Live from XMediaLab: Vincent Heeringa, Director, HB Media Ltd

From the program: Vincent Heeringa is a director of HB Media Ltd and one of New Zealand’s leading business commentators. He is a co-founder of Idealog, the country’s biggest circulating business magazine. A former business journalist with Metro magazine, The Independent Business Weekly and the founding editor of Unlimited magazine, Vincent has won numerous awards including being twice named Editor of the Year by the Magazine Publishers’ Association.

Vincent is the fall guy for traditional media. His talk is in two parts: how we launch stuff, and his anxieties for the future (kind of like an AA meeting -- "I'm a conventional media guy and I have a problem").

HB Media has been going for four years, and every year they launch something. They launched Idealog (voted best business magazine) -- "It's a long-form magazine, I'm sorry! It's got pictures, proper writing..." He's very funny!

They started a University Press with Auckland University of Technology, making any kind of media that's relevant to the university and the university audience. Ironic -- people turn to Malcolm Gladwell as an example of breakthrough thinking, but he wrote BOOKS! There's a role for books -- hear, hear :-)

Inspire is New Zealand's best-selling travel magazine. Good Magazine launched last year and is New Zealand's first carbon-neutral magazine (note: Good did a great article on Melissa Clark-Reynolds, the founder of MiniMonos). Good also did The Intrepid Volunteers Challenge, giving an award to Volunteer of the Year.

They think of long-form content and well-written, well-researched content as the core of what they do, and all of the different platforms are different opportunities. He showed a couple of campaigns they're doing with their advertisers -- combining print, advertorial, web, multi-channel distribution.

They also launched Celsias, a social media site for anyone interested in climate change. It will also have an associated magazine which will launch in August. They feel really excited about their ability to launch things successfully and profitably. So how did they do it?

(Rule one: use other people's money)

But seriously...

Rule One: Get a hunch on.
The designers call it a 'latent need'. If you've got the ability to identify a latent need, you'll be well ahead of the competition.

Rule Two: Find a sugar daddy.
They found a really big client, but it could also be an investor or a champion, but whatever you do you need to find someone who's got more money, more clout, more resources, or more connections than you who believes in what you're doing. Typically innovators aren't trusted so you need someone at the top of the tree who's going to shake it for you.

Rule Three: Present a shock and awe show.
Once you're sure your hunch is right and you've got someone powerful, you've got to go out and live as if what you're planning is already reality. When they write launch documents, they don't say "It will be", they say "It is".

Rule Four: Never stop being cool.
His kids pointed out that if you use the word 'cool', you're not cool. What he means is that it's NEVER over. You launch these products and you think you're pretty hot, and within six months you're not. The reinvention process happens so much faster now.

Part II of the talk: What's cool now?

There are a lot of challenges facing him and his industry. He wants to create long-form, beautifully edited, thoughtfully created content. He doesn't want to Twitter his way through the world. There was a rebuttal to Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink called Think, which posits that blinking is the problem!

The other thing he wants to do is pay the people who work for him. He wants a business, not a free world; he wants people to be good at their job and get paid for it. He wants an organization that's organized. He wants to go home and get paid while he sleeps, and he wants an infrastructure that pays the talented people he employs or contracts.

The other other thing is that he likes print. It's a beautiful format. You can take it to the toilet. You can light a fire with it. (He he.) It's a wonderful experience, and he knows he's not alone (at least his mum agrees with him).

In a world where people are flipping, it's hard to get them to digest longform content. In a world where there's so much good content for free, we've stopped watching television and we just YouTube our way through the day now. He's worried about all the free stuff -- he feels like he should pay for stuff but people keep giving him things.

He's also worried about is the ability of his kids to sit down and digest something from beginning to end, and their ability to think in a linear and logical fashion, and sit still for a minute. These are some of the challenges -- he doesn't have solutions but he's got some ideas:

Idea One: He's got to reduce costs. His business is now a low-cost operation.
Idea Two: He's got to open-source his problem. This is the beginning of it. He's going to blog about it and tweet about it.
Idea Three: He's also going to be completely integrated now, so nothing will be on just one platform. Everything is going to be multi-channel.
Idea Four: Content is king. He was really heartened in the Susan Bonds presentation that her audience was really sensitive to great content. Whatever they do, they're going to have great content.

Got any ideas to help Vincent with his problem?