American Business Media's spring meeting at the Boca Raton Resort & Club in Boca Raton, Florida is a three-day mix of serious discussions and serious fun for the business publishing set, with a potent brew of C-levels and other senior-level figures major from B2B publishing houses, financiers and major publishing services suppliers in generous attendance. The meeting's theme this year was "Navigating for Success", reflecting a relatively happy year for many in trade magazine publishing. Healthy ad revenues and margins are coming back for those who have found the right mix of channels through which to navigate to their readership. Unlike newspapers that are struggling to find their marketing identity and audience in a world that no longer needs print to collect general news, trade magazines have always gone after highly focused markets to deliver high advertising value with high-quality content.

But while the dinner boat was flowing with music, food and merriment this year for many, there were also "deer in the headlights" looks from publishers who are still struggling to navigate an explosion of content channels that leave many of their core talents back at the dock. Print is still the focus of business publishers, still a highly flexible and personal medium that can be leveraged many ways to support their ad clients' marketing needs. But the key messages delivered by those at the podium seem to indicate that print's place in the mix of channels is changing rapidly: 20 percent seems to be the magic number mentioned by many as the current bogie for a healthy mix of online revenues, with aggressive players exceeding this mark and many indicating that online is growing at a 30 percent rate or more annually. A quick punch of the calculator shows that this would lead to a majority of revenues coming from online channels in less than five years. It may take less time than that given the rate at which this growth rate is gaining steam and the dominance of overall online reach - 51 percent for online versus 42 percent for magazines, according to numbers cited by Jeffrey S. Klein, President and CEO of 101 Communications.

At the same time, total ad spend for business content continues to drift towards channels such as search engines and "born on the web" content services that can deliver highly specialized audiences to advertisers, even as major advertisers learn how to leverage their own Web presences more effectively to communicate with their markets as publishers in their own right. Throw in the ability of mobile devices to work their way into the "four B's" often cited for print's safe spots for consumption - beach, bed, bus and, yes, bathroom - and any sense of complacency about the role of print in the B2B content economy becomes quite suspect. Fortunately many of the leading figures speaking at this year's spring meeting were fine exemplars of how business magazines have learned to adapt to this environment and move aggressively towards models for success that balance the traditional strengths of print and of electronic delivery very effectively.

Consultative selling was cited as an important method for getting beyond rate cards to effective marketing solutions for advertisers across multiple channels, even as rich data is transforming text-based web sites to segment-dominating interactive experiences and events marketing builds add-on revenues. But these opportunities are best exploited by those with a strong sense of how best to manage this ever-widening mix of channels with powerful Web-enabled infrastructure and marketing capabilities that match the increasing sophistication of their audiences. No small wonder, then, that the M&A activity is at a fever pitch this year as titles are flipped to those with the focus and wherewithal to invest in their increasingly online future. It's a great time to be cashing in your chips and a great time to be investing those chips in marketing channels that combine the best of print, online, events and multimedia channels into potent B2B brands well adapted to today's publishing challenges.

We'll be adding highlights from the various presentations and panels this week below this entry, so keep tuned to this weblog for more insights. For now, it is enough to say that the ABM spring meeting demonstrated that B2B publishing is thriving in an environment that is yielding great revenue gains for those who have done the best job of absorbing the hard lessons of the past several years as they learn to navigate in today's marketing channels. I look forward to celebrating the 100th anniversary of ABM next year in Boca Raton and hearing how more B2B publishers have learned how to ply these channels in their own operations.