Signature January/February 2015 - 38

facetime

: What was involved in getting
prepared?
Vick: It took about three months to get
internal buy-in, get the technology set, and
build the archive. Working with our IT department, we will have about 3,000 units of
content in the database. And we will keep
building on that because the more content
you have, the easier it is to sell packages.
: Does it add to the workload
of your publishing team?
Vick: The content is still branded
IEEE, although sometimes the photography has to be stripped out if we don't
own it. Other than answering questions
about photography that we may not have
the rights to, the process is automated
and completed by CFE.
Moving forward, we can change our
photography agreements to allow us to
retain rights for licensing our content
with the photography in place. Same
thing for content agreements - we make
sure we have rights to license everything
from now on.
: Whose responsibility is it to
sell the syndicated content?
Vick: We trained our advertising sales
reps to do it. We've worked out all the
kinks, including how to get the reps
excited about doing it.
The reps are selling the content to existing advertisers as well as to prospects.
With the prospects, talking about our
syndicated content is a great way to break
the ice. Selling licensed content allows
IEEE Spectrum to build new and deeper
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There are 36 technical societies within
IEEE, and about half of them have magazines. We also publish a major journal
with a huge amount of content. When
we eventually go beyond IEEE Spectrum
and add all these in, we could easily get
to 20,000 units of content.
As far as fees, CFE gets a percentage
of our revenue as their compensation.
It made me comfortable moving ahead
knowing that they had enough confidence
in the project to structure the deal that
way. There are some up front costs in
integrating and training your sales staff.

James Vick

relationships with customers, while giving
them immediate access to some of the best
engineering content available.
: Can any size publisher
license content, or does this model
only make sense for certain types of
associations?
Vick: The scale of your archive is critical to the amount of revenue you can
generate. We built our archive by going
back 10 years. It's not about the size of
the association - it's about how much
content you can put in the archive. IEEE
covers so many different topics like robotics, engineering, aerospace, and computing. Generally, you need hundreds of
articles available under each topic area to
get started.

: Did you have any resistance
from within IEEE?
Vick: I thought there could be resistance from the IEEE editors to letting
other sources have our content. I was
concerned they might think that we were
cannibalizing our content. Thankfully,
that didn't happen. Associations should be
willing and open to doing things like this.
: Why are you so focused on
leveraging your content assets?
Vick: I'm convinced that three to four
years out, there might not be a print magazine. But the alternative has to be so
good that the membership pushback can
be neutralized. n
Carla Kalogeridis (ckalogeridis@association
mediaandpublishing.org) is editorial director of
Association Media & Publishing. Vick will give
Signature readers an upate later in the year
to let us know how the content syndication
initiative is working.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signature January/February 2015