Bom  Dia!Meu  nome  é  Joao  Wilpers  

Senior  Director/USA  INNOVATION  Media  Consulting

Hoje,  tenho  muito  prazer  e  honra  de  

estar  aqui

Mas  eu  não  falo  Português  muito  

bem

Então,  antes  de  tudo  eu  preciso  me  desculpar  por  não  ser  capaz  de  falar  em  

português

Porque  se  eu  continuar  

tentando  falar  em  português  …

Vocês  vão  ficar  mais  

tempo  rindo  do  que  

assistindo  à  apresentação

Então,  com  a  sua  licença,  eu  vou  continuar  minha  palestra  em  

inglês.

Obrigado

Before  I  begin,  I  want  you  to  know  that  my  company,  

INNOVATION  Media  Consulting,  is  a  global  

consulting  service,  not  just  the  authors  of  this  report

The  innovations  you  are  about  to  see  are  results  of  both  our  research  and  our  

consulting  work  with  publishers  around  the  

world

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The Best, Most Successful Magazine Innovations in the WorldJohn Wilpers (@johnwilpers) INNOVATION MEDIA CONSULTING innovation-­‐mediaconsulting.com

PRESENTED BY: !

INNOVATION MEDIA

CONSULTANTS & FIPP

The worldwide magazine media association

ooks about innovation are often guesswork.Maybe this idea will work. Or this one. Or

that one. Maybe….In years past, we have published a lot of

those types of case studies. We often felt as though we were like the editors of the famous US long-range weather-predicting publication, The Farmer’s Almanac: Looking at the best available data and hazarding our best guess.

Not this year. This year we feel like editors of a guide rather than a forecast.

Among many others, five major changes are exploding on the magazine media scene that will definitely affect publishing for years

B

to come: mobile as the dominant platform, big data, programmatic advertising, video, and native advertising.

This past year was stunning for the speed with which these five phenomena moved from the idea, early adoption, or too-resource-in-tensive stage to becoming accessible, critical elements of publishing.

Mobile will very soon become the dominant platform for information distribution and consumption, and it is so revolutionary that some are calling it a “do-over” chance for legacy media who got the whole internet thing so terribly wrong.

Meanwhile, video has also quickly become the most effective, most powerful, and fastest -growing method of delivering content and advertising to the largest audience, all in ways that are increasingly accessible to all publishers, not just those with big budgets.

Programmatic advertising suddenly ap-pears on its way to becoming the way most ads will be sold and scheduled

Big data is now able to put serious science and analysis behind every decision, from content to advertising to new products to customer relations. Not that every decision should be data-driven--but we’re fools to ignore it.

And, finally, native advertising is revo- lutionising the world of content, advertiser -magazine relationships, advertiser-reader relationships, and revenue models.

Of course, there is a lot more in this book, including case studies about programmatic advertising, e- and m-commerce, Google Glass, paywalls, innovation labs, e-newslet-ters, publishing frequency, startups to watch, events as revenue producers, and more. And, of course, our annual favourite: Odd, edgy, and envelope-pushing magazine innovations (look for the magazines that turn into flowers and print magazines as wifi hot spots!)

Bottom line? This year, you can take this book home and say: Here’s a roadmap.

Bon voyage! John WilpersJuan SeñorJuan Antonio GinerCo-editors

Prescriptions instead of prognosticationsMajor, successful innovations , especially in mobile, big data, video, and native advertising, are finally laying out a clear roadmap to success

EditorsJohn WilpersJuan SeñorJuan Antonio Giner wilpers@innovation-mediaconsulting.comsenor@innovation-mediaconsulting.comginer@innovation-mediaconsulting.comINNOVATION International Media Consulting - Londonwww.innovation-mediaconsulting.com

Design Spiros Polikandriotis

ContributorsPrisca Akhaya Peta Andersen Ryan Boyden Marielys CepedaDanny ChengCornelius J. DavidLilianne De La CalleTeagan Rae FardellGeoffrey Green Larissa GreenKyle HardyLaura ImkampShendi KatroCarlos Koteich Mary Colette MastellerJennifer MatthewsShannon S. MayDevon OttKristie ReillyTim Ryan Shauna Sasso Nicole TroelstrupEluz VilchezKorsha WilsonLily Yuhas

Cover Deborah Withey

Marketing, sales and financeMarta Torres

AdvertisingStuart HandsStuart@fipp.com

Publishers Chris LlewellynHelen BlandFIPP - the worldwide magazine media associationwww.fipp.comchris@fipp.comhelen@fipp.com

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This year: For the first time, we found clear cases of success and clear paths to get there

6 Keys to Success: !

1. Mobile will be the dominant platform 2. Video will be the dominant mode 3. Native advertising will be dominant

vehicle 4. Programmatic will be dominant

method 5. The collection & analysis of big data

will drive more decisions 6. Events & e-commerce will be

significant ad revenue replacements

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Go plantyour magazine!From magazines that turn into flowers, publications that fly, and washable pages, it was another year of delightful, envelope-bending print innovation

Larissa Green

o digital or go home, publishing seers were saying with the introduction of the iPad in April 2012. The world’s attention was riveted on tablets, and traditional magazines scram-bled to redefine themselves to keep up with the fast-changing media marketplace.

And yet, after much fuss and four years, digital replica magazines only account for about 12 per cent of total subscriptions and tablet magazines represent only 3.3 per cent of total circulation in the US, according to statistics gathered by the Association of Au-dited Media (AAM) and the Association of Magazine Media (MPA).

That’s not dominance. And, while the future remains primarily digital, what the seers missed was both the readers’ continu-ing attachment to the physical experience of reading a magazine and the publishers’ continuing ability to innovate in print.

That said, with ever-increasing options for readers’ leisure time, print magazines must continually innovate to keep enticing readers to their ink-on-paper products.

So how do print magazine editors compete in the 21st century? Why not make the print products more interactive and engaging like their digital cousins?

We found magazines offering washable pa-per, magazines that turn into flowers, floating catalogues, matchbox magazines, magazines made using agricultural waste (preserving trees), and print-on-demand kiosks, just to name a few.

Washable paper“Washable paper for a clean read” sounds like a slogan for a dirty magazine. But in this case, it’s the mission of a new children’s magazine, Highlights Hello. The new and third member of the beloved, 68-year-old, US Highlights magazine family, this 16-page-monthly offers educational, fun, advertising-free content to help parents and caregivers connect and communicate with infant children.

Everything is produced with the children’s safety and growth in mind — the magazine is printed using non-toxic ink containing soy and vegetable oils on durable, washable paper, with rounded corners and a stitched, not stapled binding. Highlights Hello editor-in-chief Chris Cully said it’s even been machine-wash tested.

“Hello is lightweight and portable,” Cully told Mr. Magazine. “It fits easily into mom’s purse or diaper bag. It fits toddler hands per-fectly. It can be wiped clean — and it can with-stand a little chewing. It is hard to imagine a digital product that could be so perfectly tailored to the needs of this audience.”

Magazines that turn into flowersSpeaking of unimaginable digital equivalents, how about a magazine that turns into flowers? Humo, a popular (one million readers weekly) entertainment magazine from Belgium, part-nered with one of its advertisers — Lampiris (the third largest supplier of energy in Bel-gium) — to produce the world’s first “plantable” magazine.

How does it work? Readers simply bury the magazine, add water, and wait for beautiful field flowers to bloom. Humo announced it sold enough copies to fill five football fields with flowers.

The first-ever flying catalogueThe next print innovator is actually the world’s third largest manufacturer of jets, but they also publish a print catalogue, and their innovation literally took off. Brazilian firm Embraer aimed to capture the attention of high-flying potential clients with a cata-logue that actually flies. Well, more like floats.

The cover features a relief silhouette of a new plane with two magnets sewn into the book itself. Two other opposing magnets are sewn into a platform under the catalogue. When the catalogue is placed on the platform, the opposing magnets cause the catalogue to float about five centimetres over the platform.

Paper from agricultural wasteHumo isn’t alone in paper product innovation. Former Cheers TV sitcom bartender Woody Harrelson has been investing his time and money in an almost 20-year passion project focused on finding sustainable paper pro-duction solutions. As co-founder of Prairie Pulp & Paper Inc, Harrelson played an integral role in convincing the first North American magazine publisher to print an issue on the promising product.

In late 2013, the “Straw Issue” of Corporate

Humo magazine in Belgium embedded flower seeds in a page of one of its editions, telling readers to simply bury the page. Eight weeks or so later, presto, a field of flowers!

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Print shining alone: !To compete with digital & other options for free time, print must be compelling and innovativeEntertainment mag Humo

(Belgium) embedded flower seeds in rice paper pages. Readers buried the mag and weeks later: wild flowers

To promote a new flavor, Fanta infused an edible rice paper page with the flavor and invited readers to eat it!

• Highlights Kids prints on washable paper

Knights magazine was distributed by both The Globe and Mail in Canada and The Washing-ton Post in the US. This revolutionary agri-cultural waste product is called Step Forward Paper — “a blend of 60 per cent wheat-straw waste and 40 per cent FSC-certified wood fiber,” according to PaperSpecs.com.

“With this special straw issue, we want-ed to show other print publishers that recy-cled paper isn’t the only sustainable option available to them,” Corporate Knights edi-tor-in-chief Tyler Hamilton told Treehugger.com. “Using paper made from agricultural waste such as wheat straw offers another way to take pressure off of our forests.”

“The paper is whiter and brighter and the contrast between it and the type is greater; it is better looking and easier to read,” wrote TreeHugger managing editor Lloyd Alter.

The magazine as a hot spot

Another magazine breaking new ground by sending relevant surprise “gifts” to a limited audience was Forbes via Microsoft. To adver-tise Microsoft 365 (a new cloud service), a limited number of four-page inserts with wifi hotspot capability were placed in the 6 May 2013 issue of Forbes. The wifi-enabled issues were sent to a limited number of technology and business professionals.

This nifty gadget (a router housed in a very thin cardboard box that’s part of the insert) enabled those lucky readers to connect up to five devices for up to three hours before it would need to be recharged to allow the reader to use the device for the full 15 days of free access provided by T-Mobile.

That’s a wrapCelebrating paper products is one of the things that UK Wrap magazine highlights as a distinguishing feature. The thrice-year-

Readers simply bury the magazine, add water, and wait for beautiful field flowers to bloom. Humo announced itsold enough copies to fill five football fieldswith flowers

colour prints of a wide range of magazines and periodicals (200 at present).

The print-on-demand service solves several print publishing challenges in one fell swoop: How to reach new readers, find new means of distribution, and reduce the cost of production.

The printing mechanism occupies less than 4 square meters and allows customers to choose their magazine via a touchscreen, pay with a credit card, and get a copy in just two minutes. The newsstand is connected to the internet and downloads the latest PDF of the requested magazine.

Once again in 2013, the publishing industry has demonstrated just how exciting, innova-tive and brand-reinforcing print can be. What will 2014 bring? We can’t wait to find out.

ly publication celebrates illustration, design and creative culture, putting the spotlight on some of the best artists from around the world. Each issue includes five double-sided sheets of wrapping paper based on the work of the featured artists.

“Wrap is a publication that bridges the gap between being a magazine and a prod-uct — while each themed edition comes full of interviews and features an eclectic range of creative endeavours, it also includes 10 il-lustrated wrapping papers made especially for that issue, printed on five double-sided pull-out sheets,” the editors explain on their website. “So Wrap becomes a magazine you can use, as well as one to read and enjoy.”

The world’s first bottles in a magazineIn 2013’s Innovations in Magazine Media we highlighted perfume-scented paper. This year, we’re able to report that a magazine put perfume bottles in the magazine itself.

To attract beauty buffs and advertising revenue, Hearst Magazines last November partnered with Marc Jacobs and actually affixed two-and-a-half milliliter bottles of Daisy and Daisy Eau So Fresh perfume to the covers of four titles: Elle, Cosmopolitan, Ma-rie Claire and Seventeen, 400,000 copies in total. Attaching the bottles to the covers was a publishing first, according to Hearst. “The technology just didn’t exist,” Hearst Maga-zines president-marketing and publishing director Michael Clinton told Ad Age.

“Until you get scratch and sniff on your smartphone, magazine media has a unique selling proposition to allow samples,” Clinton said. “This gives our medium an even bigger play into beauty advertising — a big growth category and probably one of the biggest cat-egories in the magazine marketplace.”

Print-on-demand magazinesPerhaps the ultimate print innovation of 2013 is the final realisation of a dream print pub-lishers have had for years but only digital pub-lishers could deliver on: content on demand.

On June 19, the world’s first automatic magazine newsstand, Meganews Magazines, opened in Stockholm, hoping to change the modern media landscape.

The kiosk will print instant, high quality,

Forbes and Microsoft broke new ground by inserting a mini-router in the pages of the 6 May 2013 edition, enabling readers to gain wifi access for five devices for up to three hours

Sunscreen company Nivea inserted a wafer-thin solar panel and a phone charger in an ad in the May 2013 edaition of Brazilian magazine Veja Rio saying beachgoers shouldn’t have to leave the beach because of sunburn or a dead cell phone

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“Until you get scratch and sniff on your smartphone, magazine media has a unique selling proposition to allow samples.” ! — Hearst President/Marketing Michael Clinton

Hearst partnered with Marc Jacobs and attached two 2.5 ml bottles of perfume to the covers of Elle, Cosmo, Marie Claire & Seventeen.

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The instantmagazine

s it an idea right on time, or an idea whose time has passed?

Visionaries have long talked about ma-chines that would print magazines on de-mand, saving publishers the ink, paper, fossil fuel and other costs of all the copies they print that go unsold and are returned.

Meganews AB in Sweden, in collaboration with printing company Ricoh, has built just such a machine.

And, following six months of testing in hotels, supermarkets and airports, the world’s first print-on-demand newsstand was in-stalled in July 2013 in the Mood shopping mall in Stockholm city centre. Since then, Meganews kiosks have been installed in two Swedish airports: Stockholm Skavsta and Göteborg Landvetter.

The company is looking to place more ki-osks in other high foot-traffic locations such as hotels, food stores, hospitals, and shopping malls that have showed interest in the digital newsstand. The company says it has received enquiries and proposals for cooperation from about 50 countries around the world.

The kiosk takes up less than four square metres, and thus can be installed in places where there isn’t room for a traditional book or magazine store, or even a newsstand.

The kiosk offers readers 200 top consum-er magazines, the ability to browse before purchasing via a touch-screen, a credit card payment system, and a Ricoh print engine allowing users to order, pay and receive their magazine in less than 120 seconds.

Swedish publishers have jumped at the chance to test print-on-demand. Meganews

PRINT ON DEMAND

has signed agreements with leading publish-ing houses like Bonnier Tidskrifter, Bonnier Publications, Aller Media, IDG, LRF Media, Albinsson & Sjöberg, Talentum, Medströms and a number of others.

In addition to saving publishers all sorts of costs, the process has a great ecological story. Consumer magazines experience returns of roughly 40 per cent, according to Meganews. Even though most of magazines are recycled, they have already accumulated a substantial carbon footprint in their production and dis-tribution process. Meganews estimates that this gives their print-on-demand magazine a carbon footprint of 40 per cent of the standard printed magazine.

Swedish research institute Innventia eval-uated the environmental differences between a print-on-demand magazine and a typical magazine printed and distributed via the reg-ular newsstand system. The study supported the Meganews position: Print-on-demand

delivers a 60 per cent reduction of greenhouse gases versus the existing magazine produc-tion process.

Meganews is already getting recognition for its printing innovation, winning the “Best Business Model Challenger” award at the Swedish Cordial Business Awards 2013.

“This company succeeded in changing

A print-on-demand magazine kiosk company in Sweden launches the world’s first instant magazine printing station

John Wilpers

The kiosk offers readers 200 top consumer magazines, the touch-screen ability to browse before purchasing, a credit card payment system, and a Ricoh print engine delivering a complete magazine in less than 120 seconds

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Forget your magazine for your flight? Want a magazine right away? !In two Swedish airports and one city mall, you can get one in 120 seconds

The kiosk, created by MegaNews and Ricoh: !

• Takes up less than four square meters

• Allows browsing by touch screen

• Accepts credit card payment

• Offers 200 titles • Reduces carbon

footprint (no returns)

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We have seen the future,and it looks like mobileSmartphone and tablet ownership is skyrocketing; some magazines are getting 30-50 per cent of their traffic now from mobile

Laura Imkamp

2017world

1.8B smartphone sales

82% of total mobile phones sold

of adults own a smartphone

adults own a tablet

60%

40%

US

mobile phones

smartphones

6.8B

90%of adults own a smartphone

55%

Europe Big Five

smartphones units sold in 2013, representing sales of

2013

an increase of 11%over 2012

230M

2017

tablet owners55%

$120B

Western Europe

China

smartphone growth

smartphone users

smartphone users

19%

100M

200M

Africa

2018

2013

Tablets are the most preferred device for leisure and entertainment activities

t is late 2013. A motley crew of passengers is boarding a small commuter plane at a modest airport in Nova Scotia, Canada.

One of those passengers is a good-natured gentleman with a mammoth, indeed infamous beard that alone has attracted 465 Twitter fol-lowers.

That same bearded gentleman is also a new media pioneer, notorious in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley alike for taking and winning big bets on digital innovations.

He’s very pleased this morning. As he sur-veys the passengers around him, hhe sees that, other than the man sitting next to him reading an old-fashioned newspaper, everyone else is reading a tablet.

That makes Jim Dalrymple very happy.“I love the fact that even users are coming

around,” he said. “It’s time for the publishers to come around as well.”

It’s been roughly three and a half years since the launch of the iPad - six and a half years after the first iPhone came out - and we are in or fast approaching the “Golden Age of Mobile,” according to mobile industry consultant and author Chetan Sharma.

“We are entering the ‘Connected Intelli-gence’ era,” Sharma wrote last summer. “These two operative words are going to define the next phase of human evolution and are going to dramatically change every industry vertical from the ground up. Welcome to the Golden Age of Mobile.”

Sharma’s words come at a time when the dramatic changes and uncertainty of the last decade in the publishing industry are begin-ning to gel into a vision of the future that has “mobile” front and centre.

Globally, the smartphone market passed a major milestone in 2013, with 1bn devices

sold during the year, according to the research company International Data Corp (IDC). Global tablet sales surged 50 per cent in 2013 and mo-bile sales surpassed PC sales for the first time, at the end of 2013, according to IDC.

By 2017, smartphone sales will hit 1.8 billion representing 82 per cent of total mobile phones sold, according to Smartphone Quarterly.

Nearly two thirds of US adults own a smart-phone, and roughly 40 per cent have a tablet, according to 2013 research from the Pew Re-search Centre.

In Europe, smartphones have a 55 per cent market share in Europe’s Big Five countries (Germany, UK, France, Italy, and Spain), according to comScore. In Western Europe, shipments of tablets and smartphones ex-ceeded 230 million units in 2013 and revenues approached $120 billion — an increase of 11 per cent compared with 2012, according to

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It  does  NOT  look  like  this

Taken  at  the    Morumbi  Shopping  Center  2km  from  here  yesterday

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We have seen the future,and it looks like mobileSmartphone and tablet ownership is skyrocketing; some magazines are getting 30-50 per cent of their traffic now from mobile

Laura Imkamp

2017world

1.8B smartphone sales

82% of total mobile phones sold

of adults own a smartphone

adults own a tablet

60%

40%

US

mobile phones

smartphones

6.8B

90%of adults own a smartphone

55%

Europe Big Five

smartphones units sold in 2013, representing sales of

2013

an increase of 11%over 2012

230M

2017

tablet owners55%

$120B

Western Europe

China

smartphone growth

smartphone users

smartphone users

19%

100M

200M

Africa

2018

2013

Tablets are the most preferred device for leisure and entertainment activities

t is late 2013. A motley crew of passengers is boarding a small commuter plane at a modest airport in Nova Scotia, Canada.

One of those passengers is a good-natured gentleman with a mammoth, indeed infamous beard that alone has attracted 465 Twitter fol-lowers.

That same bearded gentleman is also a new media pioneer, notorious in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley alike for taking and winning big bets on digital innovations.

He’s very pleased this morning. As he sur-veys the passengers around him, hhe sees that, other than the man sitting next to him reading an old-fashioned newspaper, everyone else is reading a tablet.

That makes Jim Dalrymple very happy.“I love the fact that even users are coming

around,” he said. “It’s time for the publishers to come around as well.”

It’s been roughly three and a half years since the launch of the iPad - six and a half years after the first iPhone came out - and we are in or fast approaching the “Golden Age of Mobile,” according to mobile industry consultant and author Chetan Sharma.

“We are entering the ‘Connected Intelli-gence’ era,” Sharma wrote last summer. “These two operative words are going to define the next phase of human evolution and are going to dramatically change every industry vertical from the ground up. Welcome to the Golden Age of Mobile.”

Sharma’s words come at a time when the dramatic changes and uncertainty of the last decade in the publishing industry are begin-ning to gel into a vision of the future that has “mobile” front and centre.

Globally, the smartphone market passed a major milestone in 2013, with 1bn devices

sold during the year, according to the research company International Data Corp (IDC). Global tablet sales surged 50 per cent in 2013 and mo-bile sales surpassed PC sales for the first time, at the end of 2013, according to IDC.

By 2017, smartphone sales will hit 1.8 billion representing 82 per cent of total mobile phones sold, according to Smartphone Quarterly.

Nearly two thirds of US adults own a smart-phone, and roughly 40 per cent have a tablet, according to 2013 research from the Pew Re-search Centre.

In Europe, smartphones have a 55 per cent market share in Europe’s Big Five countries (Germany, UK, France, Italy, and Spain), according to comScore. In Western Europe, shipments of tablets and smartphones ex-ceeded 230 million units in 2013 and revenues approached $120 billion — an increase of 11 per cent compared with 2012, according to

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By 2017: !Smartphones will hit 1.8 bn or 82% of mobile sales

Mobile major milestones in ’13: • 1 billion smartphones sold • Global tablet sales up 50% • Mobile sales passed PC

sales for first time

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Will 2014 be yearmobile takes off?With reader traffic shifting to mobile, advertisers had best keep up

Peta Andersen

or most readers, mobile advertising means four things: banners squished at the bottom of a screen, almost unreadable text, inadvertent clicks sending you where you don’t want to go, and slow loading times.

It’s a puzzling lack of sophistication, espe-cially given the surge of innovation in other areas of mobile. Outside of the advertising industry, mobile platform, app, and content designers worldwide are rapidly innovating to accommodate the smaller screens, the in-creased interactivity, and potentially slower connection times of mobile devices.

Digital designers have shifted to more re-sponsive models; magazines have streamlined clunky, skeuomorphic designs to create a smoother reading experience for consumers.

Despite mobile advertising’s slow start, 2014 may be remembered as the year mobile advertising finally “got it” and took off.

This year, eMarketer predicts that overall spending on desktop advertising will increase by less than half of one per cent while mo-bile ad spending will grow 56 per cent to US$14.97bn. By 2016, spending on mobile will rival desktop spending, and in 2017 mobile will blow past desktop advertising, posting a projected $35.62bn in ad spending com-pared to the desktop’s $27.21bn, according to eMarketer.

Statistics point to mobile explosionMore than

54 %of the US digital population now uses multiple devices to access the web comScore

Mobile devices were responsible for

28 % of all website traffic in the third quarter of 2013, up 67 per cent over 2012 Walker Sands

Tablets will account for nearly

50 %

of the total PC market (desktops, notebooks and tablets) in 2014 Canalys

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Internet traffic from mobile devices will exceed that from desktops for the first time this year

Buzzfeed gets 50% of its traffic from mobile; The Atlantic gets 30%Time spent watching video on smartphones doubled in 2013Conde Nast UK traffic from desktop dropped from 86% in ’11 to 58% in ‘13; mobile 14% to 30%, tablets from 1 to 12%

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fashion and entertainment sector.

Condé Nast China president Liz Schimel is sitting at her desk on the 23rd floor of one of Shanghai’s tallest skyscrapers. One side of the office wall is almost entirely made up of windows, which continue to wrap around the corner behind her, lending a feeling of massive scale that seems only fitting, given the topic at hand.

“Unlike some of the other brands out there, we made the decision to get 100 per cent plus of our content into those versions,” she explained. “So we’re not just doing a light version at this point, we really are providing all the content, and we’ve seen fabulous growth in usage.”

In the world’s largest mobile market, “fabulous growth” is no mean feat.

“The numbers here are just so awesomely, eye-pop-pingly large for everything that you do,” Schimel said. “We reach almost 40 million people every month.”

Advertisers are noticing the growth, too. They are so excited about how Condé Nast is using video and mul-timedia in its Chinese mobile applications that Schimel’s team is overwhelmed with advertiser demand to be on the iPad.

“We do have to make sure, in everything we do, that we’re balancing the needs of our advertisers and those of our consumers because, ultimately, they’re one,” she

At the very beginning of 2014, Forbes became the first magazine to launch its own social network

continued from page xxx

continues page xx

Scheenstra, Sanoma COO for content media in the Netherlands. They want to see the subscrip-tion and readership results before they invest.

Yet there is tablet advertising growth. While print ad revenues declined yet again in 2013, tablet magazine revenue grew by 22 per cent, according to AdWeek.

Unfortunately, that growth is somewhat deceiving. Most of those ads do not bring in extra money from advertisers; many are just pickups from print, according to AdWeek.

And yet, by 2020, the global tablet advertis-ing market is expected to top $27 billion a year in annual revenue, according to The Guardian.

And why not? Mobile ads outperform desk-top ads in terms of click-through and sharing rates, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti told AdWeek.

That is because users are more engrossed using their mobile devices than they are on desktops, Peretti explained, pointing out that there are far fewer distractions on a mobile screen than on a desktop.

“You have to understand the use case of the consumer, and that on the mobile phone, they’re more utility driven, they want to learn something or get something in the moment that’s valuable to them,” said Condé Nast Chi-na president Liz Schimel. “It’s not as much of a lean-back, peruse content experience as a tablet or a print magazine or a desktop.”

“Smartphones stand for a different usage situation — it is quicker, you consume the

media in a high frequency while you are on the move, and this is all about reach and in-teraction,” said Oliver von Wersch, director of Gruner + Jahr’s digital and electronic media sales. The German publishing giant went to great lengths to embrace new mobile strat-egies recently, redefining its position on the publishing stage by rebranding itself as a “House of Content” rather than a “House of Magazines”.

What about the readers? What do they want on their mobile devices?

“They don’t want to watch the magazine, they don’t want to play the magazine; the respect for reading is still very high,” said Hearst’s Wilkes.

“The way we have to win is not become more game-like and not become more fre-quent and more daily like social, but continue to invest in very rich, unique content expe-riences,” Wilkes said. “We have to win with quality.”

That’s not to say certain media elements have no place in modern mobile magazine publishing. But it does mean editors need to be more discerning about how and why they use certain multimedia tools.

“A lot of interactivity is only as valuable as what it adds to that part of the experience,” said Hearst Magazines International director of digital media Jenny Tsai.

“The traditional silos of media types are

disappearing,” Sanoma’s Scheenstra says. “The way the content is being consumed triggers a new way of content production.”

That means more interactivity, rebundling for more frequent publishing, and added visu-al elements like video, Scheenstra said.

The days when PDFs reduced to fit mobile screens were considered acceptable are long gone (or should be); today’s mobile-savvy consumers expect targeted, rich, platform-op-timised user experiences, and if they don’t get it, they won’t come back.

“I’d say the one thing we’ve learned from our audience is that they’re less interested in digital PDFs of magazines,” said Atlantic Digital’s Lau. “[We’re] moving away from just replicating what the magazine pages look like and moving toward more of a hybrid that al-lows the user to interact with the content and manipulate the content.”

The PDF approach to mobile resulted in a user experience that made readers think the magazine had “crammed something that doesn’t fit” into the mobile screen, Hearst Labs’ Wilkes said. “That’s largely what I think most magazines on small screens have done; they’ve made it overwhelming.”

“I don’t believe in shrinking the whole ex-perience of the magazine down into the mo-bile device,” said Condé Nast China’s Schimel. “The mobile device has to be very purposeful, very immediate.”

For all magazines, increasing usage time on apps and mobile websites is a critical contributor to increasing subscription and engagement numbers and revenue.

One of the best ways to do that is through sharing and social networks. But that ability to share has bedevilled almost every publisher because most digital magazine apps are an isolated reading experience. Over the last few years, it has become obvious to publishers that it is essential to put content onto the web for readers to enjoy and share. But current magazine apps hamper social communication.

“One of the big criticisms of traditional dig-ital magazines has been that they’re a walled garden,” Wilkes says.

While publishers struggle to make content shareable and save-able yet not searchable online, Forbes has tackled the sharing issue from a different angle. At the very beginning

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And why not? Mobile ads outperform desktop ads in click-throughs and sharing — BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti

Mobile advertising is projected to be the key driver of the global ad economy over the next 3 years

Mobile advertising will deliver $30 bn of the forecast $90bn of new ad revenue by 2016

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of 2014, Forbes became the first magazine to launch its own social network.

When he spoke about it in November of 2013, DVorkin was cryptic, describing the mystery tool only as their previous “clipping” functionality, but “on steroids.”

Now we know he was talking about Stream: a mini, Forbes-only social networking plat-form enabling subscribers to save and share content in a visual, pinch-and-drag way (ver-sus copying URLs), and then post it to their own Stream, or various other social networks.

The idea is novel, particularly in terms of its application specifically as a tool for the magazine’s mobile community. But, as with most of Forbes’ mobile apps and strategy, it’s only available within the magazine’s iOS app.

And that means it’s going to be one more thing to have to carry over, now that publishers are faced with the substantial — and fairly pressing — challenge of master ing as many operating systems as they can.

That’s not an easy task for pub-lishing company de-velopers, especially in an environment charac-terised by a fragmented, ever-growing list of mobile devices.

It’s a tricky thing to develop for an iPhone or iPad, it’s a lot trickier to develop for the growing range of Android and Windows platforms.

Almost all developers are focusing their efforts first on mastering iOS, for the simple reason that they know what they’re working with. But as Apple’s smartphone market share shrinks worldwide, there’s a greater urgency to optimise Android apps and roll them out to the readers.

Apple and Samsung today are crushing their competitors in the US and European markets. Combined, they account for two-thirds of all mobile devices sold in the United States. But Google is steadily encroaching on

Apple’s market stranglehold: in the last quar-ter of 2013, 51.5 per cent of all smart devices ran Android’s operating system, compared to 42 per cent on iOS.

In Europe, Android is already off and run-ning, and in China, the advent of the An-droid-based, low-cost Xiaomi marks a new wave of stiff competition. At the end of 2013, the Beijing-based start-up, whose phones can only be purchased online, had eclipsed both Samsung’s and Apple’s sales.

For publishers who have been focusing exclusively on iOS, it’s time to make changes.

“[The Android] numbers scream opportu-nity, that’s for sure,” said Wilkes.

But “there is a quality problem in that many of the experiences

on Android often feel like they are the ugly stepchildren

to the more premium iOS version,” said

Wilkes. “It seems the developers spend more time making their iOS versions and then less time making second version of

it for

Android,” which, for the large p a r t , h a s been the case.

Much of that has to do with mag-azine publishers finding a much lower will-ingness on the part of Android users to pay for online content and products. Part of that has to do with the fact that the Android marketplace isn’t quite as robust as Apple’s, yet at the same time, Android users appear less willing to shell out money online.

“We’ve learned from our engagement data that the user in iOS is much more likely to actually spend money and significant chunks

added.

So now Condé Nast China is looking at more oppor-tunities to grow its iPad content tailored specifically to the format. More frequent publishing, she says, could unlock more consumer op-portunities, as well as more advertising opportunities. Schimel’s team is focusing on “the time slice of the user, and the immediacy of that digital content.”

“I believe we’re part of a big ecosystem that includes massive social platforms,” Schimel said. “It’s an import-ant body as a development tool for us, it’s a way to a broader-reach audience, who might not read the magazine, or might find it a bit too high-end.”

Specifically, she’s talking about WeChat: a Chi-nese-developed social networking application that could be likened to a combi-nation of Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp. The app is free, and allows anyone — individuals, groups of friends, events, and brands — to create specific chan-nels users can subscribe to for updates, messages and branded content.

“I think it’s going to take the world by storm because it’s so perfectly designed for the mobile device,” Schimel said. It’s an easy adaptive step for publishers and brands to take. But WeChat hasn’t infiltrated the Western market yet, and native magazine apps, so far, have failed to meet the demand of social media.

of time,” said Wilkes. “So the return is greater to start on iPhone and then translate that to Android.”

The Atlantic’s Lau agrees: “You hear so much about Android being dominant in the market and yet from a usage perspective, when we look at the audiences that are vis-iting our website via devices, the vast majority are still coming from iOS devices. And in the limited tests we’ve done, the Android mar-ketplaces still vastly underperform Apple’s marketplace. The Android marketplace just isn’t as robust, and part of that is the frag-mentation.”

On a practical level, when Jim Dalrymple was looking at his Loop tablet magazine, he had a decision to make. “I looked at whether to do an Android version of the magazine. I looked into the stats and numbers and the way people will spend money, and from ev-erything I’ve seen and even talking to some developers who develop for both iOS and An-droid, people just don’t seem to be willing to spend money on the Android side.”

That situation won’t last forever, but for now publishers would appear to be safe to focus on iOS and leave Android for later.

Hearst’s Wilkes insists his company is intent on making sure that its Android ex-perience is “best-in-class”, but he adds that they’ll get to it “eventually”.

However, if the recent past is any indi-cation, “eventually” really means ‘PDQ’ or pretty darn quick, because it’s clear mobile is where magazines are headed and that uni-verse is exploding before our very eyes.

continued from page xx

In China, the low-cost Xiaomi smartphone, available only online, had eclipsed both Samsung’s and Apple’s sales at the end of 2013

“In the limited tests we’ve

done, the Android marketplaces still vastly under-perform Apple’s

marketplace.” Kim Lau

VP/Atlantic Digital

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Some publishers are building app-like experiences with HTML5 on the web to enable sharing and simplify multi-platform publishing

On the app front, magazine publishers are focusing on iOS because they’ve found Android users are not spenders

“We’ve learned from our engagement data that the users in iOS are much more likely to actually spend money and significant chunks of time. So the return is greater to start on iPhone.” ! — Chris Wilkes, Hearst App Lab VP

What do readers want on mobile? Not PDFs! !“We’re moving toward more of a hybrid that allows the user to interact with the content and manipulate that content” — Atlantic Media’s Kim Lau, VP/Digital

They also want to share, but apps prevent that: !“One of the big criticisms of traditional digital magazines has been that they’re walled gardens” — Chris Wilkes, Hearst App Lab VP

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B

Dead or alive?The year 2013 marked the demise of tablet apps. Or did it?

John Wilpers

TABLETS

arely 42 months after the birth of the iPad, critics proclaimed the death of the tablet mag-azine.

That was fast.Depending upon whom you believe, it’s true

and the tablet magazine had one of the shortest product lifespans in publishing history (abet-ted by more than a modicum of incompetence on the part of tablet magazine editors), or the critics are a bunch of spotlight-seeking naysay-ers who simply don’t understand the product development process.

There’s evidence for both schools of thought.First the naysayers.“The app-based tablet approach to mag-

azines leads straight to oblivion,” wrote Jon Lund, the COO of knowledge-sharing startup memit and chairman of the Danish Online News Association.

Writing under the headline “Why tablet magazines are a failure” on gigaom.com last October, Lund proclaimed to love his tablet magazines, but only on the rare occasions when he remembers to open the apps. And therein lies one of the tablet magazine’s biggest problems.

“My dedicated magazine apps… have been lost among the many other apps on my iPad,” Lund wrote. “I never read them, even those I pay monthly subscription fees for.”

Lund cited Nielsen estimates that the av-erage mobile user has 41 apps on his or her smartphone. “In April 2013, a Flurry study showed the average smartphone user opens only eight apps a day, with the most popular being Facebook, YouTube and game apps,” Lund wrote. “And, according to a 2012 report from Localytics, 22 per cent of all apps are only

opened once.”The takeaway? There’s not much room for

magazine apps. Magazine apps need extremely dedicated readers to avoid being buried.

Secondly, with apps being the latest “walled gardens,” matters are made worse for tablet magazines because the apps themselves are invisible in the large streams of information governing the web, Lund argued.

Apps basically work against everything we know about the power of the Internet: the abil-ity to be found by countless numbers of readers searching for information about topics in your niche. “When a magazine is organised as an app rather than as a website, its articles can neither be indexed nor searched on the web,”

wrote Lund. “And even if they could, clicking the link in Google at best takes readers to an app store, not to the article itself — cutting the magazine out of the greatest traffic driver in today’s world.”

Ditto social media. “When you can’t link directly to an article, the urge to tweet or tell your friends about it drastically shrinks,” wrote Lund. “And curators like Flipboard and Zite can’t look into, link or grab content from within magazine apps.”

Lund concludes by saying that if you don’t believe him, look at the numbers. The 25 best selling digital replica editions account for an average of just 12 percent of total subscriptions of the magazines.

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What is it? Dead or alive?Barely 42 months after the birth of the iPad, critics proclaimed the death of the tablet

First, the naysayers: !“The app-based approach to magazines leads straight to oblivion” !— Jon Lund, chairman, Danish Online News Assoc.

• Apps get buried by user’s avg. 40 apps

• Apps are ‘walled gardens’, invisible to the world on the web

• App content can’t be indexed, searched, shared

• Even the 25 best-selling mag apps account for, at best, only 12% of total subscriptions of the magazines

11% 8% 6% 6% 5% 4% 4% 2%

“For most publishers, a fully bespoke tablet and smartphone app… is a bridge too far both conceptually and economically,”Eddie Vassallo CEO of app development company Entropy

Here are examples of major magazines’ tab-let editions share of total paid subscriptions:

Maxim (11 per cent) Cosmopolitan (8 per cent) Men’s Health (6 per cent) Vanity Fair (6 per cent) ESPN the Magazine (5 per cent) Food Network Magazine (5 per cent) National Geographic (4 per cent) Martha Stewart Living (4 per cent) People (2 per cent)

Another critic shares Lund’s doubts, but offers an alternative.

“For most publishers, a fully bespoke tablet and smartphone app… is a bridge too far, both conceptually and economically,” wrote Eddie Vassallo, CEO of app development company Entropy, in his company’s blog. “And while a fully native, personalised experience (à la Zite or Flipboard) is no doubt the best option, HTML5 magazines can be an enticing second tier choice. With iPad Web usage shooting through the roof, HTML5-powered magazines and tailored tablet web experiences may well be the new ‘cheap and cheerful’ option for publishers.

“The ‘halfway house’ duo of InDesign and PDF solutions is simply not working — and that cold fact has been staring us all in the face for far too long,” Vassallo wrote. “[Either] fully native or enhanced Web-based HTML5. It’s time to DO something. Now.

“Tablet magazines as we know them are dead,” Vassallo concluded. “Long live the new tablet magazine.”

Not so fast, say tablet magazine enthusiasts. “It reminds me of early predictions that the internet would never catch on, no one would need a home computer, and the iPhone would never have significant market share,” Mag+ CEO Gregg Hano wrote in Publishing Execu-tive last October.

“Three years is not enough time for the pub-lishing industry to test, evaluate and iterate upon what audiences want from this new and complex mobile media or to determine what ideal and individual user experiences should be,” Hano wrote. “It is also not a lot of time to learn how to monetise this new platform.”

Tablet magazine enthusiasts have their own data to support their case. Consumer maga-zine publishers distributed 10.2 million digital replica editions in the first six months of 2013, nearly doubling the 2012 total for the same period, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

Adobe announced in December 2013 that: More than 150 million digital publications

built with its Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) had been downloaded since DPS’ launch in 2011;

DPS-built magazine edition downloads had shot up 115 per cent over 2012;

DPS-built apps have tripled unique monthly readers over 2012.

McPheters & Company’s iMonitor database now tracks nearly 11,000 magazine and news apps.

“These are very strong indicators that the magazine audience is starting to move onto

the digital platform in a very real way,” Bridget Roman, senior product marketing manager for Digital Publishing Suite, told eMedia Vitals in December.

Some magazine publishers used 2013 to up-date their traditional tablet magazine model by adding interactive features and creating the ability to share items via social media and the web.

The Forbes’ iPad edition, launched in Janu-ary 2013, features a “clip and share” function that allows readers to share photos, images, headlines, etc. using email or social media.

Other magazines decided to try to keep readers coming back more frequently than once a week or once a month. New York mag-azine enhances its weekly content with a daily offering of curated news from nymag.com and the company’s other publications including

Vulture and Daily Intelligencer.Similarly, in June, The Atlantic launched The

Atlantic Weekly, a paid app featuring a curated selection of articles previously published in The Atlantic Group’s digital properties, along with a piece from the The Atlantic’s 155-year-old archives. The first was a piece by famous American author Henry David Thoreau.

Others, including Bullett Media, experi-mented with new tablet monetisation methods including direct downloads (single-copy or subscription sales), display advertising, ad-vertorials, shoppable content, and interactive ad development services.

Tablet magazine enthusiasts have a pow-erful player in their corner: Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

“Tablets are now more popular than PCs,” Schmidt told Wired editor Scott Dadich. “You can read it, it knows where you are, it has an accelerometer. There are all sorts of stuff [pub-lishers] can do in tablet magazines [that they] couldn’t do in print magazines.”

Schmidt said that he could envision “pow-erful, tablet-looking things” replacing “tradi-tional media” by 2018. “Incredibly immersive” tablet apps will gather the reader’s location data, merge it with the reader’s social media history, and make the tablet experience inter-active, Schmidt said.

Other than the debate over native advertis-ing (see chapter on native advertising), there isn’t a more heated, more controversial, more consequential fight than the future of tablet magazines. Stay tuned.

Add chap number/cross-refMajor magazines’ tablet editions share of total paid subscriptions:

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Now, the advocates: !“It reminds me of the early predictions that the internet would never catch on” ! — Mag+ CEO Gregg Hano

• Consumer mags distributed 10m digital replica editions in first half of 2013, doubling 2012

• More than 150m digital pubs built with Adobe DPS downloaded since ’11

• DPS-built downloads up 115% in 2013

• DPS-built apps tripled monthly users

• iMonitor tracks 11,000 magazine apps

The middle ground: !“For most publishers, a fully bespoke tablet and smartphone app is a bridge too far… HTML5 magazines can be an enticing second tier choice. ! — Eddie Vassallo, CEO, Entropy

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Ryan Boyden and John Wilpers

VIDEO & MAGAZINES

H

Start shooting todayMagazine companies facing massive consumer and advertiser demand for more video must increase inventory significantly

ere’s a pop quiz:First question: How many people across

the globe watched a live-streamed video of the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008?

If your guess was in the neighbourhood of 10 million, you were right.

Second question: How many people across the globe watched a live-streamed video of the Summer Olympics in London in 2010?

We’re rather confident that you did not guess 1 billion. But if you did, you were right!

There were more than one billion live streams consumed — and 10 per cent of those were on tablets, according to David Habben, Akamai Technologies chief strategist in media for Asia, Pacific & Japan.

At the recent 2014 Winter Olympics in So-chi, Russia, for the first time in Olympic his-tory every single competition was streamed live for anyone with access.

For the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, Akamai already has plans to live stream to smart glasses and smart watches.

VIDEO & MAGAZINES

Let that sink in.Less than a decade ago — eight and a half

years ago in October 2005 to be exact — the world was only just being introduced to video playback on Apple’s fifth generation iPod. Today, billions of people are viewing live-streamed events.

In 2012, internet video accounted for 57 per cent of global consumer web traffic. By 2017, internet video is projected to be 69 per cent of global consumer web traffic, according to Cisco Visual Networking Index (VIN).

Video is no longer becoming the dominant digital content consumption platform; it’s there.

This shift to video has not gone unnoticed in magazine editorial and advertising depart-ments.

Most of the major magazine groups and many of the smaller companies are creating all sorts of videos, from scripted, high-pro-duction-value, continuing series to low-bud-get, one-time, stand-alone videos. Some are

built around staff personalities, some are produced internally, some are farmed out, some are made with iPhones, and some with expensive, studio-quality cameras.

Legacy publishers are not repeating their mistakes of the early internet era. The initial resistance to and glacial adoption of the web is not happening. Publishers are embracing video with the enthusiasm of investors who missed the last big thing and will be damned if they are going to let it happen again.

This time, it’s the top publishing houses leading the charge. From Condé Nast and Hearst to Meredith, Scripps, Time Inc, The Atlantic Group, Future and newcomer Vice Media, the industry leaders are producing countless amounts of video every day.

Condé Nast: 30 new series in 2013Last May, Condé Nast Entertainment (CNE) unveiled plans to do a staged launch of 30 new web digital video series over a period of months in 2013.

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Quiz: !How many people in the world watched a live stream of the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics?

Your choices: !

1. 1 million 2. 5 million 3. 10 million 4. 20 million 5. 40 million

Your choices: !

2. 5 million 3. 10 million 4. 20 million 5. 40 million

Your choices: !

2. 5 million 3. 10 million 5. 40 million

Your choices: !

3. 10 million 5. 40 million

Your choices: !

3. 10 million!

Quiz: !How many people in the world watched a live stream of the London 2012 Summer Olympics?

Take your best guess: !A. 100 million B. 250 million C. 500 million D. 750 million E. 1 billion

Take your best guess: !A. 100 million B. 250 million D. 750 million E. 1 billion

Take your best guess: ! B. 250 million D. 750 million E. 1 billion

Take your best guess: ! B. 250 million E. 1 billion

Take your best guess: ! E. 1 billion!

In 2012, internet video accounted for 57% of global consumer web traffic; by 2017, it will be 69% — Cisco Visual Networking Index

Video is the dominant digital content platform, and publishers and advertisers are taking notice

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First, CNE focused on Glamour and GQ, including launching Glamour’s first scripted series, The Single Life, and continuing GQ’s powerful documentary about former US foot-ball players coping with chronic pain and injury, Casualties of the Gridiron.

Then Vogue got its own digital video

channel that featured shows such as Vintage Bowles, featuring international editor at large Hamish Bowles, and The Fund, documenting the Council of Fashion Designers of America/Vogue Fashion Fund competition.

Wired followed with programming fea-turing the Angry Nerd, a rant video series by “resident geek” Chris Baker, and Codefellas, a scripted animated show set in the infamous US National Security Agency (the agency charged with collecting data for intelligence and counter-intelligence purposes).

In the summer and fall, Vanity Fair, Teen Vogue, Epicurious, and Style all launched video channels.

All of the video content was also included in CNE syndication contracts with AOL, Ya-hoo, Twitter, Daily Motion, and GrabMedia.

The channels create videos closely aligned with each magazine’s mission. For example, the Vanity Fair channel “takes the fabric of Vanity Fair and spins it into something fresh and new for the digital age,” CNE president Dawn Ostroff told minOnline.

The titles of the channels themselves give viewers a sense of that “Vanity Fair fabric”:

The Snob’s Dictionary is all about cultural superiority

@VFHollywood is a celebrity interview show

Vanity Code is an animated how-to series for surviving difficult work and social situations

Eminent Domains looks at historic, upscale, and socially legendary addresses

Charter sponsors of the Vanity Fair chan-nels included American Express, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Acura.

In addition to launching new channels, CNE was buffing up its existing video line in 2013.

Another classic Condé Nast property, Brides, launched the second season of its weekly reality show, Brides Live Wedding where viewers plan a couple’s wedding using social media to vote on almost every aspect of the wedding, from the flowers to the dress.

Three couples compete to win the crowd-sourced wedding that is then live-streamed on Brides.com, Facebook, and YouTube. Every possible item in the wedding has a sponsor, from the actual wedding rings (Simon G.) and

invitations (Invitations by Dawn) to the hair and beauty (Neutrogena), the men’s outfits (Jos. A. Bank), the registry (Target), and even the bride’s nails (Sally Hansen).

Brides chose YouTube as the primary platform because “YouTube reaches more US adults 18 to 34 than most cable networks,” said Brides vp and publisher Michelle Myers. “Our brides are millennials, and this is where millennials are — on YouTube.”

The first Live Wedding was a bonanza for Condé Nast and the show’s sponsors: The magazine had guaranteed 250 million media impressions, but ended up delivering nearly 1 billion, according to Myers.

With all of those channels, CNE now cre-ates more than three dozen videos a week for its fast-growing portfolio of regular brand-connected shows.

The result has been a tsunami of traffic: In less than a year, the CNE network rose from the 109th most-visited video property in Feb-ruary 2013 to the 23rd most-visited property by October 2013.

Time: Video production up 50 per centDown the street in New York City, Time mag-azine also seriously raised the magazine video production bar in 2013.

In August, Time launched a video docu-mentary division called Red Border Films (after the red border on the Time cover), a documentary filmmaking unit and interac-tive digital platform.

Red Border Films draws on Time’s exten-sive network of photojournalists, filmmak-ers, and other contributors to produce both short documentaries and expanded films, presented along with interactive features at time.com/redborder, where users watch films, explore in-depth information about the filmmakers and their subjects, and view photo galleries and other multimedia ele-ments around each project.

Red Border is another weapon in Time Inc.’s strategy to launch a large number of new branded video programming for all of the company’s sites.

In late 2012, Time Inc also hired its first-ev-er senior vice president for video, former Mer-edith video executive J.R. McCabe. During 2013, he made about a dozen hires, put indi-

vidual executive producers over each brand vertical, held a casting call for talent, built a new studio with live-streaming capabilities in New York, and expanded the video studios in Alabama where the Time Lifestyle group is headquartered.

His aim: “Cultivate a daily habit of con-suming high-quality, compelling video con-tent across our platforms,” he told Reuters.

In June, McCabe launched Sports Illus-trated’s live daily video show, SI Now. Then he launched Pro Football Now. In November, McCabe debuted two more daily shows, The Must List and TV Recaps, based on its popular magazine franchises.

McCabe’s various teams now produce more than 50 video series, including daily, weekly, live and event-based programmes, including:

The Must List: Entertainment Weekly editor Jess Cagle’s daily show about what to watch, listen to, or read that day

TV Recaps: Entertainment Weekly editors’

“Vanity Fair channel takes the fabric of Vanity Fair and spins it into something fresh and new for the digital age”Dawn OstroffCNE president

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Overall result: A tsunami of traffic. CNE rose from 109th most-visited video property to 23rd in just 8 months

Time Inc.: !

• Launched a video documentary co.

• Hired first VP for video

• Hired exec. producers for each brand

• Held casting call • Built new studio • Launched three

daily shows

Conde Nast !

• Hired a great VP/Video • Built team of experts • Spent $50 million • Rolled out 100 new

series • Partnered with portals

like AOL, Yahoo, Twitter

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daily show describing and critiquing the previous night’s most popular shows

The Top 3: Time’s Callie Schweitzer discusses the three biggest topics of the day

Time Explains: Time personalities give brief backgrounders on everything from the budget to sink holes

Chatter: People hosts a 60-second game featuring stars trying to beat the clock answering five random questions

Hackett & Crew: People editors talk about

the biggest celebrity story of the day The Chat: Fortune senior editor at large

Pattie Sellers hosts a quarterly show featuring interviews with some of the biggest names in business

Real Simple Video of the Day: a new daily video featuring an easy, accessible, and useful tip from Real Simple editors. Examples include “How to make champagne bubbly again” and “5 last minute halloween costume ideas”

McCabe is not only producing much more video, he’s making sure it’s being promoted internally and externally.

The new videos will be “front and centre” on each brand’s pages and widely distributed via new distribution deals with NDN, News-Look, Alloy Digital, and AOL On Network. McCabe also created a production team work-ing exclusively on getting content on YouTube.

“This partner network will allow us to guarantee the ability to deliver views,” Mc-Cabe told Adweek. As a result, McCabe antic-ipates generating 40 to 50 million new views per month.

Hearst: Partnering to grow explosively Hearst, another leader in online video, held the company’s first-ever “MagFront” event in October 2013, offering a sneak peek at the content innovations to be launched in 2014.

At MagFront, Hearst president Michael Clinton predicted that 2014 would be the year of “Big Content” as in “blockbuster content ideas” following up a big circulation and traffic year in 2013 in which Hearst saw the biggest print circulation and largest digital audience in its history: 85 million print read-ers and a digital audience of 18 million.

Clinton announced that one of the “Big Content” initiatives would be to take a quantum leap with Seventeen magazine by partnering with AwesomenessTV, a video company massively successful in that target teen niche (60 million viewers).

Given its proven prowess with young audi-ences, AwesomenessTV was given the content creation responsibility for the relaunch of Seventeen’s YouTube channel. Awesome-nessTV created a dedicated team of six for the editorial side of the project while Hearst handled ad sales.

VIDEO & MAGAZINES VIDEO & MAGAZINES

The content focuses on the typical teen fare: beauty, music, celebrities, and health. Mimick-ing the strategy that has worked for Awesome-nessTV, the team will also build a multichan-nel network (MCN) for Seventeen to give teen girls the ability to create their own channels. Eventually, Seventeen’s YouTube channel will include original scripted series, according to AwesomenessTV’s CEO Brian Robbins.

Clinton also announced that Hearst would launch The Power of Fatherhood on the Es-quire Network.

Meredith: Quintupling its video seriesAnother magazine media giant, Meredith, which only produced one online video series in 2013, is seriously ramping up its efforts, adding five online video series in 2014.

The publisher’s existing series, Lords of the Playground, launched its second season in January of this year. The 11-episode series features veteran actors Matt Servitto (The So-pranos) and Jason Kravits (Curb Your Enthu-siasm) spoofing everyday modern dad pitfalls.

Meredith’s new shows for 2014 include: Rosie to the Rescue: Pregnancy and parent

expert Rosie Pope Baby Sleep 911: A sleep consultant helps

harried families figure out the tips and tricks to get baby to sleep

Stager Smackdown: A décor war between professional home stagers

How I Lost It: Inspiring weight-loss jour-neys of determined individuals

How We Broke the News: Real people breaking the biggest news of their lives in wildly unique ways and the priceless reac-tions that follow

“Conde’ Nast guaranteed Brides “Live Wedding” sponsors 250 million media impressions but ended up delivering almost one billion”Michelle MyersBrides vp/publisher

Meredith’s Lords Of The Playground

Time’s One Man One Dream

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Hearst: !• Seventeen partnered with

AwesomenessTV (60 million teen viewers) to relaunch magazine’s YouTube channel

• Team of six dedicated to content creation & editing

Meredith: !• Hired VP/video • Quintupled # of shows • Offered advertisers

“subtle” product placement

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Then there’s Netflix.

Netflix is making a royal mess of things by dramatically transforming the manner in which readers/viewers consume content, as well as the pace at which we do so.

Netflix has revolutionised the system with its practice of releasing entire seasons of programmes at the same time. For example, at 8AM Greenwich Mean Time on 14 February 2014, every House of Cards fan with internet access, a Netflix membership, and a whole day of nothing to do could watch every episode of the new second season back to back.

It’s clearly working. While Netflix doesn’t release audience figures for any of the shows it distributes online, House of Cards and the company’s new prison comedy drama, Orange is the New Black, contributed to a 33 per cent surge in global Netflix subscribers last year to more than 44 million. The non-US subscriptions doubled to 10 million.

In an August 2013 speech, two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey praised the Netflix approach. “Clearly the success of the Netflix model – releasing the entire season of House Of Cards at once – has proven one thing: the audience wants control,” said Spacey. “They want freedom. If they want to binge – as they’ve been doing on House of Cards – then we should let them binge.”

“We have demonstrated that we have learned the lesson that the music industry didn’t learn – give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they’ll more likely pay for it rather than steal it”.

“They will talk about it, binge on it, carry it with them on the bus and to the hairdresser, force it on their friends, tweet, blog, Facebook, make fan pages, silly gifs and God knows what else about it. Engage with it with a passion and an intimacy that a blockbuster movie could only dream of.

“And if [we] fail to hear these warnings, audiences will evolve faster than [we] will. [The audience] will seek the stories and content-providers who give them what they demand: complex, smart stories available whenever they want, on whatever device they want… Netflix and other similar services have succeeded because they have married good content with a forward-thinking approach to viewing habits and appetites.”

Netflix: Changing the delivery paradigm

Meredith took its first step toward this multi-show initiative back in April of 2013 when it hired Laura Rowley as vice president for video production and product of the Mere-dith National Media Group. Rowley had been executive producer for original video and partnerships at The Huffington Post.

“Meredith already had more than 10,000 helpful videos in the informative-solution space with content like recipes and parent-ing tips, which can be watched on the web sites of our magazines like Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, and Ladies Home Journal,” Rowley told The New York Times.

“We really wanted to move into a new area,” she added, producing “story-telling videos” in the web series format “to offer a great experience.”

Meredith is guaranteeing advertisers 2.5m video streams over the 12- or 24-week run of each series, according to Rowley.

Meredith also offers advertisers the chance to get a “tasteful and subtle” integration of their products into episodes of the online video series, Rowley said.

Scripps: 70 new web seriesScripps, too, is looking at 2014 as a break-through year for video production, an-nouncing the launch of as many as 70 new web series on the lifestyle subjects of their magazines and television stations.

But Scripps is adding a twist: the company is also launching a site on which to watch the videos: Ulive. The title is pronounced to rhyme with ‘give’ to emphasise that the videos are all about subjects revolving around living your daily life, including health, food, and home.

For example, the first new series was Bon-kers Awesome, starring food blogger Joy Wil-son of the Joy the Baker blog. “Joy explores the food places and faces she loves… from baking to cocktails, and even going on a first date,” the site announced.

The second show was What Will the Maid Think, a series featuring stand-up comedian and Travel Channel star Bert Kreischer, who leaves surprises in his hotel rooms along with a hidden camera to capture the maids’ reac-tions. His surprises have included stringing 200 US$1 bills together for the maid to pull out from under a door, a fake crocodile, a man

“What’s important for us is not just do video for video’s sake. It has to be original, smart, fresh, and entertaining”Bob CohnAtlantic Digital editor

in a crib, a man on a window ledge, and a treasure map.

In addition to the new series, Ulive will also curate and host 20 years of Scripps Networks cable channel videos from the likes of The Travel Channel, HGTV (Home & Garden TV), and the Food Network.

“The sites that aggregate video tend to have higher engagement levels,” Ulive president Jeff Meyer told The New York Times.

The launch sponsor for Ulive was the Ford Motor Company, and the contract called for a branded content series called One-Tank Ad-ventures that incorporated Ford products in the videos.

Scripps is not letting Ulive hoard all those videos, Meyer said, but is making them avail-able on some 40 other sites as well as in an arrangement with online video syndicator RealGravity, acquired by Scripps in 2012.

The Atlantic Group: Home-grown talentYet another player in the magazine digital video vanguard is The Atlantic Group that launched three new series this year, two of which are built on the talents and reputations of two Atlantic editors.

Unlike the others, Atlantic’s approach is to create short, concise videos that can be consumed in a jiffy, lasting two or three min-utes at most.

The User’s Guide to Energy is sponsored by Shell and hosted by The Atlantic’s senior technology and science editor, Alexis Madri-gal. Economics in Plain English is sponsored by Box and hosted by The Atlantic’s senior business editor, Derek Thompson. The third series is an exploration of the creative process with technology, arts, and business leaders.

The Atlantic’s series are either continuing or limited to a number of episodes. Here are some of their series to date:

Late-Night Comedy Roundup If Our Bodies Could Talk Ask Washington Anything New Yorkers Advice to a Younger Me Creative Breakthroughs China’s Rise This Must Be the Place Old, Weird Tech The Perennial Plate

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Scripps: !• 70 new web series in ’14 • A new site for watching • Hosting 20 years of Scripps

videos from its Travel Channel, HGTV, Food

Atlantic Group: !• Three new series in ’13 • Using internal talent • Focusing on short, 2-3

minute videos that can be consumed quickly

Sanoma Media Radar 2015-2020 One Day with INNOVATION - May 26, 20144. Video

“The Kitchen Crashers”

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Don’t have US$50m to create a video division?

Neither did Access Express

40 B2B Magazines in Canada !Video Staffing: !

• 1 Full-time video position (editor/cameraman/producer) • Handles advertising and editorial videos • All editors shoot videos; some edit • All editors have video equipment and video skills

More equipment: !Additional US$15,000 for in-house green-screen studio and four more low-end kits for editors !

TOTAL COST: US$30,000

Equipment: !

• 2 high-end Canon XF-300s

• 2 low-end Canon handhelds

• A Lowell DVCreator lighting kit

• 2 1x1 panel lights for in-studio lighting

• 2 Sennheiser wireless lav mics for the high-end cameras

• 2 Sony wireless lavs for the low-end cameras

• 1 Teleprompter !COST: US$15,000

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Results: !• 8 editorial videos/week

• 8 advertising videos/week

• As many as 55 in a week

Lesson of that story?IF THEY CAN DO IT WITH A MAGAZINE ABOUT MANURE

(merda, não?), YOU CAN, TOO

I

Video advertising:A nicheon fireA sharp rise in video advertising and viewership sends publishers scrambling to create more inventory

John Wilpers

f there is one certainty in digital publishing, it is that video is red hot.

By extension, video ads, especially on mo-bile devices, are also growing at a torrid pace. “The easiest way to grow digital revenue is vid-eo,” media analyst Ken Doctor proclaimed in an interview with Capital New York.

Magazine industry advertising revenues for digital video rose 24 per cent year-over-year to $1.3 billion during the first six months of 2013, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

It shouldn’t be surprising. Advertising is following eyeballs.

“In the United States, video audiences will grow from 70.8 per cent of all internet users today to 76.9 per cent by 2016,” according to Greg Bobolo, CEO of digital sports agency

00:00.01 00:00.02 00:00.03 00:00.04 00:00.05

SendToNews.“Globally, consumers are devouring six

billion hours of YouTube video every month, up 50 per cent from the previous year,” Bobolo wrote on www.inma.org. “Increasingly, video is the language of promotion online, so it’s no surprise that advertising in digital media is set for expansion — from 19 per cent of global advertising spend to 21 per cent in 2014 for a total value of US$110bn.”

Global smartphone penetration is also growing in leaps and bounds. In the US, smartphone penetration is now at 74 per cent, according to a study by research firm Frank N. Magid Associates. Globally, there are more than 1 billion smartphones in use, and that number is expected to double by the end of 2016, according to Strategy Analytics.

Smartphone growth is important because more than 50 per cent of smartphone users watch a video on their phone at least once a month.

According to comScore, 188.2 million Amer-icans watched 52.4 billion online content vid-eos in December 2013 (up from 183 million watching 44 billion video in June 2013). The number of video ad views in December totalled 35.2 billion (up from 20 billion in June, a 76 per cent increase in just six months).

The rising tide of online video consumption is lifting all boats, including advertising video and most notably mobile video ad consumption.

While video advertisements are still pri-marily viewed on desktop computers (86 per cent), the growth rate of desktop video consumption was a paltry 10 per cent in 2013 compared to skyrocketing rates of mobile video ad consumption (tablets, 365 per cent; mobile phones, 235 per cent; Over the Top (OTT) devices like smart TVs and video game

consoles, 125 per cent).The non-desktop consumption of advertis-

ing videos is “growing far faster and taking share quickly,” according to Citigroup.

As the eyeballs move, so are advertisers moving from TV to digital and mobile, accord-ing to video ad exchange Adap.TV’s semiannu-al “State of the Video Industry” report.

Polling 900 ad agencies, advertisers, ad net-works, and publishers, the study found that brands increased their video ad budgets by 65 per cent from 2012. Fully 86 per cent of brands and 91 per cent of agencies said they planned to spend more on video advertisements next year. One third of the respondents planned to take the money from their television advertising budgets.

“People aren’t watching reliably in front of their TV screens anymore,” preferring to view advertising videos on multiple screens, Adap.TV chief marketing officer Kara Weber said. “It’s shifting how brands are looking to reach consumers.”

The only things holding back the growth of digital video advertising are the costs of production and lack of metrics.

While the attraction of video for publishers is that it commands higher rates in a market where the value of advertising has been steadi-ly declining, the problem is that creating a quantity of quality videos that satisfies the

The rate of US mobile video advertising consumption skyrocketed 365 per cent for tablets and 235 per cent for smartphones

For the Super Bowl in the US, Dunkin Donuts created a series of Vine videos with coffee cups performing feats of athletic prowess

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“The easiest way to grow digital revenue is video” ! — Media analyst Ken Doctor “Globally, consumers

are devouring six billion hours of YouTube video every month, up 50% from year ago” ! — Greg Bobolo, CEO, SendToNews

Video ad views in the US grew 76% in just six months at end of ’13, from 20 billion to 35 billion ! — comScore

And most of the growth is happening on mobile. Desktop video consumption was up 10% in ’13; tablets up 365%, smartphones 235% — comScore

advertisers paying high prices is actually quite resource intensive and time consuming.

At this stage, solving that production prob-lem requires increased payroll or production expense. That puts publishers in a situation where demand outpaces supply. “Currently there’s more demand for video impressions than The Times can supply,” New York Times President and CEO Mark Thompson told eMar-keter in a late 2013 interview.

That’s not to say publishing companies like The Times aren’t hard at work increasing video supply. The Times doubled its video production staff to more than 50 people and is now pro-ducing an average of 300 videos a month, up 62 per cent from 2012.

Another restraint on magazine video pro-duction is the lack of universal metrics for assessing reach, targeting, and performance.

“Audience guarantees online were expected to be a game-changer for the ‘TV-ization’ of online video,” the “State of the Video Industry” study says. “Yet some 65 per cent of brands and 70 per cent of agencies say that existing measurement standards do not satisfy their need for audience guarantees.”

One solution to the video production di-lemma could come from two unlikely sources: Twitter and Facebook. Or, more to the point: Vine and Instagram.

Brands looking for alternatives to the stan-dard 30-second commercial see the six-second videos of Vine as both more intriguing than an image but tighter than a 30-second video.

Vine was formed in June 2012, acquired by Twitter a mere four months later before it even launched. Vine officially launched in January 2013.

It was an instant hit. By April, Vine was the most used video-sharing application in the market as well as the most downloaded free app in the iOS App Store.

Initially aimed at giving people an enter-taining way to post short videos, Vine has been discovered by advertisers looking to do content marketing and brand promotion.

The strangely addictive six-second loops meet the advertisers’ increasing awareness that the old 30-second advertisement format is intrusive and culturally out of date as users are more time-sensitive and less likely to give up 30 seconds of their lives to watch an ad. Six

told Forbes.Another reason why brands are increasingly

using the mini-video format is because of the community Vine has built . It is an “ecosystem where brands and consumers talk directly,” Spanish ad agency Territorio Creativo partner Kevin Sigliano told Forbes.

Rather than risk getting it wrong, brands are hiring what are called “Vine-artists” in-stead of agencies to build the six-second videos.

Not to be left out of the video marketing trend, Facebook’s Instagram began offering video functionality in June 2013. Founded in 2010, the photo-sharing service had grown explosively to 100 million users in April 2012 when Facebook purchased the company for US$1 billion. Today, Instagram claims to have 150 million users.

Setting itself apart from Vine, Instagram’s video service allows videos up to 15-seconds.

And, like with Vine, brands have leapt at the chance.

Fully 40 per cent of the most-shared Insta-gram videos were created by brands, according to marketing technology company Unruly.

In one month in late 2013, the total number of unique Instagram videos shared on Twitter was 176,016, which is equivalent to ten per cent of the unique YouTube videos shared on Twitter during the same period (1,871,530), according to Unruly. And nine out of ten of those videos were shared on Facebook, vastly increasing their potential reach.

“New short-form content platforms such as Vine and Instagram are experiencing explo-sive growth,” Unruly managing director Phil Townend told Marketing Magazine.

“By engaging consumers in their native environments across today’s complex and fragmented media landscape, and utilising the open web to amplify awareness of their content, brands can maximise the effective-ness of their content marketing strategies to drive sharing and ultimately increase their market share,” Townend said.

“It’s remarkable that within just five months of launch, Instagram videos now account for almost ten per cent as many tweets as YouTube videos do. Smart marketers are no longer mea-suring success based on a YouTube view count and advertisers understand that it’s people first, platform second.”

More than

188.2mAmericans watched

52.4b online content videos last December

The number of video ad views in December totalled

35.2bup from 20 billion in June comScore

Brands looking for alternatives to the standard 30-second commercial see the six-second videos of Vine as both more intriguing than an image but tighter than a 30-second video

Why video advertisements work on mobileWe all know what we do when an ad appears on our television screen. We do something else.

We get up to get something to eat or drink, go to the bathroom, change channels, chat with a friend, or check email on our phone.

Even on desktop computers, users can click on another tab or close the window.

But mobile devices, deliver more engaged advertising video viewers because of the difficulty of opening another window and the fact that you’re holding it in your hand and are less likely to walk away from it.

How much more?A YuMe-IPG Lab study found tablet video viewers are 26 per cent more likely to correctly recall a brand they saw advertised on their tablet compared to TV viewers.

The study found that the majority of TV viewers multitask while watching, including having conversations, cleaning, cooking, reading email, surfing the web, or texting. For example, a third of television viewers admit that using their smartphones is their primary focus when watching television compared to only five per cent of tablet video viewers.

The study established that tablet users are far less likely to multitask while using a tablet, and users do not use tablets to play video in the “background” as they do with their TV.

Intriguingly, the only activity that more than 50 per cent of tablet users engage in while watching videos is eating.

seconds of entertaining video? That they’ll do.Vine advertisements aren’t really advertise-

ments, at least in the mind of Michael Litman, co-founder of Vine BrandsOnVine, which mon-itors the 30,000 brands on Vine. Vine ads are “brand blips”, he told Forbes. They are a strong medium for content marketing because they “[don’t] need to be ‘watched’ to be seen — there’s no decision-making process by the user.”

Brand-produced Vines are tweeted on com-panies’ Twitter pages and then re-tweeted by fans and followers, creating a snowball effect. Unlike banner ads and traditional 30-second video ads, Vine delivers a “propagation value”, one of the major reason brands adopt Vine, ad agency Big Spaceship CEO Michael Lebowitz

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Single factor slowing video ad growth: Cost of production of videos to host that advertising, resulting in demand outpacing supply

“Currently, there’s more demand for video impressions than The Times can supply” — New York Times CEO Mark Thompson

Publishers are scrambling to meet that demand: NYT doubled its video production staff to 50 & is producing 300 videos a month

One solution: Vine and Instagram as alternatives to 30-second ad spots, seen now as intrusive and culturally out of date

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Shopify’s seven tips for Vine successE-commerce solution company Shopify offered seven strategies for developing successful Vine content in its company blog:

1. “How to” videos. People want to resolve issues

quickly and don’t want to look at a really long

Youtube video. Vine forces discipline and heavy

visual power to make “how to” incredibly successful

and entertaining.

2. Influencer created. These are the one per cent

who create online content that the other 90 per

cent consume and nine per cent edit or curate.

3. The stop-motion creative. Stop motion is

incredibly visual and feels somewhat DIY.

4. Product features. The modern-day ‘demo’.

The content must be very visual, impactful, simple,

and informative.

5. One-to-one interactions with your consumers. For example, the Old Spice “sexiest

man in the world” protagonist responding to

social media comments. Customer tweets were

responded via Vine videos.

6. Contests. The moving image piece makes a

promo outreach more impactful than a static image.

7. “Behind the scenes” videos. Brands must be

more transparent, a peek into the inner workings of

your brand or company is key to generate intimacy

with your consumers and fuel their evangelism.

VIDEO: VINE & INSTAGRAM

U

We’ll betyou can’twatch just one

VIDEO: VINE & INSTAGRAM

Brands join tens of millions of viewers embracing short-form video sites Vine and Instagram

Carlos Koteich

nwrapping your favourite candy bar and eat-ing the whole of it: It doesn’t get any better! Quick, delicious, instant gratification.

Like candy companies, magazine media have lately had success offering consumers quickly and easily digested bits of content that deliver maximum satisfaction: the mini-video clips from Vine (owned by Twitter) and Insta-gram (owned by Facebook).

To access an endless feed of mini-videos re-quires no more than tapping the Instagram or Vine app icon on your smartphone. No need to search for and load a video. Just open the app, tap, consume, swipe, tap, consume, swipe over and over again. Like those chocolate treats, it’s impossible to consume just one.

Twitter started the micro-video consump-tion trend. The company acquired Vine in Oc-tober 2012 before the four-month-old start-up had launched a product. Twitter needed only three months to prepare the six-second video service for launch in January 2013.

Consumer acceptance was immediate and stunning: Between the first and third quarters of 2013, Vine grew 403 per cent to 40 million users, making it the fastest growing app of the year, easily outpacing Flickr and Instagram (146 and 130 per cent respectively), according to Mashable, Statista and GlobalWebIndex.

By comparison, it took Instagram a year to get to 10 million users. That said, Instagram acquired 50 million new users between Feb-ruary and August 2013, which included three months of its new video service.

Vine’s nearly instant success in early 2013 led Facebook-owned Instagram to add a video-sharing feature in June 2013. Instagram decided to distinguish itself from Vine by of-fering video in a 15-second format.

With its parent company’s massive base of existing Facebook users, it didn’t take long for Instagram to overtake Vine. Toward the end of 2013, according to data from Simply Measured, Instagram videos:

Represented between 15 and 30 per cent of all Instagram data traffic on mobile networks

Were generating six times the mobile traffic of Vine

Had twice as many of the top 100 brands in the US compared to Vine, and

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Vine: !• Six-second videos • Launched Jan. ’13 • 40 million users in

8 months

Instagram: !• 15-second videos • Launched video

service June ’13 • 50 million new

users in 3 months

Unlike banner ads and 30-second video ads, Vine and Instagram “ads” deliver a “propagation value” — Michael Lebowitz, CEO, Big Spaceship

And it’s working: 40% of the most-shared Instagram videos were created by brands — Marketing tech company Unruly

eBay’s four quick tips to mini-video successFrank Mertens , eBay director of marketing and brand, offered four quick tips for mini-video success on his personal blog:

Use hashtags

Craft your content to match the call to action

Be smart about your distribution strategy

Above all be creative

“The last is most important,” wrote Mertens. “There is no playbook for this format so you have to be very creative and take risks.”

New York magazine’s ten tips for Vine successStella Bugbee, editorial director of New York magazine’s The Cut, outlined the keys to the magazine’s Vine success at the 2013 Fashion Week in a blog post:

1. The cute, well-planned stop-frame version

2. The perfect capture of a conceptual presentation

3. The backstage makeup test

4. The celebrity spy

5. The chaos before a show

6. The Hitchcockian suspense sequence

7. The focus on sparkly details

8. The model casting

9. The Fashion Week “survival” guide

10. The steady hand for the finale

Generated more engagement on average than Vine videos for brands that posted on both platforms But Vine has not gone away. Nor will it, insist observers.

Why not?Vine and Instagram are different products serving different needs for different audienc-es, and they are backed by the top two social media companies in the world.

“Why not both?” posed Gary Vaynerchuk, co-founder and CEO of social media brand consulting agency VaynerMedia, on his blog. Both Facebook and Twitter work. [Vine and Instagram] are different enough, both are at scale, and both are backed by the [top] two social networks in the world.

“The stories are told differently: One is short-form, one is ironically long form at 15 seconds; one loops, the other doesn’t,” said Vaynerchuk. “Different options for different needs. I see both winning.”

So what does this mean for magazines?“It’s no loss to a magazine to issue video on both platforms. You’re going to get that extra audience,” said Cynthia Wang, a former People magazine editor.

“What started as a promotional tool for magazines has now become another avenue for streaming original content,” Wang said. Mag-azines are going beyond promoting upcoming stories to create original content exclusively for either Vine or Instagram.

And, while magazines on Instagram might have more followers, it’s a safe bet that most of them were followers before the arrival of Insta-gram Video and followed for photos, not video.

Instagram’s main game was never vid-eo in the first place. Although Instagram is now a player in video sharing, its 15-second concept of micro-video does not play well for everyone. “Some people, they’re not going to hang around for 15 seconds,” said Chatter Buzz Media co-founder Ashley Cisneros.

At this nascent point in the development of the mini-video, magazines can experiment with both and not worry about which format wins. For now, everyone does.

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Peta Andersen

BIG DATA

T

Should big data be in the driver’s seat?Media companies are utilising big data in new ways but

they must avoid the temptation to have it drive every decision

he idea of big data is not new: in the 1949 George Orwell classic 1984, Big Brother’s oppressive rule was founded on an extensive knowledge base; in the 1956 Phillip K. Dick short story, Minority Report, governmental knowledge is so extensive it can predict a given individual’s actions at some future time.

While we are far from being able to mine as much data as Orwell’s Inner Party or predict future actions like Dick’s “precog” mutants, we are approaching a new dawn in predictive data metrics and analysis.

Consider that in 2012, retail giant Target created an algorithm to identify pregnant cus-tomers in their second trimester using purchase data (such as the buying of prenatal vitamins) and other factors, some purchased, some col-lected by the company itself.

This sort of market research is commonplace

BIG DATA

in retail — although “Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” according to Eric Siegel, chairman of Predictive Analytics World, an analytics conference. “We’re living through a golden age of behavioural research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”

Not so long ago, all publishers had to go on were simple circulation numbers. Up here, down there… but why? Who was reading what? Who knew?!

Until recently, the idea of collecting digital data within a publishing framework was so rudimentary or unfocused as to be useless.

“We know next to nothing about how people consume our content, whether we’re publishing in the right way, whether all the time and effort we’re putting into creating these interactives actually work,” Aron Pilhofer, head of the New York Times’ new newsroom analytics team, told journalism.co.uk. “The only way you can do that is through analytics, understanding how people are interacting, what they’re doing with your content.

“When you’re spending so much time, you’re putting so many resources into these projects and into these pieces you really shouldn’t be publishing blind,” he said.

But Pilhofer doesn’t believe data should drive every editorial decision. He and other editors still believe in the old-fashioned gut instincts of great editors that have made great magazines.

“I don’t think everything should be ap-proached that way,” Pilhofer said. “I’m not even sure most things should be approached that way, but having the ability to make data-driven decisions, I think is super important.”

And data analytics firms agree.In an interview about the use of big data in industry, Forbes writer Rich Karlgaard asked Tony Fadell, founder and CEO of Nest Labs, a maker of “smart” thermostats: “Does big data help Nest design its thermostats?”

“No,” said Fadell. “Great products come from strong points of view. You design them for your-self. You say ‘no’ to most of the features that data says you’ll need. Steve Jobs was brilliant at saying ‘no’. But big data shows how people use your product in ways you hadn’t expected. It provides terrific insight into how you might improve the product’s software, communicate

with customers and build loyalty.”In magazine publishing, perhaps no one

delivers on the power of data like The Atlantic Group. Consider their new product, Quartz: Launched in September 2012, the digital news site provides intelligent content customised via a given consumer’s interaction with the site. Similarly, companies such as Gravity, Contextly, and Sailthru help publishers craft a personalised experience using data gleaned from a consumer’s profile and reading habits.

If you’re unconvinced about the ease with which a well-constructed site can gather data based on your reading habits, pay a little more attention to the advertising blocks showing up on your preferred websites and within your webmail interface — chances are, at least two of the advertisements are for products you’ve searched for online but have not yet purchased.

Observers draw a highly probable paral-lel between the music industry at the turn of this century and what they call the Intelligent Content movement of today. “[MP3s] meant the end of curated CDs,” wrote Roger Wood and Evelyn Robbrecht in PaidContent. “Now, playlists are compiled and shared with the help of Pandora, Spotify or Songza. Thus magazines and books could soon become the Pandora of dynamic content, with artificial intelligence applets that choose and adapt content, then tailor it to the reader’s context and taste. We see the beginnings of this with Flipboard, but it will only get more advanced.”

In other words, publishers will throw every-thing at us, see what we like, then watch and wait and follow us on our virtual reading paths.

What does this mean for magazine publish-ing? Data-driven content — and the context in which it’s consumed — are incredibly import-ant to creating work that is engaging and has a high ROI. For some, this means predictive

Watching what readers do on a visit gives editors the most complete picture of their readers’ interests and what areas of their site generate the most interaction

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Data can inform decisions about editorial, advertising, and new initiatives, giving publishers greater assurance of success

• Hearst used data to launch new title “Dr. Oz, The Good Life,” netting 145,000 subscribers in just 30 days

• Meredith: 800 data points for each of 115 million customers (buying history to online behavior) to target subscription pitches, up-selling of other products

• Forbes: Used data to change ad placement from ineffective to more effective, and to compensate writers for stories with biggest impact

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Native advertising fears givingway to best practices, profitsNative advertising works everywhere, doesn’t interrupt,adds value, and commands high CPMs. What’s not to like?

t’s everywhere. When you open your email, Google a recipe, look for a silly cat video, search for a holiday destination, comparison shop for cameras, or simply try to read an article a friend recom-mended on Facebook, it’s there.

Native advertising.Native advertising consists of discreetly placed content blocks embedded within the content you were originally seeking, designed to look almost exactly like the “real” content itself, and directly relevant to the subject you were researching.

And it is, indeed, everywhere. An Online Publishers Association and Radar Research study found nearly 75 per cent of all digital publishers already use native advertisements.

What is it?While it has many names – branded content, native advertising, content marketing – this type of advertising at its core consists of an advertisement that visually and contextually imitates the other forms of content you find on

ADVERTISING: NATIVE ADVERTISING

CJ David

Nearly

75per cent of all digital

publishers already use native advertising

Online Publishers Assoc./Radar Research study

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Compared to banner ads and pre-roll, native advertising:

• Works everywhere • Doesn’t interrupt • Adds value for the reader • Commands high CPMs

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that page or website, hence “native.” While the definition may be simple, creating

successful “native” content that readers will engage with is a challenge.

Despite all the buzz, “native advertising” has actually been around for decades in the guise of sponsored pages or sections and adver-torials. It was painfully easy to spot (and gen-erally painful to read). Not anymore. The key to the 21st century version of “native advertising” is that it be high quality, directly relevant to the topic at hand, and non-intrusive.

Controversial reputationJournalists have long viewed ‘advertorials’ with disdain, and now some view native advertisiing with alarm as the clarity of the dividing line be-tween real editorial content and advertising gets less distinct with native advertising.

But with print advertising a shad-ow of its former self, and banner ad-vertising delivering unimpressive results, publishers had to come up with something that would deliver eyeballs and demand quality CPMs (cost per thousand).

Enter native advertising.A study conducted by IPG Media Lab and Sharethrough last year demonstrated that native ads are becoming the preferred medium for consumers to get information from advertisers. The results in-dicated that consumers not only look at native ads more frequently, but they also shared these ads more often and have had a more positive affinity towards the brand as a result.

One test, using the same creative message from five different advertisers in both native advertising and pre-roll spots (video ads before video clips), showed native advertisements de-livered better brand lift in five out of five cases.

In one case, a US campaign for the soft drink Jarritos, native ads generated an 82 per cent brand lift compared to just 2.1 per cent for us-ers viewing the pre-roll campaign.

Consumers also had a higher negative brand opinion after watching pre-roll compared to the native ad campaign.

In tests pitting native ads against banner

ads, the study found that: Native ads are more visually engaging than

banner ads. Consumers looked at native ads 52 per cent more frequently than banner ads

Native ads registered a nine per cent higher brand lift and an 18 per cent higher purchase intent life than banner ads

Consumers were more than 68 per cent more likely to share a native ad than a banner ad

And, most impressively, consumers actually looked at native ads more than the actual original content they sought — 26 versus 24 per cent — and spent almost the same amount of time on each

The reason for the success of native advertisements, enthusiasts say, is the difference between choice and interruption, context versus irrel-evancy, and valuable information versus a sales pitch.

Native ads are embedded in the content but do not interrupt a read-er’s consumption of the content the way pre-roll does. High-quality na-tive advertising actually adds val-ue to the base content. And native advertising is directly related to the content the consumer is seeking, thus enhancing the reader’s expe-rience.

Consumers also said they were more likely to purchase from the brand after viewing the native content as opposed to the traditional banner and banner pre-roll ads.

A later 2013 study, the largest of native ad-vertising at the time, surveyed more than 1,000 publishers, ad agencies and brands worldwide. The Hexagram and Spada survey found that native advertising already represents 20 per cent of ad revenue and the publishers surveyed anticipate it will hit 30 per cent in less than a year.

What forms does it take,and how is it identified?The Hexagram and Spade survey, conducted primarily in the US and UK but also involving media professionals around the world, found that the most commonly used forms of native advertising were blog posts (65 per cent), arti-cles (63 per cent) and Facebook (56 per cent).

The survey also found that the most popular method of identifying native content is using the “sponsored” tag (64 per cent) followed by “brought to you by” (34 per cent) and “fea-tured” (29 per cent). A Digiday survey found publishers are also using “partner content” and “advertiser content.” The Huffington Post uses “sponsored feature” and “in partner with.”

Some publishers take steps to help readers understand native advertising. NBC and The Atlantic both use “What’s this?” rollovers that enable readers to understand that, in the case of The Atlantic, “this content is made possible by our sponsor; it is not written by and does not

necessarily reflect the views of The Atlantic’s editorial staff.”

Where is native advertising headed?“We believe native ads are quickly becoming the de facto ad format on mobile and increas-ingly moving into desktop,” wrote J.P. Morgan’s lead analyst Doug Anmuth in the company’s annual “Nothing But Net” report released in early 2014.

J.P. Morgan calculates that native ads de-liver the best return on advertising dollar investment.

“We think native ads also have significantly

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Still controversial: Does it cross the church-state line? !Not when done well with separate staffs, clear labeling, high quality content, and brand-consistent advertisers

Native outperforms banner ads and pre-roll. In a study, consumers: !

• Looked at native more frequently

• Shared ads more often

• Reported more positive affinity

• Reported better brand lift

• Had fewer negative reactions

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higher click-through rates than traditional display ads, which leads to higher pricing over time,” Anmuth wrote.

It’s about money. Lots of it.Advertisers were projected to spend US$2.4bn on native advertising, or 39 per cent of total US paid social ad spend this year, according to market research company BIA/Kelsey. The same report projected that the native US ad spend will grow 93 per cent to US$4.57 bn by 2017.

The “Nothing But Net” study also cites the increasing sophistication of mobile advertis-ing as a future source of revenue. Consumers already see native ads in their social media feeds that closely resemble other content on those websites, which increases the chance that people will click on it.

The explosive growth of mobile phones and mobile use for content consumption makes

Buzzfeed’s Jonathan Perelman shared the company’s principles of native advertising with The Media Briefing:

1. Integrate with your content model: Apply the same guidelines to native advertising as to editorial content: Make it something readers would want to share with their friends.2. Seventy-five per cent of BuzzFeed’s readers visit the site looking for something to share so they look smart or funny, Perelman said. And it works: 30 per cent of traffic to the native ad pages comes from shares.3. BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti described his company’s success with editorial and native advertising content: “The key is to make something that is easy to understand, easy to share, and includes a social imperative,” he said. “You never know in advance which ideas will work. You can drastically increase your chances for success if you try lots of things and bring the best forward. Viral Rank, measuring the “social reproduction rate” of media,

is the key metric to show what is getting shared and linked on the social, real-time web.”4. Forget about display advertising: “We don’t think banner ads work, and more importantly they are being ignored,” BuzzFeed’s Perelman told The Media Briefing. “And if you look at the stats for banner ads on mobile, 40-50 per cent of clicks on mobile banner ads are mistakes.5. Collaborate with your clients: To create ads that get shared requires that Buzzfeed’s writers, who don’t know the brand, must therefore take a collaborative approach. “We know what people share and the brand knows its objectives — it’s the intersection,” Perelman said.6. Don’t be too intrusive: Native advertising is meant to be the polar opposite of display advertising that is in readers’ faces and interrupts their content consumption experience. “It’s branded and it’s subtle . People know that it’s a piece of branded content… and you wouldn’t be able to pass it off as something else,” said Perelman. “Clearly they (the client) want this

to be seen as their brand, yet you have to do it in a way that isn’t going to hit you in the head with that branding.”7. Don’t restrict your ad content with commercial rules: Because BuzzFeed is pursuing viral success for its native advertising clients, it doesn’t charge brands based on the number of times the content is shared. That would be counter-intuitive and counter-productive. We’d have to stop sharing content if it became too popular, Perelman said. BuzzFeed also allows clients to keep the content to enable the companies to repost it on their own social media sites.8. Maintain the separation of church and state: BuzzFeed keeps the editorial and 40-person native advertising creative teams totally separate. “They work from the same CMS and the same sharing mind set, but they are completely walled off,” Perelman told The Media Briefing. “No journalist would have to write a piece of ad content about a brand and then write a news story about the same company.

Native advertising leader BuzzFeed’s 8 tips for success

ADVERTISING: NATIVE ADVERTISING ADVERTISING: NATIVE ADVERTISING

native advertising even more attractive. In the United States, the use of mobile devices has increased 500 per cent since 2009, to the tipping point where consumers are spending more time consuming information on their mobile devices than their desktops and lap-tops, according to Business Insider.

Worldwide, mobile devices are now gen-erating 20 per cent of global web browsing, reported web analytics firm StatCounter in No-vember of last year. In 2013, global mobile usage increased 53 per cent over the previous year.

Facebook is a good illustration of the trend with 219 million Facebook users, or 20 per cent of their total, being mobile-only.

“In the future, all advertising on social me-dia will be native in-stream ads,” Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, a social media analytics company that works with Fortune 100 brands, told Business Insider in December. “The right rail and banners will disappear altogether.”

Another advantage of native advertising is simply that it fits. Everywhere. Unlike banner ads, native in-stream advertising looks, feels, and functions seamlessly across desktops, lap-tops, tablets and smartphones.

It makes sense that advertising specifically geared towards mobile platforms will become more ubiquitous and profitable.

There’s no turning back Combine all the benefits of mobile delivery of content (including native advertisements) with the explosive growth of mobile devices, and it’s clear that the future is not only mobile but also some form of native advertising.

The International Telecommunications Union recently projected that the number of active cell phones will reach 7.3 billion in early 2014, exceeding the world population. The number of humans with access to cell phones already vastly exceeds the number of humans with working toilets (7.3 billion versus 4.5 billion).

What works?As ubiquitous, profitable, fast-growing, and ballyhooed as native advertising is, it’s still not entirely clear how to best make it work nor exactly what to measure to determine success.

At present, there is some consensus on what

strongly contributes to a native advertisement campaign’s success.

Everyone agrees that the sine qua non is compelling content: consumers only care about what they want to see and they insist that it be good. Very good. When they see that kind of content, they come in droves to consume it.

For example, an analysis by Reuters of a Vir-gin Mobile campaign on BuzzFeed showed the company received 1.1 million views of its native content. A Geico campaign netted 140,000 views, a GE campaign 65,000 views and a Pepsi Next campaign 44,000. Why some campaigns succeed wildly and others less spectacularly is still a matter of finding the right substance and style. It’s clear that native advertising is more an art than a science.

But those mixed results are no different than the mixed results editorial content re-ceives. BuzzFeed’s VP of agency and strategy, Jonathan Perelman, told The Media Briefing. “Like our editors, our native advertising writ-ers might know generally what type of content will go viral but more often than not they are surprised by what actually does end up be-ing shared the most,” Perelman told Media Briefing.

Native advertising is lucrative.BuzzFeed, which has relied entirely on native advertising since its December 2008 inception and announced a “record profit” last August, is charging approximately $92,300 per native ad campaign, of which it ran between 600-700 with more than half of the top brands last year compared to 265 in 2012. BuzzFeed claims 85

“The key is to make something that is easy to understand, easy to share, and includes a social imperative”Jonah PerettiBuzzFeed founder

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Native is about money — lots of it. !Almost 40% of US 2014 social ad spend will be native; it will be 93% by 2017, or US$4.6 billion ! — BIA/Kelsey

“Publishers who are not thinking about these [trends] now are putting their entire business at stake.”

! — Dan Meehan, PadSquad

• Forbes expects to get 30% of its revenue from native this year

• BuzzFeed projects US$60m in native ad sales

• Huffington Post projects 47% increase in native ad sales

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How to build native content teamsThe quality of the native advertising must match that of the editorial content, so hire professionals

John Wilpers

tatistics such as the following make magazine publishers sit up and take notice:

Forbes generated 20 per cent of its 2013 revenue from native advertising and expects it to be 30 per cent in 2014

The Huffington Post projects a 47 per cent increase in native advertising this year over last

Buzzfeed projects selling 600–700 native advertising campaigns in 2014 for US$60m

ADVERTISING: HOW TO BUILD A NATIVE AD TEAM

US native advertising grew 77 per cent in 2013 to US$2.4b, according to media consulting firm BIA/Kelsey

How do publishers respond to those sta-tistics? “How do I get some of that business?”

How do magazine publishers hitch a ride on this latest flashy new thing that holds out hope of helping the industry replace lost print dollars with digital revenue?

There are two schools of thought on how to create native advertising content: Turn over the keys to the advertiser (the Forbes, Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post approach) or create the content with or for the advertiser (Gawker, Buzzfeed, The New York Times, The Huffington Post).

Perhaps the most debated example of turning the keys over to the advertiser is Forbes. The other leading candidate, The At-lantic Monthly, took some of the content keys back after a controversy erupted over a native advertisement by the Church of Scientology that involved embarrassingly glowing con-tent and the subsequent censoring of negative comments. The Atlantic changed its policies and now pre-approves both advertisers and content, and bans censoring of comments.

Forbes is crystal clear about the philosophy

and goals of its “BrandVoice” product: “Offer marketers the freedom to speak directly to consumers — authentically, without con-trivances,” according to chief product officer Lewis DVorkin. “First, we gave them access to our editorial tools to publish posts on Forbes.com, always clearly identified and labelled. Then, we built a brand newsroom (it reports to the sales department) to support them.”

The Forbes advertising department will also provide customers with assistance via outside resources. “There are numerous brands who are looking for help in creating and publishing content, and we work with an outside, startup vendor called Contently that has a stable of contributors who work with the marketer to help them create content,” DVorkin told NetNewsCheck.

“I often say the mission of journalism is to inform, and the job of a media business is to find solutions for marketers,” said DVorkin. “Forbes BrandVoice does both. BrandVoice, when done right, enables the kind of authen-tic story-telling that works for today’s savvy consumers.”

Is he concerned about potentially poor qual-ity being published by advertisers? DVorkin shrugs that off, saying the Forbes audience will

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How do you create native advertising? !Two schools of thought:

1. Turn the keys over to the advertiser 2. Build teams of high-quality

journalists

System #1: Forbes, Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post !System #2: BuzzFeed, Gawker, Huffington Post, New York Times

Because the “native” content appears so similar and adjacent to editorial content, it had better be good because it reflects on the brand

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decide if the content is worthy or not.It’s the same story at The Washington Post.The Post’s “BrandConnect” programme al-

lows marketers to create content and feature it on The Post’s homepage and throughout the site. The Post created the WP BrandConnect Studio with a small team of content creators or advisors. While advertisers are largely on their own, they may request assistance from the Studio. No editorial staff is used.

Taking a lesson from The Atlantic, The Post does not allow comments on its sponsored content, not wishing to deal with the head-ache of monitoring the comments or deciding what to do with negative comments about

an advertiser.Another Post native advertising pro-

gramme, “Sponsored Views”, places up to 600 characters of the client’s opinion directly under a Washington Post opinion piece. No content creation worries with this group; it’s what organisations like the Natural Resources Defence Council, Cato Institute, Centre for American Progress, and CTIA: The Wireless Association do for a living.

Clients sign up for an “opportunity alert” and receive instant notification of the publica-tion of a Post opinion piece in any of 12 catego-ries (e.g., taxes, defence, gun rights, education, foreign policy, gay rights, etc.). Up to three

“Sponsored Views” are published below an opinion piece (but placed above the comments about the piece), and are highlighted in a light tan shade with the title “Sponsored Views”.

The folks at News Corp, The Huffington Post, Gawker and BuzzFeed disagree with Forbes and The Post.

Giving sponsors direct access to The Huff-ington Post content management system would be a “slippery slope” to “sub-optimal content,” and open the company up to crises they could not prevent but would have to cope with after the fact, like The Atlantic’s Church of Scientology controversy, HuffPo director of native advertising Tessa Gould told pbs.org.

In Gould’s mind, one of the most important elements of a successful (and ethical) native advertising programme is to employ in-house content strategists and creators.

Teams of top-notch journalistsTo ensure both the separation of “church and state” and the greatest possible quality, The Huffington Post created its Partner Studio staffed by top-notch writers, editors, designers and strategists. “We hire great journalists,” Gould told pbs.org. “We try to hire directly out of The Huffington Post newsroom, or we look at the very same pool of candidates as the newsroom. We want the tone [at the Partner Studio] to mirror our editorial side.”

News Corporation, too, believes in hiring teams of high-quality journalists outside of the editorial department to help clients produce native advertising content.

“We are prepared to not only run [native advertising] but also help them create content,” Raju Narisetti, senior vice-president and dep-uty head of strategy at News Corporation, told journalism.co.uk. “The Wall Street Journal creates content for its advertisers’ native ads, but that is not the task of the newsroom. We will never have our journalists write that kind of content.”

The Journal created a “custom publishing arm” of the advertising department, made up of a lot of seasoned former journalists who can produce the kind of Wall Street Journal-level quality content a brand might want, according to Narisetti.

There’s yet another way to look at the advan-tage of building the internal capacity to create

native advertising and attract more advertising clients: If magazines don’t do it, the brands will do it themselves.

“As brands become better at storytelling, you have to factor in that you have a new competitor in addition to the other publishers you thought you were competing with,” Narisetti said.

“Intel has its own newsroom, Virgin Amer-ica has a newsroom, advertising agencies have their own newsrooms — and they’re hiring journalists,” DVorkin wrote.

That’s not to say the brands will find the content game easy or succeed at it.

“Brands will quickly find out that creating content inexpensively is going to be difficult for them,” Narisetti told journalism.co.uk.

What brands may find difficult comes nat-urally to publishing companies, and magazine publishers can come to the rescue of struggling brands. “Compelling storytelling is a craft and has a science to it and most big publishers have had more than 100 years of experience doing that,” Narisetti said.

The success of native advertising at brands like The Atlantic and BuzzFeed is prompting more and more publishers to consider native advertising. As they wade into these tricky waters, they’d be well advised to consider the experiences of those who’ve gone before and avoid repeating their mistakes.

“As brands become better at storytelling, you have to factor in that you have a new competitor in addition to the other publishers you thought you were competing with”Raju Narisetti Senior VP, News Corp

BuzzFeed Gawker Media

The Washington Post Hearst

Team size

40 16 Unknown 5

Team members

Designers, writers and animators

Writers, designers, producers, strategists (also uses freelancers)

Designers, producers, videographers, writers, techies

Not specified but mostly from editorial backgrounds

Mission Produce content for advertisers and consult on how to write stories in the BuzzFeed style

Develop content for advertisers spending $50,000 or more

A team of experts with journalistic sensibilities to help advertisers create sponsored content

Produce content for digital-only ad campaigns and for the online components of broader ad packages sold through Hearst Integrated Marketing

Note Sponsored content is the site’s only source of revenue. The team is salaried and does not receive commissions or bonuses

Team members are paid a bonus tied to the financial performance of the advertising team

Team members do not handle sales, are salaried but are not paid a bonus or commission

Team members salaried and do not receive commissions or bonuses

A quick look at native advertising teams at four publishing companies

(Source: Ad Age magazine)

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Forbes, Post offer advertisers control: !

Giving advertisers access to CMS is “slippery slope” to “sub-optimal content” ! — HuffPo Dir. of Native Adv. Tessa Gould

To protect the brand, offer the best reader experience, & maintain standards, publishers should build internal teams of journalists of the quality they would hire for the editorial department

Jen Matthews, Korsha Wilson and John Wilpers

A

The Holy Grail of advertising?Programmatic advertising has burst from the shadows to become the system that delivers extremely targeted ads to extremely targeted individuals instantly and efficiently

dvertisers and publishers used to know how to dance.

The advertiser would give the publisher an advertising campaign complete with all the necessary collateral. The publisher would run the ad and send the advertiser an invoice.

Or the publisher would give the advertiser a “spec” ad, the advertiser would make a few text or artwork changes, and then the pub-lisher would print it and send the advertiser an invoice.

For subsequent issues, the publisher’s ad rep would simply call the client to confirm that the ad would be running again.

That was it. Oh, they would also go to lunch regularly

and have a martini or three.Then the internet cut in on these two old-

time dance partners, and the dance hasn’t been the same since.

Among the many digital disrupters, the biggest party crasher may end up being what’s

called programmatic advertising. Many tra-ditionalists see it as taking the human ele-ment out of advertising decisions, damaging the brand, and cheapening inventory. But its advocates see programmatic advertising as providing a more lucrative, more targeted, more efficient and far less expensive way of buying and selling ad space for both the pub-lisher and the advertiser.

While programmatic advertising has been around for roughly a decade, it has explod-ed in the last year. The stunning statistics of the growth in both its use and the size of programmatic budgets makes it crystal clear that publishers who ignore programmatic advertising do so at their peril: “We are see-ing entire markets moving en masse [to pro-grammatic advertising],” said Jay Stevens, international general manager at automated advertising seller Rubicon Project, which sells News Corp’s inventory programmatically.

“Publishers are watching print revenue

decline and looking at digital to make up the [revenue] they are losing in print. They have to move to automated trading or they will die,” Stevens told The Guardian in February 2014.

“All media will be purchased this way in the future — on television, mobile phones, vid-eo and social,” Michael Smith, vice president of revenue platforms and operations at Hearst Magazines Digital Media told MediaPost.

“The industry has seen a monumental shift toward programmatic buying,” Forbes Media senior vice president of digital advertising Mark Howard told eMarketer. He didn’t say a “slight” or “moderate” or even a “significant” shift, he said a “monumental” shift.

To wit: US programmatic advertising is growing at 53 per cent a year, according to IDC, and by 2017, 83 per cent of US digital display advertising will be programmat-ic, according to Magna Global, one of the world’s largest advertising buyers. Research firm Forrester believes programmatic will

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It’s either: !1. Taking the human

element out of ad campaigns

2. Damaging brands, 3. Cheapening

inventory…….OR

Programmatic advertising is growing at 53% a year in US and is projected to be 83% of US digital display advertising — IDC & Magna Global

It’s providing: !1. More lucrative 2. More targeted 3. More efficient, and 4. Far less expensive

way of buying and selling ad space for both publishers and advertisers

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er qualified individual viewers for an ad and, thus, trigger the real time bidding.

Programmatic coming out of the shadowsFor years, programmatic advertising func-tioned largely in the background as a way for publishers to sell “remnant” digital inventory. Recently, however, with the ability to gather increasingly sophisticated data about web user behaviour, programmatic advertising has leap-frogged into what is predicted will be the primary method of buying advertising, or so its advocates would have you believe.

Why? Publishers now have the technol-ogy to not only identify their site visitors but also continually follow, catalogue and analyse their behaviours. Thus, the pub-lishers’ “first-party data” (their own) about their readers enables them to serve up finely parsed audiences and deliver different ads in the same position on the same page depend-ing entirely on whom an advertiser wants to reach and which reader arrives in which context (from home, from his mobile, etc.)

There is also third-party data of the same nature, but it comes from sources outside the publishing company and is currently consid-ered less robust and less trustworthy, at least in the publishers’ eyes.

Clickstream data, demographic data, be-havioural data, and many other first-party and third-party data points create an ex-tremely fine-grained picture of the consumer who will view an ad. The programmatic ad-vertising system can then decide with incred-ible precision if this particular consumer in this situation matches the most likely pros-pect from the most desired audience.

How does it work in the real world? Let’s say Sally Harris, a recent college graduate, wants to buy a snazzy red couch to decorate her cool new apartment. She searches on Goo-gle for hours, but can’t find the couch that’s right for her.

The next day, Sally does a Google search for a news topic, intending to find out more about an event that interests her, but red couches show up in the ad spaces on her browser win-dow, distracting her from her news quest. Sally starts clicking on the red couch ads and forgets all about the news she wanted.

Her husband does the same Google search

for the same news topic, but because yester-day he was searching for mountain bikes (and not red couches!), the same results page Sally got will instead feature mountain bike ads in the same spaces where Sally saw red couch ads.

Going to the next level, publishers are in-creasingly able to differentiate what ads Sal-ly and her husband see depending on where they are: on their home desktop computer or on their smartphone in the city.

New device IDs in both Apple and Android smartphones make possible the re-targeting of consumers on mobile apps. The new IDs strike a balance between user privacy and advertiser targeting capabilities. Addition-ally, the availability of “hyperlocal” location signals using latitude and longitude infor-mation is now increasingly available on ad exchanges, according to ClickZ.

So, for example, if Sally had recently searched for sushi restaurants and was using a magazine app in a cab on her way down-town, she might see advertisements for sushi restaurants. Her husband, on the other hand, might see ads for a nearby gym because he’d recently searched for fitness equipment.

When you think about it, programmat-ic advertising is rather like the Holy Grail of advertising: the ability to deliver adver-

83%

60%

59%

56%

52%

40%

33%

31%

23%

The US

The Netherlands

The UK

France

Australia

Japan

Germany

Spain

China

Programmatic advertising percentages of digital display advertising in 2017

ultimately capture the bulk of all global dig-ital ad spending.

And, while the spread of programmatic advertising will be slowed in some countries by obstacles such as traditional publishers resisting change, a slow-to-develop ecosys-tem infrastructure, and tough privacy laws restricting the use of behavioural data, the growth of programmatic advertising appears to be inexorable. Magna Global predicts that programmatic advertising will account for a significant per-centage of all digital display advertising in 2017 in key countries, as shown in the chart on the right.

But let’s take a step back before we get too overwrought here.

What exactly is “programmatic advertis-ing”? The term is widely used but not so wide-ly understood.

To over-simplify a complex process, programmatic advertising is ultimately a data-driven process of buying digital ad space at scale across multiple platforms to reach highly targeted readers from a very specific demographic with very specific online be-haviours that indicate that an individual is most likely to purchase the product being advertised. The ads are purchased often, but not always, through automated, open, real-time bidding with the ad going to the highest bidder.

There are subsets of programmatic ad-vertising where publishers create private networks, selling the same spaces and demo-graphics but to a limited number of potential bidders who pay extra for the privilege of hav-ing a chance to bid on the highly desired ad spaces and audiences. Those private networks also help publishers protect the integrity of their brands by limiting the type of advertiser with access to their pages.

Real Time Bidding (RTB) is a term that is often used interchangeably with “program-matic advertising”, but it is not a synonym. Real time bidding is a key part of the pro-grammatic advertising process — it is how the ultimate winner of the ad space is chosen. Programmatic advertising itself is the en-tire process of integrating customer and site data into the planning of an ad campaign to take advantage of algorithms that can deliv-

With the ability to gather increasingly sophisticated data about web user behaviour, programmatic advertising has leap-frogged into what is predicted will be the primary method of buying advertising

Source: Magna Global

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The ads are purchased often, but not always, through automated, open real-time bidding with the ad going to the highest bidder

Subset: Private networks where publishers sell space to a limited number of pre- approved advertisers

It is the data-driven process of buying digital ad space at scale across multiple platforms to reach highly targeted readers from very specific demographics with very specific online behaviors that indicate an individual is most likely to purchase the product being advertised

RTB or Real Time Bidding is often used in place of “programmatic” but it is not a synonym. RTB is the process…

Wait a minute! What IS programmatic?

It is one of the most widely used and yet least understood terms in advertising today

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tisements for specific products the viewer is looking to buy at the moment they are in the purchasing mode for that product. Talk about “qualified leads”!

Outside of print, gone are the days when advertisers will buy “full-run” ads that serve up products to thousands of people who have absolutely no interest in what the advertiser is selling. No more pregnancy test kits being sold to senior citizens or cases of beer being sold to active members of Alcoholics Anon-ymous or steak dinners being promoted to vigorous vegetarians. You get the idea.

Simply put, companies create program-matic campaigns that only buy online ad space when a buyer triggers their carefully constructed algorithms.

When a person comes to a site, his or her arrival is instantly noted and, if he or she meets an advertiser’s set of criteria, the algo-rithm triggers the instantaneous RTB process and the ad is purchased at lightning speed by

the highest bidder. The visitor is then, quite to his or her amazement, seeing ads that have them thinking “Yeah, I’ve been looking to buy one of those! How’d they know?”

As good as this sounds, there is a problem: Most publishing companies are dangerously clueless about how to maximise the potential of programmatic advertising.

The sudden rise in the importance of pro-grammatic advertising has caught most advertising departments flat-footed. Most publishing companies have no one on staff who truly understands programmatic adver-tising and how to put it to use in the context of all their other marketing tools. Addition-ally, programmatic advertising is technolog-ically challenging, adding to the difficulty of finding someone internally who can guide the company.

A new position: chief of programmatic“Six years ago they were selling a print mag-azine,” one magazine publisher told AdAge about his overstretched sales team. “Now they’re being asked to sell print, online, mo-bile, tablet, conferences [and programmatic]. Their lives are insanely complicated.”

Some publishing companies have created a special position within their sales organisa-tions dedicated to programmatic advertising.

Because so many advertisers and agen-cies want to buy media with programmatic ads, and because their budgets are so large, publishers cannot turn a blind eye anymore. Since they cannot rely on internal resources, publishers must consider hiring outside tal-ent as programmatic directors to figure out how to use programmatic not as a separate, secondary tool but as an integral part of the sales operation.

In the last nine months of 2013, The New York Times, Meredith, and The Washington Post all hired top executives to head up their programmatic initiatives.

One common feature of the portfolios of each programmatic executive is the training, education and support of the sales team. At present, that means the care and feeding of both their own sales department and their advertisers. The ad sellers need to educate their clients as to what’s possible but most ad

sellers themselves don’t yet know.“You have to prep your team to understand

how to integrate it [programmatic] into any sale,” Meredith vice president of programmat-ic sales and strategy Chip Schneck told Digi-day. “A key part of my role is scaling, which is getting people talking about it with clients and understanding how it can support a deal.”

“I work hand in hand with both opera-tions and sales, educating both in-house and customers,” Business Insider programmatic director Jana Meron told Digiday.

Some publishers are also getting ready by forming private networks within which to sell programmatic advertising. In September, five leading Czech media houses formed the Czech Publisher Exchange to offer advertising inventory from publications that reach 70 per cent of the population. The Czech Republic followed France and Denmark as the third European country where large publishing houses have announced collaborations.

These private networks or “exchanges” claim to be able to calm four of publishers’ biggest fears about programmatic advertis-ing: Taking the human element out of sales, eliminating the consultative element of direct sales, damaging the brand, and eroding price.

Publishers worry that their brands will be damaged because the highest bidder for an ad space might in some way be inappropri-ate for their content, their readers, and their brand. Publishers also worry that even the highest bidder might be below the rate they need to be profitable. They also see the algo-rithms of programmatic advertising as the death knell for the human touch so integral to the consultative approach to direct sales of advertising campaigns.

But programmatic advocates argue that it is no longer the dumping ground for remnant ad space. Programmatic is so powerful in de-livering extremely targeted, qualified leads that it must now play a strategic role as a crit-ical part of a publisher’s ad sales efforts. Sales executives are pushing their teams to bundle programmatic as just one element of lucra-tive “premium” packages. And, increasingly, publishers are also using it to better monetise their first-party audience information as well (more to come on that).

Programmatic advocates also argue that by

limiting access to the RTB process, publishers can protect their brands by limiting the type of advertisers who can bid on the space. The private exchanges can also include a price floor, below which the ad will not be sold.

And while some publishers have experi-enced revenue drops even with price floors, other publishers are reaping an unanticipat-ed benefit: price wars that are escalating, not lowering, CPMs (cost per thousand).

“Evidence shows that RTB eCPMs are in-creasing, indicating agencies are prepared to pay premium prices in an automated environ-ment,” Improve Digital CIO Janneke Niessen told FIPP’s Magazine World. “This highlights the advertisers’ demand for greater efficiency and reinforces the core value of publishers’ first party data, consumer access, quality con-tent, and intimate audience relationships.”

“Prices are going up, not down,” Hearst’s Smith told MediaPost. “The concept that RTB, ad exchanges, ad technologies and middle men are all in a race to the bottom is com-pletely not the case. The opposite is true. The pricing that Hearst sees is reaching a state of market equilibrium that is indeed fair.”

“We find that the more competition we see for each bid, the higher the rates people are willing to pay for that inventory,” Forbes Media senior vice president Mark Howard told eMarketer. “As a result, we see higher yield in terms of not just the cost per impression but the overall revenue generated. This has been really useful in helping us understand the true value of our display inventory as a result of that increased competition.

“It gives us a daily feedback mechanism

"You have to prep your team to understand how to integrate it [programmatic] into any sale."Chip SchneckVP of Programmatic Sales and Strategy, Meredith

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How does it work? !Individual reader’s online behavior can be tracked and captured and when that reader returns, he or she triggers an algorithm and is a target for an ad

“Prices are going up, not down. [It is not] a race to the bottom. The opposite is true.” ! — Michael Smith, Hearst Digital Media VP

Common problem: Few publishing companies have anyone with programmatic advertising expertise. !Solution? Hire programmatic directors to train staff and advertisers

Advertisers who want to reach that individual then instantly and “programmatically” bid for an ad space on the page the consumer is about to see

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What’s the difference between RTB and DSP? And what’s a DMP and can you use it with an SSP? Media Two Interactive founder and CEO Michael Hubbard published in his blog (mediatwopointoh.com), is a quick lesson in media buying space lingo:Programmatic media buying: Ultimately, it is the automation of the media buying process, usually through algorithms.Ad Exchanges: Where only remnant inventory lived but now also include some premium inventory made available for purchase through the programmatic technology. Supply Side Platforms (SSPs): Publishers’ technology platforms used to place the inventory on the exchange and focus on yield optimisation.Demand Side Platforms (DSPs): Marketer and agency side platforms that were developed to purchase inventory off of the ad exchanges in a programmatic fashion.Trading Desks: Agency side platforms that run off of DSP (see above) technolo-gy, but strategies, bidding and optimis-ation are managed by the in-house ad agency rather than a sales rep from the DSP side.

Real Time Bidding (RTB): The service being performed by the DSPs on the ex-changes.  Although it’s often thought of as a way to just lower pricing, the function of RTB is actually just as much of a function of bidding on data in real time in order to secure the audience an advertiser is after first.  ReMarketing or Retargeting: The ability to send a secondary message to someone whom an advertiser has previ-ously sent an ad to already.  An example: A user came to an advertiser’s website and spent time shopping on the site, but never actually purchased anything.  The advertiser could then identify this person via 3rd party cookies while they surfed the web somewhere else and an ad position on that page they were surfing became available on one of the Ad Exchanges. The advertiser could serve them up an-other ad with a message of “50 per cent off for all first time buyers, today only!”Data Management Platform (DMP): A centralised location for first-party and third-party data that allows advertisers and publishers to aggregate all of the information to that one location with the ability of then utilising it to target audienc-es on the exchanges or networks.  

Programmatic lexicon

that shows us where the volume of activity is taking place, in what industries, for which companies and for which campaign objec-tives,” he said.

Results: rate hikes, not lower pricesSeeing this advertiser activity also helps publishers figure out where to raise rates. “By having a much more granular view of what advertisers are paying for — users and segments — you are able to determine what inventory is most valuable and start increas-ing your rates,” Leon Siotis, senior director of programmatic video advertising platform BrightRoll, told Magazine World.

For the advertiser, the benefits are obvious: a much more targeted audience and, as a re-sult, a much higher rate of return.

“The smartest programmatic buyers may see ROI improvements in the range of five to six times over traditional buying, because they pay only for the exact consumers that they want to reach, in contexts that work,” according to Roland Siebelink, product mar-keting director for artificial intelligence firm RocketFuel.

“Programmatic buying is also effective simply because it makes every individual impression, brand-attribute lift shift, click, and conversion measurable in real time,” said Siebelink. “This makes it easy to set a clear and measurable campaign goal, and to op-timise the campaign toward that goal as it is running. Whether the goal is brand lift, click-throughs, or conversions, programmat-ic buying can help marketers reach — and verify — the maximum possible effect at the lowest possible cost.”

Another very real benefit of programmatic advertising is that it takes most of the tedium and labour intensity out of placing ads. The old insertion orders (IOs), delivered by mail, fax or email, required human interaction and lots of paperwork and time. Manual buying is inefficient and costly. On average, it can take up to 50 steps to complete a direct sale, and can require as many as a dozen people, according to iSocket.

Programmatic "greatly reduces the friction and costs associated with buying and selling advertising by eliminating many of the ineffi-ciencies associated with booking an IO, such

as sending over tags, setting up daily reports etc.,” said BrightRoll’s Siotis.

“Removing the need for out-dated, er-ror-prone tools, multiple pairs of hands, repetitive tasks and significant overheads and inefficiencies is what it’s all about: ad automation helps publishers by taking on those time-draining, money-wasting tasks and freeing staff to focus on higher value, creative commercial partnerships,” said Jay Stevens, general manager, international, of the online advertising technology firm Ru-bicon Project.

Looking ahead, some publishers are al-ready taking what many see as the next step in the evolution of programmatic advertis-ing: Taking their own audiences and selling them via programmatic advertising to other publishers and websites, becoming buyers as well as sellers.

By setting up what the industry is calling ‘publisher trading desks’ (PTD), these for-ward-looking media owners are selling their audiences and user groups across both their own properties as well as other sites. Using data management platforms (DMP) or other in-house solutions, the PTDs buy inventory from third-party sites and exchanges, repack-age it, and sell it to their advertiser clients at a premium.

The publisher trading desk represents a completely new revenue stream for creative, data-driven sellers – not the least magazine publishers, who often have high value, highly engaged audiences, and sell out across their own inventory – and are therefore well-placed to take advantage of this trend.

Condé Nast, The Washington Post and The

“You are able to determine what inventory is most valuable and start increasing your rates”Leon SiotisSenior Director, BrightRoll

Guardian all launched PTDs in 2013. The ad-vertiser wants the publisher’s audience, but doesn’t much care where it happens. Making that connection happen on their own and other sites is the opportunity PTDs can make happen.

What does the future hold for program-matic advertising and magazine publishers?

“There’s no doubt that more dollars are going to continue to shift to RTB as these technologies get more sophisticated,” Forbes Media’s Mark Howard told eMarketer. “I think we’ve gone through that first huge wave, and now we’re going to need a second wave to come in behind it.

“I think that second wave will mostly be metrics-driven,” said Howard. “We’ll see an

emergence of metrics that brand marketers will need to measure the branding impact of this channel.

“Over the next few years, I think a lot of the technologies that exist today only in the pro-grammatic marketplace will start to penetrate the direct-buy process,” said Howard. “You’ll see a lot of those efficiencies from a buying, execution and optimisation standpoint start to affect what you can do on the direct side, but I don’t see programmatic buying replac-ing direct buys any time soon.”

The consultative, face-to-face direct sales process will continue, but the discussion will include programmatic advertising now as one of the key elements of an entire campaign. If not, it will be a short discussion.

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The granular view of reader and advertiser behavior helps publishers figure out where to raise rates (the valuable inventory)

Programmatic also: !

• Makes every click, impression, conversion measurable in real time

• Takes tedium and labor intensity out of old ad insertion order system. From 50 steps and a dozen people to instant automated action

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YInstant gratification is a good thing for publishersMaking editorial content and advertisements shoppable creates new revenues and greater reader engagement

Peta Andersen

ou’ve heard of e-commerce—but have you heard of m-commerce? The new kid on the block, m-commerce is any kind of electronic commerce that takes place via a smartphone or a tablet, often associated with items featured in editorial copy; its par-ent, e-commerce, also encompasses desktop and other online purchasing options.

If you’re leery of the notion that m- commerce deserves its own label, consider these figures: 100 per cent of year-over-year online sales growth in the UK was entirely mobile-driven for the second quarter of 2013, according to consultancy firm Capgemini and the UK’s e-retail association, Interactive Me-dia in Retail Group (IMRG). Desktop revenue flat-lined for the first quarter ever.

Until recently, integrating e-commerce and m-commerce into a publication or website was verboten or at least certain to generate an editorial firestorm while also being labour- and cost-intensive.

For most editors, making editorial content shoppable was anathema. For decades, the editor’s opinion carried the weight of law and editors could single-handedly shut down com-mercial initiatives that imposed on their turf.

Not anymore. Even editors recognise that times have changed and the media and me-dia consumers don’t play by the same rules. Editors also recognise they must change with the times in order to stay in business.

“There is still some concern left about mak-ing sure that the content maintains editorial integrity,” shopping technology company 72Lux CEO Heather Marie told MPA, the US Association of Magazine Media. “We’re challenged with integrating the technology in a way that shows that we’re not changing editorial strategy; we’re just launching new functionality.”

“It’s not really a matter of consumers being concerned if a publisher is recommending a handbag for a particular reason,” Marie said. “If consumers like a product, we shouldn’t make it hard for them to buy it.”

In addition to editorial firewalls, exces-sive cost and labour requirements prevented publishers from enabling shopping directly from their content — until the advent, that is, of e-commerce middlemen such as 72Lux and ShopAdvisor.

E-COMMERCE & M-COMMERCE

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Until recently, editorial firewalls, excessive cost and labour requirements prevented publishers from enabling direct sales…

m-commerce: !100% of year-over-year online sales growth was entirely mobile driven in UK in 2nd quarter of 2013

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These companies and others like them handle the various technological demands of making a magazine’s site or tablet edition shoppable while producing easy-to-use, elegant shopping tabs and checkout options.

72Lux, the brainchild of CEO Marie, does about 30 per cent of its business with mag-azine media brands; its dedicated shopping platform is called Shoppable. “Publishers are increasingly enabling integrated shoppable content because they’re seeing that it’s great for the consumer,” Marie said.

Time Inc’s Essence, a monthly covering lifestyle, fashion, and beauty for black wom-en, recently partnered with 72Lux to launch Beauty Matchmaker. Available on the Essence website — and fully functional on an iPad — it’s a quick and easy product-finder, akin to services offered by beauty companies such as CoverGirl and Garnier but with a key dif-ference from the perspective of publishers.

The difference is that 72Lux’s platform allows consumers to shop directly within the Essence website, across a variety of ven-dors, including Beauty.com and Sephora. This ease of use, coupled with the curation offered by the magazine, makes consumers far more likely to purchase, as opposed to merely browse — and the ability to complete a purchase without ever leaving the Essence site may mean a greater degree of interaction with the site, Marie said.

Currently, the median age of the online Essence visitor is 41, two years younger than the magazine’s median age of 43. The high-spending, coveted 18-34 demographic comprises 37 per cent of online traffic.

Condé Nast International’s Allure is also experimenting — quite successfully — with its Allure Beauty Product Finder app. Free and available across all major platforms, the app boasts 30,000 downloads to date.

ShopAdvisor, which touts itself as a shop-ping experience company, is similar to 72Lux but with a distinguishing feature: the ability to delay gratification.

Allure and ShopAdvisor recognised that not every reader is always in a position to purchase items immediately, but magazines and advertisers don’t want to lose them as customers. Enter the “watch list.”

The ShopAdvisor technology enables read-ers to add items to their “watch list” which will trigger email alerts when an item’s price drops or an out-of-stock item becomes available. The list is also there for when the consumer has the resources to make the pur-chase. The consumer can access his or her list via a mobile device, enabling them to call it up when they are shopping in a store.

According to ShopAdvisor, more than 90 per cent of users respond to these post-discovery notifications, establishing significant ongoing engagement.

In an interview with Mobile Marketer, Sho-pAdvisor CEO Scott Cooper explained the company’s natural shopping model. “Today’s consumer goes on a discovery journey when shopping. They do not distinguish between editorial and advertising, both forms of con-tent are equally valuable when learning about and researching their consideration set of products. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to shop-enable both.”

Time Inc’s All You is working with Shop- Advisor — specifically to target its bargain

-hunting audience. A joint survey conducted by All You and the Insight Strategy Group discov-ered that many women spend time researching product deals on smartphones and tablets.

“Ninety percent of women in the survey think of themselves as smart bargain shop-pers,” deputy editor George Kimmerling told Folio. At present, the focus is entirely on creat-ing that all-important engagement. According to Kimmerling, the magazine isn’t closing off advertising opportunities, but is currently more focused on metrics and how readers interact with the magazine’s new shopability.

Condé Nast’s Allure also implemented the ShopAdvisor platform last year, starting with the September issue. An unobtrusive yet easy-to-spot “Shop” or “Buy it now” but-ton appeared at the end of a review or at the top of shoppable ads. The issue included 64 shoppable pages (60 editorial pages and four advertisements) featuring brands such as CoverGirl, Bare Minerals, Macy’s, Sephora, and Shiseido.

“While we are still early in our commercial rollout, we have seen some surprising trends,” Cooper continued. “For example, we’re seeing consistently that when a publisher makes editorial and advertising shoppable, their readers are spending more time engaging with those ads — although both have stron-ger engagement rates and time spent than non-shoppable content… It demonstrates the importance of lighting up the brand across the entire publication and reinforces the idea that the consumer is going on a discovery journey where the type of content, or medium for that matter, is irrelevant at that stage of their consideration process.”

And lest anyone thinks e- and m-com-merce are only for magazines looking to make up for revenue losses, Time Inc’s Sports Illustrated Golf Group in January 2014 began offering buying opportunities to its readers. The Golf Group’s premier title, Golf Magazine, subsequently achieved a 12 per cent year-over-year gain in ad pages, according to MPA.

E-COMMERCE & M-COMMERCE E-COMMERCE & M-COMMERCE

of women in the surveythink of themselvesas smart bargain shoppers90%

“If consumers like a product, we shouldn’t make it hard for them to buy it.”Heather Marie72Lux CEO

Lewis D’Vor-kin

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Conde Nast’s Allure worked with ShopAdvisor to build a shopping experience with a twist: delayed gratification via a “watch list” that sends emails when the item’s price drops or an out-of-stock item becomes available (> 90% act!)

When a publisher makes editorial and advertising shoppable, readers spend more time engaging with the content

Time Inc.’s Essence partnered with 72Lux to launch Beauty Matchmaker, enabling web and iPad visitors to use a quick and easy product finder, shopping within Essence across a variety of vendors and completing purchases without leaving Essence

I

It’s showtimeMagazines discovering there’s money to be made using their “power to convene”

Eluz Vilchez

n an increasingly digital world where print advertising revenues continue to decline, where do you suppose magazines would turn for new revenue?

You probably would not have guessed “live events”. But that’s one of the increasingly at-tractive answers in the search for new sources of revenue.

“Saying the conference industry has exploded is not an exaggeration,” BizBash founder David Adler told Digiday. “The in-dustry has increased tenfold in the past few years. Twenty percent of marketing budgets in general are face-to-face events.”

The motivation is clear. Print revenue con-tinues to shrink — down four per cent in the

US in 2013 which was at least better than the 8 per cent decline in 2012. From 2008 to 2012, advertising pages in the US were down 32 per cent. And while digital revenues are on the rise — a 25 per cent increase in the US in the first half of 2013 — they do not come close to replacing the print losses. Thus publishers must find new sources of revenue.

Enter events. “The economics of a conference are as-

tounding — create something extraordinary, and people will pay anything to be there,” Cindy Gallup, former chair of the US branch of advertising firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty, told Digiday.

But ticket revenue isn’t the only source of

new income from events. If the audience is desirable, advertisers want face-to-face access to them, and they will pay for the privilege.

When Interior Design launched its “Giants of Design” event, it attracted more than 177 companies as event sponsors, each paying handsomely for the opportunity to connect directly with potential customers.

The new revenue doesn’t stop there, either.“Many of our events sponsorships require

a certain amount of business with us in print and digital advertising revenue, so we drive sales across platforms,” Interior Design event director Rachel Long told Digiday. “We offer advertisers new ways to connect with cus-tomers and prospects, and bolster their sales

WIRED added a third day to its annual flagship event, “WIRED 2014,” calling it “WIRED/Next Generation” and inviting 12-18 year olds

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Events deliver: • Ticket revenue • Advertiser sponsors • Print & digital advertising

With print revenue continuing to decline and digital not growing fast enough, events can fill the gap. !And provide much more….

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and marketing efforts to a targeted audience.”“An event platform allows our readers to

engage with the brands they admire, while our advertisers value the chance to get their products and services in front of new cus-tomers,” said Ebner Publishing Group CEO, Gerrit Klein.

“Everyone is getting into the game because it is a good business, and it definitely has better margins, when done right, than the regular equation of journalism and writing,” TechCrunch COO Ned Desmond told The New York Times. TechCrunch itself is expanding its successful “Disrupt” conferences overseas.

Magazines succeeding at eventsHere are some of the magazines successfully enhancing their revenue stream with events and conferences:

1 Lucky magazine launched the Lucky FABB (Fashion And Beauty Blog) conference in New York City in 2011. Since then, it’s held two more in NYC and two in LA. It’s a conference with a twist: Attendees must apply to get into to the invitation-only event… All legitimate fashion bloggers who apply are invited and everyone who applies automatically becomes a member of the “Lucky Community.” In that Community, “users from all over the world

share their style tips, outfits and beauty secrets, according to the company. It’s also where they are acces-sible to the magazine and its advertisers.

“From my experi-ence, I knew confer-ences and live events

were a big revenue generator,” Lucky director of digital content Caroline Waxler told Digi-day. “There’s something special about live events and the FABB conference immediately became the big, shiny, attractive thing to sell to advertisers. It pushed a lot of revenue to the magazine.”

2 Wired is trying to become a serious player in the magazine event field. The company’s fourth flagship conference, “Wired2014,” will be “a two-day haven of disruptive thinking and radical ideas,” according to the company. Last year, Wired added a third day to its pre-mier event, targeting 12-18 year olds and calling it “Wired/Next Generation”. This year, Wired will hold the second of yet another conference the company launched last year, “WiredMoney.” And this year, Wired is launching yet another new conference, “WiredHealth”.3 Runner’s World hosts a three-race weekend event including running clinics tailored to meeting their readers’ running needs as well as Q&A sessions with the editors.4 “The New Yorker Festival”, which Gawker

calls “the Lollapalooza for the urban intelli-gentsia” (referring to the annual alternative music festival in the US), has been running for 14 years and is a wildly popular event in NYC.5 Ebner Publishing’s WatchTime now gen-erates 30 per cent of its revenues from events and hosts the largest luxury watch events in the US in five cities in exclusive venues. The magazine also hosts boutique events at high-end watch stores. Watchtime is turning the magazine into an event brand. “We host very successful small exclusive dinner events with selected attendees, where revenue comes solely from the sponsoring partner,” said Ebner Publishing International managing director and publisher Dominik Grau. There are other events with hundreds of guests in half a dozen cities, where revenue comes from guest fees and sponsors,” said Grau. “Those events started more than ten years ago but have seen rapid growth in the past three years.”6 Fashion magazine Elle is partnering with Selfridges’ Denim Studio in London for an event in what is purported to be the world’s biggest denim department — 2,415m2 (26,000ft2) of space dedicated to denim. Elle is inviting more than 250 in-person guests and all of their readers via digital media to get styling tips, watch a cover shoot, listen to a Q&A with Elle editors, and catch a review of some of the 11,000 pairs of jeans and denim accessories on the floor. The in-store activities will be enhanced by content across Elle’s mul-

“Create something extraordinary, and people will pay anything to be there.”Cindy GallupFormer chair of Bartle Bogle Hegarty

EVENTS & CONFERENCES EVENTS & CONFERENCES

5 1 9

4

1083

6

7

tiple print and digital platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Vine. The overall campaign is expected to reach more than 1.5 million readers and followers in the UK.

7 Last June, The Huffington Post held its first “Third Metric” women’s conference in found-er Ariana Huffington’s apartment to discuss redefining success and reducing stress for women. In short order, Huffington held sim-ilarly small follow-up events in London, Ha-waii, Munich, and New York City. Now, hav-ing created exclusivity and demand, the company is ratcheting up in 2014, taking the show on the road again but this time to ven-ues holding 2-3,000 attendees. 8 Last fall, Cosmopolitan announced that it would launch two conferences in 2014 focused on women in their 20s, “Cosmo Live” and “Cosmo for Latinas Live”. Aiming to attract

2,000 young women, the two-day events will address personal and professional issues im-portant to millennial women. 9 Hearst magazines also announced two other new conferences for 2014: Food Network Magazine’s new “Food Network in Concert”, a Chicago-based food and music festival in the fall, and Town & Country’s first “Philan-thropy Summit” in New York in the spring.10 Atlantic Media is the magazine event go-rilla, hosting more than 200 events a year (see next page), including week-long con-ferences, dinners, festivals, social gather-ings, high-profile Q&As, round-tables, and more, and the company is expanding its events to Europe and Asia in 2014.

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“Everyone is getting into the game because it is good business, and it definitely has better margins, when done right, than the regular equation of journalism and writing” ! — TechCrunch COO Ned Desmond

Benefits of events: !• Promote the brand • Increase visibility of

brand personalities • Create new text & video

content, extending value of event for months

• Create news covered by other media

• Solidify and expand magazine’s followers

2 3I N N O VAT I O N S I N M A G A Z I N E M E D I A 2 0 1 4 I N N O VAT I O N S I N M A G A Z I N E M E D I A 2 0 1 4PAYWALLS

T

Walls that work Fear of paywalls has given way to a wide variety of successful strategies including video, tiered, registration, ad, and hard paywalls

Lily Yuhas

he folks who built the Great Wall of China thought they had it rough.

But they had a map, and people had, after all, built walls before!.

Twenty first century magazine publishers trying to build a different kind of wall — a paywall — have no roadmaps, no precedents, and not much time to figure it out.

The stakes are huge — something must re-place the devastating loss of print advertising and circulation revenue, and to date, that has not been digital advertising.

The challenge is daunting: To create a busi-ness model to replace a system that worked just fine for centuries… until the internet wiped it out. It’s tabula rasa time.

PAYWALLS

A paywall’s task is incredibly complex and delicate. Paywalls must:

Protect content Create new revenues Allow content marketing Avoid alienating loyal readers Permit social sharing Attract new readers, and Preserve what’s left of print subscription

revenueUntil recently, no one had done it success-

fully.To complicate matters, publishers are ask-

ing people to pay for stuff they’ve become accustomed to getting for free online. Ear-lier attempts were met with strident reader protest.

But free is not a sustainable business mod-el.

Over the last few years, publishers have run enough tests to know readers will pay for high-quality content they cannot get any-where else. Commodity content can and will remain free; high-value, unique content will cost money to read (like it used to).

The irony is that the same technologies (the web, tablet and mobile apps) that ravaged the traditional print business model now offer publishers the tools to test a wide variety of monetisation strategies from video paywalls to freemium apps. The end result could be a much healthier business model with many more revenue sources than ever before.

Where not so long ago no one saw paid con-tent coming, today two-thirds of surveyed media professionals believe that 90 per cent of online content will be behind a paywall with-in the next three years, according to a 2013

study by strategy and marketing consulting firm Simon-Kucher & Partners. That might be wishful thinking, but it’s a sea change and a good sign for those responsible for the bottom line.

The question has changed from “Should publishers use paywalls?” to “How can pub-lishers use paywalls most effectively?”

So, where does a publisher begin? The first step is to determine the value of

their content.“The first step is to understand the value,

and, how the value differs online and offline,” Simon-Kucher & Partners director, David Smith, told MediaBriefing. “Then understand how much people are willing to pay. If you have something very, very specific then they will be willing to pay more.”

Smith recommends two research strat-egies:

1. A/B Testing: Give your audience options to see which outperforms the other. “If you already have a paywall or an online business, then you can run A/B testing or price trials.”

2. Customer research: “Engaging with ex-isting and potential customers is very valu-able,” Smith told MediaBriefing. “This may seem like a no-brainer, but it is important, especially with potential customers who not only represent new opportunities, but are also not as likely to be users of your site and therefore will provide you with valuable basic information.”

Smith discourages per-day and per-usage

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Over the last few years, publishers have run enough tests to know readers WILL pay for high-quality content they cannot get anywhere else

The paywall challenge: !Replace loss of print advertising & circulation revenue and: !

• Protect content • Create new revenues • Allow content marketing • Avoid alienating loyal readers • Permit social sharing • Attract new readers • Preserve what’s left of print

subscription revenue

End result? A healthier business model with many more revenue sources than before, making us less vulnerable to change

The question is no longer: Should we, but how should we use paywalls?

4 5I N N O VAT I O N S I N M A G A Z I N E M E D I A 2 0 1 4 I N N O VAT I O N S I N M A G A Z I N E M E D I A 2 0 1 4PAYWALLS PAYWALLS

fees as they only deliver minimal revenue, are inefficient, and devalue your content. Publishers should offer full service to those who want it while offering others the specific sections of a magazine’s content that interest them. “It’s a good, better, best model,” Smith said.

Publishers are following Smith’s advice, and more, experimenting with video walls of varying length, premium subscription packages with regular gift boxes, premium story walls, tiered subscription models, and offline perks for digital subscribers.

But before we dive into the smorgasbord of paywall options, let’s get one shibboleth out of the way: Online subscriptions do not cannibalise print subscriptions. Paid-access digital content products draw a complete-ly different group of subscribers while also adding value to existing print subscribers who want to add digital to their package of options, according to a 2013 study of top US media companies by the Online Publishers Association (OPA).

The 2013 OPA study also came up with two more valuable findings:

1. Digital data cuts down on subscriber churn and extends subscriber lifetime val-ue. Publishers can observe online subscriber behaviour and thus predict outcomes of trial subscriptions, craft tailored offers, and shape unique strategies to keep digital subscribers for longer than print subscribers (whose be-haviour is not observable).

2. Making readers pay for content increases the value of ad space on those premium pages.

Some publishers with paywalls discovered they could demand higher rates for advertis-ing on pages with a pricetag. “We have grown advertising business every year since we’ve introduced subscriptions,” Financial Times website managing director Rob Grimshaw told Business Week. “Because of the data we have on our subscribers, we can guarantee that advertisers reach very specific, scarce audiences.”

Paywall options: Video paywallsVideo “paywalls,” asking readers to “pay” with their time rather than their money, are one way to bridge the gap between free con-tent and paid subscriptions. Technology com-pany Genesis Media provides publishers with video paywalls through its ContentUnlock service. The program matches ads to reader interests by analysing online behaviour.

A reader who clicks on fitness articles would see a video advertisement for running shoes, while someone who reads mostly au-tomotive articles would see a video spot for the latest hybrid car.

ContentUnlock also gives significant con-trol to publishers, enabling them to choose the duration of the ad and the level of access. A fifteen-second ad might unlock three arti-cles, while a thirty-second ad might give the reader two hours of access.

Genesis Media says the strategy increases advertising revenue, and it has the numbers to back it up: “The clickthrough rate associat-ed with highly targeted ads delivered through the ContentUnlock platform range between 1 and 3 per cent. This compares to a display banner comparable clickthrough rate of 0.01 per cent,” said Feuer.

It works because more than half of Amer-icans (54 per cent) will watch 15 seconds of a web video advertisement before leaving, according to a 2012 Poll Position study. Longer “pre-roll” videos are less successful — only 12 per cent of Americans will watch a 30-second video advertisement.

Another media company testing video pay-walls is Sports Illustrated, but with a twist. Instead of being hit with a video immediately upon arriving on a page, SI viewers are given a choice of video advertisements to watch. Campaign provider Selectable Media believes

“The first step is to understand the value, and potentially, how the value differs online and offline.” David SmithSimon-Kucher & Partners director

The types of paywalls:

Registration wall: Content is free if the reader registers with a valid

email address or social media profile.

Paywalls (Metered, Tiered, and Hard): Content is not accessible without a paid

subscription. Paywalls have varying heights: some

publishers provide a set number of free articles per

month (called the metered method) while others

put all content behind a hard paywall. Paywalls

can also have tiers: Digital-only, print plus digital,

platform-limited (eg, tablet-only, desktop-only, etc.)

Adwall: Content is free, but delayed for a set time behind a

moving or static advertisement. Revenue comes

from advertising rather than readers.

Video paywall: Content is free after readers watch a video ad. In

this case, “pay” refers to paying attention rather

than paying money. Video walls vary in length from

10-30 seconds, and the content can be altered

based on viewer behaviour with some services.

Video walls can also be metered, allowing full

access or access limited to a certain number of

stories over a certain period of time.

that if viewers are given a choice of ads to watch, they are more likely to recall the ad and purchase the product. SI and Selectable say 50 to 70 per cent of visitors viewed the videos in the SI experiment.

Other magazines using video walls include Maxim, Radar Online, and Guitar World.

Genesis believes media companies can observe reader behaviour with video walls and serve up a crescendo of offers leading ultimately to a subscription offer to frequent visitors.

“If someone is coming to your site through search, they are coming to you because they searched for a term and found an answer on your site,” Genesis CEO Mark Yackanich told Publishing Executive. “In the case of those individuals, the first time you see them, make them ‘pay’ for the content by viewing an ad. If they visit a second time, maybe they watch 15 seconds of ads to access five articles. The next time maybe they can only receive one article, and maybe on the fourth visit they get a 20 per cent off deal to subscribe to the publication” in order to read the story.

Yankanich warned publishers: “If you are dedicated to implementing a paywall, you will drive subscriptions in the first two months

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One shibboleth slayed: Online subscriptions do not cannibalize print. Paid-access content draws a completely different group of subscribers while adding value to existing print subscribers — Online Publishers Association 2013 study

The study also found: Digital data cuts subscriber churn & extends subscriber lifetime because publishers can observe subscriber behavior and craft tailored offers, shape unique strategies, and predict trial offer outcomes

Study: You can also demand higher ad rates for pages with pricing. “Because of the data, we can guarantee advertisers reach a very specific, scarce audience … We have grown business every year since introducing subscriptions.” — Financial Times website MD Rob Grimshaw

to all three.The tiered model is a popular way of easing

customers into the habit of paying for content. But it’s not the only way.

Esquire, which had been testing paid con-tent models for ebooks and anthologies since 2012, tried something completely new in 2013, putting a single, but high-profile, in-depth article behind a paywall. Instead of asking for a site subscription payment or putting a video wall in front of the story, Esquire put “The Prophet” article behind its own paywall and attached a US$1.99 fee for the 10,000-word feature. Esquire editor David Granger explained the fee to readers when they were asked to pay:

“This is the first time we’ve asked online readers to pay for a story, but for good reason: Because stories like Dittrich’s matter and they don’t come along often. Because great jour-nalism — and the months that go into creating it — isn’t free. So, besides providing the story to readers of our print and digital-tablet ver-sions of the August issue, we are offering it to online readers as a stand-alone purchase. Thank you. —DG”

Though the experiment did not pay off in terms of money, it gave Esquire new infor-mation about customer behaviour. “I think it was a loss in terms of revenue from having a paywall versus no paywall, but it was never

truly about making a ton of money. It was more about making this experiment to see if it would work and then learn from it so that we could use that information going forward,” said articles editor Tyler Cabot in an interview with Publishing Executive.

One drawback to story paywalls: “We learned that when you have a paywall it is harder for people to write about a piece be-cause they have to buy it first,” Cabot said. “Maybe there needed to be other ways to get a story out there before putting the paywall up so you get more chatter on it. Also, readers like to see reviews of the story before they buy, like they would buying an ebook. With a paywall there is no natural way to do that.”

Other media companies are looking be-yond traditional digital and print offerings to offline perks.

People magazine revamped its subscription options and created a high-end VIP subscrip-tion for $200 a year. VIP subscribers receive access to all digital and print content, as well as a six-month gift subscription for a friend, and gift boxes delivered to their homes three times a year. The inaugural gift box included designer note cards inspired by this season’s shirtdresses, an animal-print scarf influenced by the styles worn by Heidi Klum, and vinyl nail wraps that gave subscribers a glimpse at Rihanna’s style.

Once you’ve built the paywall, the next big question is how to raise prices.

That’s actually the easy part, according to Smith. “There’s a lot of inertia in going from paying nothing to something — it doesn’t necessarily matter what that amount is. It’s just the act of handing over your credit card details,” Smith told The Media Briefing. “Once you’ve done that, you’ve got over that hur-dle and so the normal rule of price elasticity will apply. Yes, you will lose some people when you put up the price reasonably, but not many.”

What’s a “reasonable” price increase? The Simon-Kucher survey found that readers only started to see a subscription as too expensive when it hit £20 per month, or roughly US$33.

Now that the fear of paywalls has largely disappeared and success stories are coming in, it only remains to be seen which wall or which combination of walls is most effective.

and then plateau. Six months to a year later you will be adding as you lose subscribers. You need to look at customer [engagement] and pricing strategy. Run the analytics and provide customer service while still providing great content. It seems easy but the answer is it is really difficult.”

In early 2014, Genesis Media began rolling out implementation across different publish-ing portfolios. Readers who watched an ad on a parent company’s celebrity gossip site could also unlock access to the same company’s food magazine site.

This portfolio-wide strategy gives readers more freedom while providing publishers with extra data on reader behaviour, enabling marketers to tweak their methods and turn casual readers into paying subscribers.

“In managing that transition, it’s quite critical that you have a single view of the customer,” said pricing expert David Smith, a director with Simon-Kucher & Partners.

The firm’s 2012 Global Pricing Study found that active pricing involvement from C-level executives correlated with increased profits, stronger pricing power, and better results from price increases.

Publishing companies must push past tra-ditional pricing comfort zones, and executive involvement is a key component in developing successful strategies. Publishers can start by ensuring one person has access to all market-ing strategies and subscription data.

“One of the most important things for a media organisation [is] having someone look-ing at pricing who has a single view of the customer. Someone who can stand back and look across your website, your print offerings, and make sure you have a holistic view,” said Smith.

Pricing strategies should not be developed in isolation just for print offerings or just dig-ital content. Smith advocates taking a com-prehensive view in order to create paywalls of varying heights to match the reader’s needs.

These integrated strategies are already paying off for some publishers.

The New York Times offers a three-level plan. The lowest level allows access to NY-Times.com and the smartphone apps. The next price level swaps smartphone apps for tablet apps, while the highest level provides access

People magazine created a high-end VIP subscription for $200 a year that provides full print and digital access as well as a six-month gift subscription for a friend and gift boxes delivered to their homes three times a year with high-end items.

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Types of paywalls: !1. Registration walls: Content

in trade for email address 2. Metered, tiered, hard walls:

Limited stories free, limited types of stories, full wall

3. Ad walls: Watch an ad first 4. Video walls: Paying with

their time. Can be metered 5. Membership walls: Put

special content, privileges behind wall

2 3I N N O VAT I O N S I N M A G A Z I N E M E D I A 2 0 1 4 I N N O VAT I O N S I N M A G A Z I N E M E D I A 2 0 1 4 ADVERTISING: PRINT-DIGITAL INNOVATIONSADVERTISING: PRINT-DIGITAL INNOVATIONS

he most compelling magazine media adver-tisements of 2013 blended print with digital to create interactive experiences for readers.

That’s not to say there weren’t powerful print ads and dynamic digital ads, but the combination of print and digital utilised the power of both platforms and tickled the imag-inations of readers and clients alike.

The imaginative geniuses at magazines and ad agencies surprised consumers yet again in 2013 with advertisements that brought print pages to life with music, wifi hotspots, solar-powered mobile chargers, instant tele-communications, and even a colour-changing smartphone.

T

Digital & print:Better togetherAds using print to create a multimedia experience dazzled readers

John Wilpers

The imaginative geniuses at magazines and ad agencies surprised consumers yet again in 2013 with advertisements that brought print pages to life with music, wifi hotspots, solar-powered mobile chargers, instant telecommunications, and even a colour-changing smartphone.

Here is an inventive mix of print and digital, Wired and Motorola used four small batteries, three LEDs, some plexiglass, and a series of buttons in a print page to let readers change the colour of a cell phone on a print page

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Blending print & digital maximised the power of both platforms

For example: !

• A print ad that was a wifi hot spot

• A print ad that let you test different cell case colors

• A print page that played music

• A print ad that dialed for an insurance quote

4 5I N N O VAT I O N S I N M A G A Z I N E M E D I A 2 0 1 4 I N N O VAT I O N S I N M A G A Z I N E M E D I A 2 0 1 4

A wifi hotspot in a print magazineFinding wifi hotspots is often an irritating challenge. Microsoft decided to play on that consumer need and garner attention for its Office 365 sales campaign by installing a fully functional (if stripped down) T-Mobile router in a cardboard insert in some editions of the 6 May 2013 edition of Forbes. The mini-router turned the print publication into a portable hotspot for up to five devices for two weeks. The device operated for three hours before needing to be recharged.

A magazine cover that plays musicGive a music fan the choice between read-ing about music or listening to it, and it’s no contest: Listen! Billboard Brazil didn’t force its readers to choose in an early spring 2013 edition. In a print publishing first, the

Billboard cover was enabled with Near Field Communication (NFC) stickers behind the cover so that all readers had to do was put their smartphone on the cover and they were instantly listening to a playlist of the featured artists — the bands that played at the Lollapa-

looza Brasil festival in São Paulo earlier in the year. No need to buy an app, no need to engage Bluetooth, no ugly QR codes, and no downloading. Just listening.

“What was most interesting is that it [Brazil] is a place where lots of people have modern phones, but they don’t know they have NFC capability,” Ogilvy creative direc-tor Fabio Seidl told NFC World. “People were asking, ‘We didn’t download anything and we don’t have an app on our phone, so how did it happen, how is it possible?’ People in Brazil never talk about NFC so they don’t have a notion about what the technology can do, so sharing that knowledge was a positive part of the trial.”

Try different mobile designs - via a print pageChoosing the colour of your new mobile phone while you’re in the store is a stressful and rushed decision, often regretted later. The salesperson is hurrying you along and other customers are waiting. Motorola of-fered potential customers of its Moto X cell phone the opportunity to try different colour combinations and see all of the options right before their eyes… in a print ad!

The advertisement was made up of four batteries, three LEDs, some Plexiglas, and a series of buttons. The ad allowed readers

to customise the Moto phone in 11 different colours, by tapping different keys to try out different looks. Roughly 150,0000 copies of the January 2014 edition of Wired with the innovative advertisement were made made available in New York and Chicago.

Get an insurance quote “by phone”…from a print adExecutives at the Dubai-based insurance agency RSA knew how difficult and horrible getting car insurance can be in Dubai. The Dubai culture otherwise is all about indul-gence and ease. So RSA thought they had a perfect environment to take its “Easy as Ever” slogan to a new, unprecedented level of customer service.

The company embedded a thin, light, custom-built communications device into an advertising wrap for CEO magazine that allowed customers to request a quote straight from the ad using only their licence plate, making the experience effortless.

Readers keyed their details into a phone-shaped device, which communicated with RSA’s servers. In minutes, RSA sent a quote to the customer’s mobile device.

In 2013, advertisers proved that the most powerful presentation is not digital, not print, but the compelling combination of the two for a memorable multimedia experience.

ADVERTISINGADVERTISING

“Lots of people have modern phones, but they don’t know they have NFC capability”Fabio SeidlOgilvy creative director

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Microsoft embedded a mini router in a cardboard insert in Forbes. Readers could connect up to 5 devices for 3 hours… and then recharge for 2 weeks!

Brazil’s Billboard magazine embedded NFC stickers on the cover causing readers cell phones to start playing music when placed on the cover

Nivea: Readers should not have to leave the beach due to sunburn or a dead mobile. A wafer-thin solar panel and phone plug in a VEJA Rio page charged dead cell phones

THESE IDEAS AND MANY MORE ARE AVAILABLE IN THE BOOK…

Which you can get at: fipp.com/Innovations

You’re thinking:

“This is great! I’ll just take these ideas home, give

them to my editor and ad director, and I’ll be

innovative and my future will be secure!”

Right? !

WRONG !

YOU !CANNOT JUST BRING IDEAS HOME AND TELL !YOUR STAFF: !“DO THESE!”

CC License Photo by by Tilemahos Efthimiadis, Nat’l Gallery of Greece

YOU !CANNOT!MANDATE!INNOVATION

CC License Photo by by Tilemahos Efthimiadis, Nat’l Gallery of Greece

NOR DOES INNOVATION!HAPPEN BECAUSE YOU HIRE A FEW !MAD CODERS & DIGITAL NATIVES

CC License Photo by by MariuszPriv

INNOVATION ONLY HAPPENS WITH COMPLETE ORGANISATIONAL TRANFORMATION

CC License Photo by by Cosmo

YOU CANNOT MERELY MAKE COSMETIC CHANGES

CC License Photo by by MariuszPriv

TO INNOVATE, !YOU MUST CHANGE:

•ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE!

•WORK FLOWS!

•ARCHITECTURE!

•JOB DESCRIPTIONS!

•STAFF MIX!

•CULTURE

WITHOUT CULTURAL, STRUCTURAL !

AND EVEN ARCHITECTURAL

CHANGE,

IDEAS WILL NOT FIND FERTILE SOIL

STATUS-QUO PROTECTORS WILL STRANGLE THREATENING CHANGE

“You can have the most impressive and effective built-for-purpose, tested-within-an-inch-of-its-life piece of technology on the planet. But if your staff regards it with suspicion, or refuses to embrace it because they don’t like the idea of changing their existing work flows, the project will fail.”! !! ! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! ! ! ! ! — Kylie Davis, INMA columnist!

CC License Photo by by Rob Gallop

HOW DO YOU CREATE A

CULTURE OF INNOVATION?

TO !INNOVATE, !YOU !MUST!SOLICIT, !ENGAGE, !& INVOLVE!YOUR!STAFF

CC License Photo by by Hubspot

• One-on-ones • Small group

breakfast/lunch • Town halls • Walk-arounds • Intranet

MEET!WITH!

YOUR!STAFF

ASK QUESTIONS:• What are we doing well?  • Not so well?  • What would you do if you

were in my job?  • What do you think I should

know, that I don’t know?  • Suggestions?  • What’s bothering you?

• Print-first • Committed • Old-fashioned • Silo’d • Unintegrated

• Process-oriented • Not multi-media • Not responsive • Small digital portfolio • Not multi-platform

• Complacent • Unfocused • Not 24-7 • Unaccountable • Rarely viral

• Smart • Passionate • Reactive

LISTEN: ANSWERS to “Describe us today”

• Digital-first • Committed • Modern • Integrated • Smart

• Reader-oriented • Multi-media • Responsive, caring • Robust digital portfolio • Multi-platform

• Aggressive • Focused • Accountable • Often viral • Passionate

• 24-7 • Fast • Proactive

LISTEN: ANSWERS to “describe what you hope for”

COLLECT RESULTS!DO MARKET RESEARCH!DO DATA ANALYSIS!TALK TO CUSTOMERS!ADD YOUR IDEAS!CREATE A VISION

CREATE THE VISION:

• Where we are!• Where we’re going!• Why it matters!• Why you matter!• What’s in it for you

COMMUNICATE THE VISION:

• Create teams!• Share leadership

with rank-and-file!• Report progress

often & honestly

SHARE THE RESPONSIBILITY:

AND WATCH THE TRANSFORMATION OCCUR

SO, HAVE THE

COURAGE TO

CHANGE!BOLDLY

DON’T !USE A !PLASTER…

CC License Photo by by Nathan Gibbs

WHEN!YOU !NEED A !COMPLETE!BLOOD!TRANSFUSION

CC License Photo by by MariuszPriv

IF YOU DON’T CHANGE HOW YOU OPERATE, YOU CANNOT EXPECT TO

CHANGE YOUR FATE

Juan Señor at OXFORD MEDIA MINDS25

INTEGRATION OF HARDWARE WITH

SOFTWARE

INSANITY: “DOING THE SAME THING

OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND EXPECTING

DIFFERENT RESULTS” — EINSTEIN

TO INNOVATE AND CHANGE, YOU MUST GET OUT OF YOUR

COMFORT ZONE AND !

DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY

SO, IN THE SPIRIT OF EINSTEIN, LET’S GET

OUT OF OUR COMFORT ZONE AND

END THIS PRESENTATION DIFFERENTLY

PLEASE STAND UP…!!

… and could I get a few volunteers to

come up to the stage, please?

LET’S ALL DANCE TO Ivete Sangalo’s “Poeira”

I have a prize for the best dancer! So, strut your stuff!

WHY DID I MAKE YOU DO THAT SILLY

EXERCISE?

TO EMPHASIZE THAT TO INNOVATE YOU MUST:!

Do things differently and get out of your comfort zone

So, in your next boring meeting planning things the same old way:

Play “Poeira” on your smart phone and get up and dance

That’s the kind of thing we do

We help publishers like these build innovative

cultures that deliver results

“INNOVATION believes you won’t fix the business model

without fixing the editorial model” because

good journalism IS good business

Don’t risk losing great revenue or reader

opportunities.

Don’t wait another year to get the latest

innovations

WANT MORE INNOVATIONS?

GO TO innovation-mediaconsulting.com

Oct. 1 and sign upOR

Send me an email and I’ll send you an invitation johnwilpers@gmail.com

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