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Marketers are willing to look to their media partners for marketing services.  Is that something that media partners want?

In an effort to do a real-world reality test  of corporate buzzwords, Crain’s Media Business Magazine went out and asked a bunch of marketing heads whether they wanted the marketing services solutions that their media partners are going out aggressively to acquire or build.

The logic from the media company side is sensible.  Advertising spend has been down, the business is changing and their are broader opportunities to partner with their clients.

The challenge is in finding the right way to define this activity.

When a media company says that it provides marketing services, the danger is getting sucked in to low-margin, labor intensive activities.  The unique capability of a media company is to leverage content and marketing know-how to solve marketing problems, not building ads or writing SEO copy or managing e-mail programs.

What’s different today from the past is that digital technologies and changing consumer behavior has changed the core process of content creation, content delivery and distribution.  The lines between marketing and publishing have blurred.

What a media company can do that a traditional marketing agency can’t even begin to dream of is use their traditional skills, transported into the digital environment, to create seamless bridges between the digital footprint of their brand to their clients’.

That’s not providing a marketing service.  That’s extending the media platform to solve the problems of visibility, engagement and conversion for marketing partners.

That’s far from being a commodity solution.

The challenge is finding a simple and direct term to describe this service and to develop fairly standard and efficient ways of delivering the solutions.