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“That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.” says Ecclesiastes 1:9.
Ideas that seem insanely new appear regularly, and as it turns out, they’ve been recycled from yesteryear. Look, for example, at the collaborative economy or the use of personas in marketing.
But I digress. My attention was caught back in June by an interesting Fast Company article “Bedtime Reading: Why An E-Commerce Brand Is Expanding Into Content,” by Neal Ungerleider.
It seems that Casper, an e-commerce seller of mattress-in-a-box solutions, has launched Van Winkle’s, a digital publication that focuses on “the social, creative, and scientific elements of sleep.” Sounds interesting, eh? I’ve signed up and look forward to my first issue.
Van Winkle’s has an interesting ambition. According to its editor-in-chief, Jeff Koyen, it is “the first publication of its kind to consider sleep as its own editorial vertical.” That said, the idea behind Van Winkle’s is not new. Consider airplane magazines and the publications you find in the rooms of big hotel chains. They’re all efforts to associate a brand with high quality content and by so doing, to strengthen it. No less than Airbnb has leapt into the space with its quarterly print publication Pineapple. (Note that the pineapple was a colonial symbol of hospitality.)
As a blogger, I can tell you that it takes hard work to consistently produce content that grabs reader interest in a world that moves quickly to the next big thing. I’m rooting for Van Winkle’s and Pineapple.
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