George Beckerman of Marlin & Associates conducted a conversation with Cindy Hill, focusing on how to approach the convergence of media and enterprise content markets and to manage the acceptance of content from premium services with ads in the services. Cindy points out there that there's a huge "what's in it for me" from users but also a willingness to consider ads from subscription services if it doesn't impede access to content. Print-based journal providers are getting pushback on budgets not only on the basis of price but also on the basis of budget for storage, so migration to more ad-based content aimed at institutions into electronic media is going to be crucial. George points out that at the Amsterdam SIIA conference Claudia Juech, VP of Central Information Services at Deutsche Bank, was definitely open to the concept, so there was some anecdotal evidence for ads in enterprise-oriented content having support.

But Cindy point out that you do need eyeballs for content to make this work. Cindy and George have been doing research as to what the real receptivity is for ads. George points out that Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, has done some experimentation with premium ads. Outsell research highlighted by George indicates that people in professional roles do respond to ads, so there is also some broader evidence for this response factor. Cindy underscores the need for ethical standards as a key factor for moving ads into enterprise-oriented content. Her research with George indicates that they would consider convergence pricing, but that they expect faster access to more essential informaiton in the process. So instead of having ads as sidebars direct embedding with useful information would be key. [COMMENT: We've been suggesting this for years, monetize context does not necessarily equate to traditional advertising.] But not everyone is in favor of ads in enterprise content - interestingly coming from individuals who were of the opinion that they were already able to negotiate pricing effectively and from those who are concerned about objectivity. So although that there is promise for this concept more insights and experimentation is required. Metrics are highly important, Cindy indicated that if a journal is not used at least one hundred times it's cancelled - a relatively low threshold of usage. Ads could help to offset the cost in these kinds of instances. There may be a number of solutions to be worked out for this, especially given earlier models for sponsored content in the financial industry.

In Q&A it came out that Alacra has done research and received strong push-back in their markets, Dow Jones is working on an enterprise-based product for financial information and news, BLR has added ads to some of their business and legal content with no pushback from subscribers.

Selling context in enterprise products can be tricky - interrupting workflow is a huge issue, but that's subject to interpretation. People are going to Google and other search engines as a part of their workflow any way, to implicitly there is a strong degree of acceptance for ads in business information anyway. The key factor to focus on is the value of context - content in context could be an ad, it could be objective content with sponsorship, it could be a database that has some content distributed on a licensed basis and other content on an ad basis, it could be the customer themselves offering that context for content that could be useful for their purposes.

Labels: advertising, business information, business models, enterprise, media, SIIA Content Forum 2007