Mining Data for Gold: IDG’s Cutitta Builds a New Business for the Media Giant

Frank Cutitta, a long-time internationalist and former CEO of the International Advertising Association, has once again taken on a pioneering role. He has returned to IDG and is now the General Manager of the recently-formed IDG Connect, a centralized database and lead-generation practice now at the core of the sprawling tech publishing company. In a conversation with The Internationalist, he made us realize how discussing anything in our digital age means constantly redefining our language.

Just the simple word “media” is a good case in point. Frank challenged us to characterize what exactly constitutes media today. For example — if it doesn’t engage, is it media? What about content assets like white papers and webcasts, are they media? Is media only about content generation —what about aggregation?

This line of questioning is more than fun with semantics; Frank Cutitta finds such issues critical to his a new global business, which he describes as a “content optimization practice” or an “engagement intensity group.” The basics of his new IDG division involve optimizing databases with various forms of content for enhanced lead generation.

IDG Connect now has 6 million files with data that ranges from such basics as company and job title to specific, behavioral metrics of engagement such as sites visited and amount of time spent on certain pages. All of this can be leveraged to sell leads based on individual brands. Certainly this new division is testament to the need for publishers and all content providers with multiple sources to create a centralized database.

To produce the greatest value from its lists, IDG Connect also audits content assets and tests effectiveness in an effort to build sales by making leads more relevant. Content assets like webcasts and white papers are literally audited and ranked for pre-existing properties like degree of intimacy, level of difficulty, whether the product speaks appropriately to the target. Frank also talks about the perils of developing the format, such as a webcast concept, before developing the content. In his continual play with language, he says this leads to “dis-content,” and rarely works effectively.

However, it is engagement, according to Frank Cutitta, that elevates a mere name to a more highly prized lead. He admits, though, that engagement is difficult to measure and identify. The new IDG Engagement Intensity Index creates a score that ranges from the 101-level to what Frank calls the “Mensa” level. The higher the score, the better the chances of transforming leads from the standard $50 level to the highly detailed leads at the $150 level.

He also likes to describe these times as a “new age of user-generated circulation.” He advocates that publishers need to encourage their audiences to send content to each other, rather than relying on the traditional publishing model of sending out content to an audience. He adds that publishers need to be watching new forms of circulation, such as the Facebook model, or taking advantage of tools like “email this” and “digg.”

And now Frank is adding an international overlay to IDG Connect in order to better develop the cross-cultural aspects of such performance-based marketing. He is returning to his original international roots by looking at how content engagement differs by country and gauging whether an adapted U.S. execution can build the same results as a locally-created effort in a b-to-b field like technology. Or as Frank Cutitta says, “From a guy who spent his whole life selling print around the world, it’s interesting to note that a lot of the international issues haven’t changed even in our new digital world.”