—both online and in print—which in turn creates a need for not just a flexible billing backend, but support for multi-tiered product offerings. At Technologyreview.com users have various levels of paid access according to their subscription status. “I can go to my fulfillment company and say we’re about to launch PDFs for purchase on our Web site. They can handle that and all of the data management so I’m able to cross-sell and cross-promote,” says Holmes.

Jessica Cox, fulfillment director at b-to-b financial publisher Source Media, has been servicing an increasing array of bundled and custom product packages that has required a rapid response and support cushion from her fulfillment operation. “We did a million-dollar deal with Apple that included a bunch of products across all divisions of Source Media,” she says. They wanted to see one bill, which had to have certain verbiage. It couldn’t run through the regular invoice system. It required a completely separate channel, which we call ‘special billing’ now, and we created another workflow for it in anticipation of more deals like the Apple deal. Fulfillment has to get involved up front very quickly. You can’t just stick it in the system.”

All of this places a premium on two things: Supporting the strategy of reaching the customer when, where and how they want, and collapsing the fulfillment operation from a decentralized network into a centralized, integrated operation. If you’re going to offer your customers content anywhere, anytime and in any format they want, your fulfillment system has to support that level of service complexity and offer ways to facilitate ongoing opportunities in that strategic vein. “You’re able to speak to the client in the way they want to be spoken to,” says Denise Robbins, vice president and group director, circulation at NewBay Media. “That’s the most important thing to us right now—to have an idea of how our readers are interacting with all of our products and which are more successful and which aren’t.”

Moving toward a centralized operation can be painful for many publishers. It requires both a cultural and systematic overhaul. Some fulfillment operations solve this problem with a master database overlay that’s fed from existing, product-aligned databases. Others go whole-hog and reformat and pour their multiple databases into one centralized repository. “I think everybody should be [centralized],” says Robbins. “I think it’s more daunting for some companies than others. We were in a state where we had a hodge-podge of things and we had to make a decision anyway, so it was easier to make a big leap in stead of 10 small ones.”

Once again, we’re looking at a top-to-bottom integrated operation, from a strategic outlook to operational support. And fulfillment is no exception. “I think circulators have to think this way,” says Robbins. “You can’t work in silos anymore. And in ten years we might be out of a job because [companies] are not going to need the circulators they have now just for print. You really need to take command of more products within your own company. And this is a really easy way to do that.”

For Source Media’s Cox, the new focus on fulfillment has paid dividends in her operation’s role as crucial force in business development. “We’ve become cool, if you will. In the past, people thought we just sat in the back room and did our thing. But now people realize they should get fulfillment involved and see how quickly these orders can get turned around. We become more integrated into the sales process and into the strategic planning process, where that wasn’t always a place for us.”

The publisher’s relationship with the fulfillment bureau can be loosely compared to one between parents and a teenager—solid support with just enough independence to do what it wants on its own. Now that business development has reached such a rapid pace, publishers need to bring certain services “in-house,” performing tactics independently, but with the full support, of fulfillment bureaus. “More so than any other company I’ve been with,” says Robbins, “our non-print products are moving to the forefront. We need to create Web forms that we can update ourselves, so that if we want to go in and target to somebody we don’t have to go through the bureau to get that form. A lot of it is being able to have more flexibility and be a little bit more nimble.”   


The New Fulfillment Function Check List

Here’s a sample of what publishers are looking for at their fulfillment houses to help support a cross-platform media operation.

• Real-time access to data
• Fully integrated customer database
• Client-side custom report generation
• Quick queries on live data
• Tiered levels of internal data access and
   use permission
• Web-based user access
• Client-side Web form and template creation

Bottom Line: Fast, flexible, integrated functionality and services that allow the publisher to develop business independent of the bureau.