• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 7, 2011

When it comes to Madison Avenue’s holy media trinity -- owned, earned and paid -- few agencies practice what they preach. Most try to earn media for themselves through PR, white papers and public speaking. Occasionally, an agency will pay to place a house ad, typically to boast about a big account or major awards win. But for all their talk about the ascendancy of “branded content,” agencies rarely create media that they actually own on their own behalf. That’s exactly what digital-savvy health and wellness shop CementBloc is doing with a new print and digital publication that makes a medium around the agency’s core message of “convergent branding.”

“We converge our thought-leaders at the Bloc so that we are seamlessly integrated as one team from insights and discovery to medical strategies to multichannel strategies to business intelligence where analytics and measurement is foundational to our a

pproach,” explains Elizabeth Elfenbein, a partner at the Bloc and editor in chief of the aptly named new publication Convergent Times.

“We aren't working in silos like traditional companies -- we are inextricably linked to a brand,” she says, equating the concept of convergent branding to Apple’s design vision: “End-to-end user experience. Except in an industry that isn't thinking that way yet.”

The industry Elfenbein is referring to isn’t Madison Avenue per se, where UX or user experience reigns supreme these days, but specifically in the health and wellness marketing sector, which coincidentally is what will be a primary source of content for Convergent Times.

“The health and wellness space is behind other industries,” Elfenbein explains, noting that it also is an industry hungry for marketing innovation, and new ways of connecting with its customers and prospects.

The goal of the publication, she says, isn’t simply to publish content on the subject, but to utilize the medium itself to demonstrate how health and pharma brands can leverage convergence to market themselves, creating “portable content” and disseminating it across “multiple channels,” effectively becoming a “portal” that aggregates the insight and sprit of the Bloc’s organization by turning it into content.

This is not the first time Elfenbein has tried her hand at publishing. For nearly two years she has been writing “My Life As A Focus Group,” a daily blog featuring her musings about the people and human interactions she observes every day, and how they relate to brands and advertising.

TK