Rodale's Latest 360 Effort
by Lynn Andriani, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 6/18/2007
Call it Rodale 360, version 2.0. The latest Rodale book to receive the house's cross-company marketing and publicity muscle is The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Change—or Live Through It, which pubs June 26. The book will be the official companion volume to a series of concerts taking place around the world on July 7 that will benefit the Alliance for Climate Protection, founded in 2006 by Al Gore. Rodale is backing the book, by 28-year-old David De Rothschild, with a major campaign that includes comprehensive media coverage, advertising, Web offerings and a sweepstakes.
Publisher Liz Perl said Rodale's efforts to promote Live Earth exemplify how the company has intensified its signature "360" program: "Back in the day, that meant placing remnant space ads and excerpts in our magazines, but we've come a long way since then. With the new Rodale 360, we can incorporate the authors and their content across all of our platforms." This includes putting content—author interviews, chats, blogs, video—on Rodale's Web sites and the sites of its business partners, and getting the companies that advertise in its magazines to integrate the book into their own marketing programs, buy copies of the book to distribute to their employees or use as a "premium" for their own marketing.
Among the hits are publicity and cross-promotional tie-ins with NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, Sundance, XM Radio, Sirius Satellite Radio and MSN, and promotions and tie-ins with corporate sponsors like Stonyfield Farm and Pepsi. A sweepstakes promotion is running on Amazon until June 20; winners receive two tickets to the concert at Giants Stadium, and $2,000 for travel expenses. A video of the author speaking about why he wrote the book is on Amazon. The book will be sold in special sales outlets ranging from Wild Oats to Urban Outfitters.
Leigh Haber, Modern Times/Rodale editorial director and v-p, acquired the book from Charles Melcher at Melcher Media, which designed and packaged it. The $14.95 paperback will have an initial first printing of 200,000 copies. International editions will be published by Trends in China, Abril in Brazil, Touchline in South Africa and Liberis Publications in Greece, among other houses. Proceeds from the sale of the book will go to the Alliance for Climate Protection.
In addition to Giants Stadium, the worldwide concerts will take place in Hamburg, Germany; Johannesburg, South Africa; London; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Shanghai, China; Sydney, Australia; and Tokyo, and will feature Madonna, the Police, Bon Jovi, Kelly Clarkson and other performers. The concerts will be streamed live at LiveEarth.MSN.com and broadcast on NBC in the U.S.
