Let’s give it up for Joe Pulizzi.

When I first heard he was creating Junta42, a marketplace for custom publishers and brands, I thought we were in for another ad network play, a jobsite, or a competitor to the Custom Publishing Council’s referral service. J42 is most of that and a whole lot more. Pulizzi is one smart dude: When he sees a wind blowing, he tacks right into it. Custom: got that. Publishers’ referrals: got that. Digg-like aggregation about custom content: got that too. J42 has even managed the trick of coopetition with the CPC, no easy feat.

Pulizzi’s best trick, however, is turning this little windup toy about custom publishing into a model for his business: he really eats his own dogfood. J42  collects user-submitted articles to be voted up by registrants, and Pulizzi emails the best to his user, marketing his own custom publishing company (Z Squared) while simultaneously taking a cut on referrals—at this point more than 100 matches between brands and custom publishers who pay $4395USD a year—compared to membership in the CPC (from $1,700-21K/year (depending on company revenue) for roughly the same service. Between sales and referrals (no real advertising here), that’s a nice business. You have to give this guy props.

And yet.

As a onetime custom magazine publisher whose roots and tendrils have always been unambiguously digital even when he was working with print, I can’t reconcile the reality of custom publishing with distributed brand intelligence.

I sense Pulizzi knows this too: his definition of custom is nothing dogmatic, rather a big tent accommodating everything from the classic brand monologue, print or online, no matter how well or poorly produced, to the most up-to-the-minute social media and content marketing schemes. The Junta42 model, which Pulizzi explains in a white paper is based on the rising costs of interruption economics (brand advertising), the sinking fortunes of media companies, and the seeming bliss of consumers who seem to be just as open to blogs as they once were to big media brands and their partners in brand advertising. Inside this big tent, it’s all content marketing and it’s all good. As brands get bigger, savvier, and realize that their content—even their spec content—is gold, they will only pay more to bet smarter about content strategy, content marketing tactics, and content management, and Junta42 will be there to guide them.

Good stuff. Pulizzi is clearly onto something. If I had money, I might even join J42; I could use a new client or two, and if he’s doing as much volume as it seems, the $4K might even be a good investment. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have the cash—and (perhaps more important) can’t summon up the same enthusiasm for custom publishing. Don’t misunderstand: I believe there’s plenty of good brand-sponsored publishing to be done, nearly all of it online. Brands ignore the remixed associated value of their content—repeat: remixed, associated value of their content—at their peril. Understanding how to innovate down to the bit, relearning brand storytelling across the datasphere in new story forms is why I’m here.

Custom for dummies?

But that’s not custom publishing. The competitive essence of custom publishing is its ability to write and publish in the style of popular journalism—mimicking the real thing in look and feel—but wholly disassociated from the credibility and competence of newsgathering. Custom aims to boost and protect a brand. It’s not about you. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There’s plenty of consumers who could care less about the news curve. But let’s call this what it is: a disguise, a feint, a kind of editorial ventriloquism. As if readers/users won’t know the difference between content related to news and content related to marketing, promotion, and sales. Here: take this magazine and remember us the next time you have a problem with your car! Here: take this magazine and remember us the next time you accuse us of not having any imagination! Here: take this magazine and remember us the next time you can’t find a product in our giant database. Here: take this magazine and FOR PETE’S SAKE WOULD YOU SHUT UP—we’re giving you this gorgeous magazine FOR FREE!

Charlie McCarthy: Editorial ventriloquist

This is why Luce wanted a Chinese wall between editors and business, Church and State. Why ASME still insists on labeling advertorials. Why nearly all custom cannot compete for brand advertising, even in unrelated categories. (Custom publishers say they create high perceived value with consumers but if that was the case, why wouldn’t they compete for customers and advertisers?) And (perhaps I don’t need to say this), it is why user generated content exists. To blow a hole in this mockery of independent judgment and reporting, of pseudo-news and real news. To put an end to dummy-to-dummy publishing—passive consumer to monologuing customer publisher.

Making the bridge from conversational farce (ventriloquism) to conversational, customer dialogue and customer service seems to me an almost impossible leap. As I said above: I just can’t square custom publishing with distributed brand intelligence. Juntas aren’t distributive democracies. Period. (Does anyone see the irony in naming a business that promotes popular ideas about publishing for a term that is all about a military brand monologue?)

Of course the custom publisher/content marketers of the world don’t see it this way. Since most big companies are dropping their expensive custom magazines, all they see is fresh opportunities, whether by sticking with the magazine model—locking content behind DRM systems such as Zinio and Idio or DRM-protected emags or even PDFs fit for the utopian ideal of a color Kindle. Or they are going the social media route, adding marketing blogs or other social media conventions to massive online brand destinations. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum: Follow us on Twitter! Check us out on Facebook! Hear our brand soundtrack on MySpace! Join our FunClub/Ambassadors Club/MeClub. We get it—even if we don’t know what we get out of it (but check out our white paper for the mumbo jumbo on why you should be promoting your brand on My Twitface including the 10 best ways to turn 140 characters into great marketing 22 times a day!). Welcome the age of content marketing!

Not. The problem with all of this is that content marketing, like custom before it, craves control and abhors real conversation. You don’t need a paternity test to see it’s the same DNA. This is the same ol’ same ol’. Content marketing prefers the lopsided asymmetry of promotion to real customer dialogue. Why do you think Twitter is the tool du jour of content marketers? If you have something to promote, what better way than getting into a realtime stream with asymmetrical follow? Why do ya think company after company is craving so-called social media experts and why an army of self-proclaimed social media expert is rising up to meet this demand. The whole thing gives me a strong sense  of déjà vu. I’ve seen this movie before, maybe even a couple times already: These are the same folks who made the “dot com” revolution. Who crowed about Web 2.0. And who are now heralding a new age of content marketing.

Conversation for dummies

Not all content marketing is so ugly. Since one of the hats I wear is “content strategist,” I’m among the first to recognize that there’s significant value in propping up marketing in the Orwellian newspeak of the distributive web. My experience is that when content marketing is conversational marketing—when it maintains authentic dialogue and conversation rooted in the use cases of real people who actually use the products, when it aims at participation instead of passive ingestion of brand factoids—it has the potential to be way cool. Conversational marketing may sound oxymoronic but it is a job that needs to be done. I’ve been saying for a decade that the web turns every company into a media company, whether they like it or not. A Citibank/HP/BP/Audi/Levi Strauss can spend money on brand advertising or they can touch consumers directly with brand-associated content through self-assembling evangelists. (By the way, I take it as obvious in the extreme that the first job of content strategy is helping companies get a grip on the fundamental audit, positioning, CMS, sort, and content creation routines that are the bread and butter of CS.)

But evangelism, especially self-organized evangelism, ain’t easy. Brand advertising works less and less. Web-site destinations are plummeting in popularity. Last week, David Armano, a top UX designer now working on Jeff Dachis’s stealth SaaS collaboration software,  wrote that he was killing his own website, and that almost everyone else should too. “Your website should provide value to all of your users,” wrote Armano. “If you can get them to participate, then do what ever it takes achieve that. In other words, it doesn’t matter if your site looks more or less like a blog, what matters is if you’re doing something to transform behavior from the passive to the active.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’m not saying companies shouldn’t have brand publishing initiatives, or websites, or that they not undertake marketing initiatives via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest. Go for it. But if you do, try to make such initiatives be an invitation to active participation, to dialogue, to content that enjoins and extends a company content into a shared customer ecosystem of connection, conversation, and collaboration that is inherently uncontrollable—and highly prone to influence.

Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize: it’s an unrehearsed adventure. More like playing to gamble than to win or lose. It’s all about the bet, about the place where different universes meet, acknowledge each other, and enjoy an oblique relationship which doesn’t require or forecast assimilation. It’s the one place where difference really matters.

And as long as brands insist on control, they’re playing a losing bet.

Surrender with your hands up!

So how do you start a conversation? How do you give up control? How do you turn passive brand factoiding into active participation where the inmates are liberated from the asylum of the brand?

There’s a whole ‘nother post to be written about this. But it can be done. In print, online, and in just about any kind of application you’re interested in betting on. Blogs help a lot. Blogs establish voice, deepen authenticity, provide insight and create instant culture. Gawker, for example, is planning to grow its sponsored advertising faster than its brand advertising. Take a look at Bloodcopy, its recent experiment with HBO’s True Blood. Just as Valleywag no longer exists independently of Gawker, so Gawker is publishing Bloodcopy across its various properties— pretty much indistinguishable from its typical editorial “except [said Chris Batty, Gawker’s vice president of sales and marketing] that the blog is written by an undead, bloodsucking ghoul…“If we’re around in three or four years, the majority of our advertising revenue will be in sponsored posts like this.”.

OK, I know what you’re saying. That’s not participatory. It’s not on the newscurve. And it’s not very scalable. But what would happen if, say Dell, sponsored a beat on Jezebel, a Gawker property catering to women, about galtoys—and almost entirely unrelated to Dell technology. Or if Volkswagen sponsored a reporter to test drive a dozen cars running on biodiesel. Or if American Express sponsored a blog about small business and really let it rip, competing directly with the Wall Street Journal. (Oh wait: Amex is already more than halfway there with openforum.com— maybe the best site on small business anywhere.) What if your favorite hotel chain started using Facebook to let you tell the hotel what was terrific—or sucked—about its facilities? What if it helped you connect to someone on the other side of the pool? Whichever side of the continuum of social media avails we choose to enter—from blogs that can potentially exist on the newscurve to Tweets and Facebook pages that go beyond promotion to active engagement with products—the opportunity to engage in conversation over promotion must be true north for content marketing. This is most definitely not custom publishing.  

Indeed as a former ink stained wretch, one of the things I like best about this model is that it contains the opportunity for  brands to expand the reported environment through their own thirst for user intimacy. This works particularly well in microdistributed contexts (Twitter and Facebook) and provides far more returns—quantitatively (and maybe qualitatively)— in terms of content and sponsor value than both mainstream media and branded content marketing (i.e., custom publishing online).

Caveats? You betcha. First: Your Monetize May Vary. If you think this is the way to increased brand ROI, you might be disappointed. You might also be delighted. ROI direct to sales may be limited. But ROI related to brand strength may be strengthened. The question you have to ask is: What job does this campaign need to do? So if you go this route, do it because you want to touch a specific audience who will associate reporting on this subject with your brand. Think associatively, act directly. If you do it because you want to spread info about your company, raise its brand, or even have people think your company is on the ball, you lose. This is about authenticity and independence.

Second caveat: Custom publishing can’t do this. Once you go this route, you become the media. You are making the same wager media companies have taken for years, betting that your brand is strong enough to support and even shine on associated content and vice versa. You are no longer in the realm of brand boosting but consumer interaction in and through media.

So don’t screw it up with layers of control. It’s a conversation—not a monologue. Any dummy knows that!

Are they dummies? Are they custom publishers?

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Tagged: Add new tag, Advertising, content strategy, contentstrategy, custom, custompublishing, Digg, Facebook, Joe Pulizzi, MySpace, Publishing, Twitter, User-generated content, Web 2.0, Zinio