"There's nothing like a recession to focus your mind," noted Bill Pollack, President and CEO of American Lawyer Media at the American Business Media/SIIA session on "rich data" content at the McGraw-Hill building last week. Draconian cuts in ad budgets since 9/11 and a changing marketplace for professional content have forced some B2B publications to make huge changes to their operations over the past several years to become database publishers first and foremost, spinning our print publications still but now wary of the hard lessons that they have learned about ad cycles that do not always come back. As demonstrated by this representative selection of panels and speakers some of these lessons have been embraced aggressively by publishers learning how to service user needs more effectively than ever via online databases, while others are still pondering what rich data really means. Significantly many in attendance at this excellent but brief event were SIIA members - as many as half by some reckonings, though some attendees with both memberships came - so it's not clear just how clearly the traditional ABM crowd is embracing the themes laid out in this session. Ads are starting to cycle back strongly, now, though much of the action has moved online, so it's questionable as to how aggressively many trade publishers will continue to move towards injecting technology-driven content into their mix as apparently easy money comes back into the marketplace.

Nevertheless Gordon Hughes, President and CEO of ABM, sees "vast potential for all companies" in the rich media space as they feed database-driven content to their clients and ABM members, which in turn should foster more interest in ad revenues reaching those clients from B2B publishers. As Hugh Roome, President of Scholastic International put it, it's about being "transformed from a B2B company into a database business, where publishing is an important business but not the main business." The main business is extracting value from content by analyzing its value in the eyes of the marketplace. Like a small-market baseball team playing "Moneyball" to define valuable performance in a way that the marketplace may not recognize via traditional measurements, Hughes sees the necessity for publishers to look at content assets from outside of the traditional publishing perspective to understand their true value. For Scholastic this has meant recognizing that one of their most valuable assets was their deep relationship with teachers in the education marketplace and learning how to leverage that asset through the data acquisition capabilities of their customer service desks - data that they could leverage through their own products and that they could combine with partners such as AT&T's True Rewards plan to extend brand loyalty on multiple planes. This builds up to a USD 200 million ecommerce operation that is well insulated from ad revenue fluctuations and the even more chancy vagaries of publishing titles such as Harry Potter novels. Becoming a database publisher first and foremost, then, is about leaving presumptions about business models behind and taking on a powerful customer-centric view of what content will really matter to very specific and personal markets.

Details on the two main panel presentations and vendor presentations follow below.