Adobe seeks content for marketers

Back in March we filed a post titled ‘Content marketing worth copying‘ about  Chief Optimist, Xerox’s online magazine. It provided a laudatory assessment of how Xerox used content marketing to get around the gatekeepers stopping direct marketing and other sales-related efforts from reaching the man with the power to buy printers.

Chief Optimist is based on a simple idea: write about what chief executives might be interested in. Content is tailored to reflect the audience mindset and concentrated on exploring solutions to a wide range of business problems.

Adobe may have been looking in the same direction, because it has produced its own online magazine to promote its cluster of marketing software. Dubbed CMO, it is designed for marketers (the clue is in the title).

Yet that is as far as the comparison goes. For some reason, it is difficult to feel enthusiasm for CMO. For starters there is the design, which looks like it was put together 10 years ago. Maybe it is because it uses Adobe Experience as a CMS. For a company that’s best known for its design products, 2006 is not a good ambassador.

You cannot deny there is a lot of content on CMO. Whether that is good enough to compete with actual marketing publications with their high editorial standards is open to debate. One example is in the ‘exclusive’. The definition of an exclusive is a story that you beat everyone else to. Here the scoop is an op-ed featuring the chief executive of a ‘change agency’ under the headline ‘Innovation, the beating heart of success’.

There is nothing wrong with including that piece; just don’t oversell what you have. Either you are a marketing publication or you aren’t. A typical marketing journal would not describe a comment piece as an exclusive, unless it was written by David Ogilvy from beyond the grave.

It’s not all bad though. There is some original research under the Adobe Digital Index section. Here CMO draws on Adobe’s experience with analytics software to provide in-depth insight.

Unlike Chief Optimist, which played down its Xerox connection, there is no mistaking that this is an Adobe site. At the same time, it is hard to find the Adobe product content in there.

CMO describes itself as a magazine for the digital marketing sector. It is certainly geared up for that. But does it compete with the many other titles out there – Adweek, Campaign etc? That is another question.

Adobe seeks content for marketers is part of Content24, the blog for London content marketing agency FirstWord.