Cam Bishop is no longer in control of the company he built, Ascend Media.  Life happens, right?  Well, in this case, that’s not the whole story.  Remember, Bishop has a significant equity stake in the company, and what happens in the next 6-24 months with Ascend will have a huge impact on his personal fortunes.

So, what’s he up to right now then?  Though I haven’t been able to get in touch with Cam, I’m told that he’s working very hard right now helping with the transition and with getting numbers in order, etc.  I’ve also been told that he may be hoping to find himself in a new job by June/July.  We’ll be watching.

The unsolicited body counts keep on coming in.  The fresh news is that two more top editors have left BNP’s new baby, Stagnito, one a senior editor from Confectioner Magazine.

Out of the 100 employees that were part of Stagnito when the acquisition was made, the seven Stagnitos (it was a family run business), three editors, two marketers, Mary Mazur, Sue Ranvenscraft, and one more person from the circ department.  Of the two people left in the circ department, one is “looking,” according to my sources, and the other is “about one year from retirement.”  My sources also indicate that the HR person and is looking as is the head of marketing.

And the mood: “I talked to another editor the other day and he is just staying quietly in the background, he is afraid to make waves, as he need the job until he finds another,” says one source.

In B2B media, we are pros (literally) at helping our clients market their brands. More and more, we’re being asked to think of creative ways of telling a product or service’s story to its possible customers. But how often do we think of doing our own marketing? Probably pretty often for some of you, as it should be. After all, with the media industry in a transitional phase, the rise of online advertising, the potential rise of mobile, and the wide fluctuations we’ve seen in pint this year, it’s more important than ever that we tell our story effectively to the clients we serve.

Twenty years ago, that story was fairly simple and an old one: we have a great magazine here and if you want to get in front of your customers, you should buy a program with us. Today, that’s no longer the case.

So, I wanted to share with you a press release that came accross my desk today. The gist: Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine is running a fantasy stock picking contest open only to marketers, advertisers, and potential advertisers that offers cash prizes for the participants who see the most stock market growth in six months with a fantasy portfolio staring out at a value of $100,000. This past month, Clark Katayama of godfrey Q and partners and Andrew Alper of Legg Mason each won $500 in real money for winning the contest and growing their fantasy portfolios by $5,000 over the course of 30 days. And that $500 is just $1,000 out of the $31,000 that Kiplinger’s is planning on giving away over the course of six months; at the end of the contest, Kiplinger’s will award $10,000 to its overall winner (the person who added the most value to his/her portfolio), $5,000 to the runner up, and $1,000 each to the next highest portfolios. The contest is open to “employees 21 or older of an advertising agency or the advertising, marketing or media-buying department of an advertiser.”

I bet you’re already trying to think of a way to weasel your way into playing the game.

The results? Hundreds of advertisers have signed on. And for the next six months, they’ll be intimately engaged in the Kiplinger’s brand in a way that advances the brand’s message: we are personal finance. Not only that, they are subtly telling the marketers that they know how to get eyeballs, and they know how to move the needle when it comes to marketing; translation: if you think we put a lot of effort into this to drive our sales, wait ’till you see what innovative things we can do for you to drive your sales.

For many B2Bs, it won’t be as easy as this. But the key is that Kiplinger’s found a way to engage its clients, showcase its marketing creativity, and also enhance its brand image. Maybe this program didn’t enumerate all the of the different things that Kiplinger’s can do for its clients (it sort of did); maybe it didn’t stay on message (I think it did); and maybe it didn’t even enhance the brand image (did did did!!!), but it definitely got qualified leads in the door, and once they’re there, it’s up to you to tell your story.

UPDATE:

The very nice PR person who sent me the story in the first place has asked me to add, for all you minsiders, that registration for eligible contestants closes December 15 and that you can go to www.winknightsmoney.com to sign up. Happy hunting.

I come back from a meeting and am delighted to find a comment on my blog. If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m pretty enthusiastic about this B2B media space we operate in and love talking about it with anyone who will listen. But this comment wasn’t a comment at all. It was the in-house announcement heralding the end of the Cam Bishop era and the beginning of the Vicki Masseria era at Ascend Media.

First, I’m not very surprised at this announcement. Things have been unraveling at Ascend since early in the year when new drug launch advertising slowed down and the pipeline didn’t look promising. Then the dental group continued to struggle. By early May, the Stagnito food group, one of the most successful divisions of the company was quietly for sale. And then it was sold. Along with EXPO magazine. And then three pubs were shuttered. And now this: Bishop out, Masseria in.

(Technically, Bishop is staying on as chairman. This company was built by him, Ron Wall, and an often bickering group of finance guys, one side from VSS and the other from CCMP Capital. From what I know, Cam sweats for Ascend. So I don’t question his dedication to the project. But my guess is this move is not a promotion. The reasons? If I had to guess, I would guess these: 1. The company is not performing well, at least in part due to market conditions; 2. It is very hard work working with–and between–competing and antagonistic teams of PE guys…it wore down on him; 3. Due to both 1 and 2, the company is not headed towards where Bishop wanted it to go when he formed it all those years ago…and that can take the wind out of your sails. More on this in this week’s issue of min’s b2b.)

But what interests me most about this at this point is that it was effectively announced as a comment on my blog. And not on the most current story, but the last story I wrote about Ascend. Is this new?

I had a great conversation yesterday with Businessweek online editor John Byrne about how things are going on his site, particularly with his video and podcast offerings.  Much of our discussion will be printed in this upcoming week’s min’s b2b, and the rest will be published online at minonline.com/digital/ (behind the firewall).  For those of you who aren’t yet full-fledged minsiders, here are some of the points that were made:

• Just putting an executive in front of the camera and having them pontificate does not a great editorial product make.  What works?  Strategy, news reports, quick analysis, (and we’ll add product demos).
• The Web begs you to integrate different kinds of media to give the user a complete package.
• Integration, especially the kind of integration where advertisers in print push users to the content online, is the way to go.
• Invest time and money in training your editors.
• You need not create videos with top quality production values: sometimes down and dirty is best.
• Podcasts are still popular (and profitable).
• The key to a good podcast franchise (and the reason to do it) is subscribers.
• Your users will consume your media if you place it prominently on the home page.  People like audio and video: you just have to help them find it.

Last night at a launch party for Bonnier’s new horizontal consumer science mag, Science Illustrated, I ran into Field & Stream/Outdoor Life group publisher Eric Zinczenko.  I was pleased to find out that he was a reader of min (our consumer media flagship newsletter) and of minonline.  What I was even more pleased to learn was that he was paying close attention to what’s going on in B2B media right now.

Why?  As we’ve discussed in the past, what B2B media execs are doing online, with custom publishing, and with face-to-face events is in many cases way ahead of what consumer publishers are doing (Zinczenko added “efficiency” to that list).  In the coming months, I believe we will see this realization become a growing trend, one that will culminate in even more B2B media execs being lured over to the consumer side.

For my part, I’m going to follow closely the careers of David Blansfield and Eric Shanfelt, two B2B media execs that have recently made the move to niche/consumer to see how they fare.