Mike Smith, Custom Media

After 20 years leading the now-booming custom marketing media field, Mike Smith has witnessed the branding power marketers and associations can earn through effective custom media. Smith, a former farm-magazine editor and now the creative force behind our custom publishing, understands why custom media is a natural for brand-building. Content done right improves purchase decisions, makes customers feel closer to the sponsor, and opens readers and viewers up to allowing you permission to sell within the venue, research proves. But, generic “content” won’t  cut it: 90 percent of those same readers say accurate, reliable and usable information is any custom publication’s most important trait. It’s the same environment Smith found in vertical trade publishing when he left Purdue University to enter that business: The real standouts are those who successfully focus commodity information to the reader’s advantage. (No surprise Smith guided the first agricultural trade magazine in history to capture the American Business Press’ prestigious Neal Award for excellence.) Readers have high expectations of their media...whether custom or not. That's a great marketing advantage, he's learned after creating such media for a long list of companies including Intervet, Pfizer/SmithKline, the National Grocers Association, Merial, Elanco, Bayer, Schering, Colorado State University, Upjohn/Pharmacia, Alpharma, Ft. Dodge, Purina, Kendall, Boehringer Ingleheim and others.

How do you achieve that level of reader value? It requires a rare combination of editorial and design craft, coupled with a closeness to the market that brings the necessary insight to understand and meet unique customer needs with that media. Smith's two decades of experience in the farm and food-chain markets, combined with his strategic alliance with Food-Chain Communication, a specialist in strategic communication up and down the food chain, keep him constantly in contact with the changing needs of that market.