Chango publishes print magazine to highlight the power of programmatic advertising to its customers
Chango is a programmatic advertising company that connects marketers with their exact target audience in real time across display, social, mobile and video. Its clients include top brands and agencies in the US, UK and Canada. Chango produces content for a number of publications including: Digiday, MediaPost, CMO.com, Marketing Land, ClickZ, Wired and The Makegood.
Challenge
Programmatic advertising is a complex and confusing industry that has many marketers scratching their head. There are countless acronyms and complicated algorithms and other tech jargon that, frankly, scares many.
The marketing problem for Chango was that it had tonnes of interesting and educational content that demystifies programmatic advertising and even makes it approachable. However, the company needed a way to highlight this content every quarter and bring it to life, rather than directing people to various bylines and content on chango.com or publishers’ websites.
Solution
What was intended to be a PDF with links to all of Chango’s best content from every quarter morphed into a well-designed, robust print magazine, featuring plenty of existing content from the quarter as well as new original content made for the magazine.
Print was chosen in order to stand out from the crowd, while doing justice and illustrating the premium nature of the content. The magazine was fully integrated into each of the brand’s content programmes in order to maxmimise success.
Despite the digital nature of the subject matter, the nostalgia of print seized the attention of the audience. Although it was a little expensive to run small batches of the magazine at first, prices fell after Chango audience expanded.
Results
While the first print issue of The Programmatic Mind was only shipped to just clients and prospects, the number of subscribers doubled for the second issue and again for the third issue. The company’s subscribership continues to grow. Consequently, the brand has partnered up with Adweek in the US, and distribute the magazine to a targeted list of agencies and marketers. In the UK, The Programmatic Mind will be distributed along with Contagious Magazine.
The company has multiplied the readership of the magazine six times since its launch. Each quarter the magazine is distribution increases by up to 20 to 30 per cent.
Instead of carrying around standard content such as whitepapers or reports, the sales team can bring in beautiful magazines for prospects and clients. Traffic to the programmaticmind.com has increased 10 times since the magazine has launched. So far the magazine has generated dozens of high-value leads every month and resulted in a handful of strategic meeting with new prospects.
The magazine is also a great client retention tool and is consistently ranked as our number source of thought leadership content by clients.
Bryan Bartlett, marketing manager at Chango, explains: “Brands and agencies are changing the way they think about us because our content and approach is so unique and beneficial to them.”
Looking ahead
The brand is currently working on its sixth issue and will continue to elevate the content and distribution.
In addition to the magazine the company recently released its Marketers Against Marketing card game, an idea that came as the brand were looking for a way to ride on the success of the print magazine. It felt that there’s something more to this form of ‘nostalgia marketing’ in a digitally-driven world. Presenting content in a format that is familiar and recognisable to people. Today’s marketers seek this type of digital detox, which explains why a print magazine is working so well in a digital marketing industry.
