FIPP devoted two whole days to exploring mobile opportunities at their London conference in May and I was invited to moderate twenty-two sessions – exploring the mobile experiences of publishers as varied as Quartz, Martha Stewart, Time Inc, Immediate Media, The Daily Beast, Popsugar and the New York Times.
This is my guide to the latest thinking on mobile behaviour, its impact on content, where publishers can make money and what cultural and structural changes they must implement. I have also picked out some inspiring case studies of publishers seizing mobile opportunities from both sides of the Atlantic.
How mobile is changing behaviour
With 68% of people checking their mobile within fifteen minutes of waking, and 87% of millennials saying that their phone never leaves their side, no wonder this “remote control for life” is dominating media and information consumption. This is an impatient audience, unwilling to wait for pages to load or sift through irrelevant content to find the nugget they seek. They spend more and more of their time on social platforms, connecting with friends and colleagues but also increasingly commenting on and sharing content.
People switch seamlessly between devices as the day progresses and have high expectations of the user interface, set by global technology platforms. When they have a need to learn, find or buy something, they want it instantly at their fingertips, but they are also prepared to read longer articles, browse galleries or watch videos when the content is interesting and they have the time.
So for publishers, loading time and streamlined UI on mobile is as important as relevant, appropriately formatted content. And consumers increasingly expect to interact and contribute to the discussion, and, indeed, many may be part-time online content creators in their own right.
How content for mobile is evolving
The CEOs of both Hearst and Time Inc agreed that Facebook is now their biggest source of traffic, with Snapchat also growing fast. It was the same story for The Daily Beast, Popsugar and even Harvard Business Review. So, publishers are now producing content for third party platforms as well as their own sites, and the demand for highly shareable video content is exploding. Hearst now has its own in-house studio, and has shifted gear to a continuous daily publishing cycle built around new definitions of prime time, rather than a monthly rhythm.
Many publishers are moving away from monthly magazine replicas towards a stream of original and curated content, designed for mobile first. There’s a strong trend towards “useful” content, such as Powder’s personalised beauty recommendations or Allrecipes’ shopping lists and in-store coupons. And several are experimenting with content delivered as notifications or within messaging apps.
Why mobile marketing is built on analytics
Digital publishing is built around data, and digital-born media businesses use it relentlessly to refine and optimise their content and marketing. Popsugar have developed their own proprietary tools to track trends on social media, and measure the levels of engagement with their content. They also actively encourage influencers to contribute to and share their content. Bloggers and influencers are crucial to PR: when The Economist launched Espresso, they connected with 500 influencers to drive online PR, and when Martha Stewart Living launched on Facebook Live, they invited twenty bloggers to cover it in real time.
Where are the mobile revenues?
Now reach in itself is all very well, but where is the money? Polling the audience at FIPP Mobile, a range of revenue streams were being considered, from subscription to native advertising, sponsorship and e-commerce. Mobile news service Quartz is funded by native advertising, while Espresso is now profitable based purely on subscriptions.
Some publishers are also exploring micro-payments: Blendle has signed up multiple clients for its platform, and the Guardian is about to experiment with mobile billing for subscriptions or one-off purchases.
There was consensus that the growth of ad-blocking software, and the impatience of consumers, is pushing publishers to focus on sponsorship, branded content and native advertising for mobile products rather than display ads. As brands get more sophisticated about their own content marketing campaigns, this raises the bar for media owners, who need to develop creative ideas to engage their audiences.
How to make the digital transformation
The shift to mobile first is such a radical change of direction, it can cause upheaval and chaos in traditional publishers. Those who have successfully negotiated digital transformation believe it needs a big shift of culture. Hiring in members of the audience, changing the established hierarchy, appointing mobile champions and investing in new skills appear to help the transition.
It seems to pay to set up a dedicated NPD team to evaluate and develop ideas. Time Inc has a small Innovation Lab team who assess new ideas within a couple of weeks, and then develop the most promising. HBR has a team who focus on the future customer, and have developed podcasts and a slackbot. Time Inc also scans for acquisitions, such as its recent investment in Snap Fashion.
Case studies of mobile innovation
* Popsugar: Reaching 100m young women and with 57% mobile traffic, Popsugar keeps its content authentic by hiring millennials as writers, and engaging with bloggers. Short videos designed for Facebook have driven traffic, and they have actively targeted niche topics to maximise engagement. Popsugar tracks engagement very closely across multiple channels to refine content, and much of their revenue comes from retail partnerships where sales are driven by their editorial.
* Martha Stewart Living: MSL’s social audience is 9m strong; it isn’t directly monetised, but considered as marketing activity for the media products. Recently, they have created a series of demonstration-style, long-form videos, using products from a retail partner, all broadcast live on Facebook Live, reaching a 6m worldwide audience, and allowing viewers to ask questions of Martha in real time.
* Time Inc: Time Inc’s Powder (first a website, now mobile optimised) aggregates beauty product reviews and offers personalised suggestions, with plans in future to deliver a physical “beauty box” to subscribers. This is a clever way of re-packaging magazine reviews content that could be adapted to other markets.
* The Daily Beast: Audience growth to 1m readers a month for The Daily Beast has been driven by social media. Editor in chief John Avlon attributes this to hiring up and coming influential journalists with their own social following and focusing on original investigative articles, rather than repurposed content or clickbait.
* Quartz: In four years, Quartz has become a major player in world news, and has always focused on mobile, first with an HTML5 web app with very streamlined design and easy navigation between stories. Ads are native, and carefully constructed to appeal to readers; they have even had appreciative feedback from users saying they like the ads so much, they disabled their ad-blocker. In February, Quartz launched a new app based on notifications, a more informal way of sharing breaking news on the lock screen, again funded by a controlled quantity of native ads.
* Economist Espresso: The Economist wanted to reach a new audience, and developed the succinct, mobile first Espresso app. They involved 500 bloggers and influencers in the PR launch and have now reached 200k subscribers, with a profile that is younger and more female than the main magazine.
* NYTVR: The New York Times has made a revolutionary step in storytelling, by creating a series of virtual reality films. They distributed low-cost Google cardboard VR headsets to their newspaper subscribers (a nice use of print distribution) and provided a free NYTVR app to watch the films. In a few months, they have achieved 1.3m views and, thanks to enthusiastic sponsor support, the project is profitable.
* Allrecipes: Originally a website, user-generated recipe site Allrecipes has now developed its mobile version, with social sharing among its community, shopping lists and in-store mobile coupons, providing inspiration and utility to its users throughout the day.
* HBR: Harvard Business Review has been actively investigating ways to reach the CEOs of the future, by publishing articles on Facebook Instant and daily video updates on Facebook Live. Facebook is now their biggest social traffic referrer. They have also developed a slackbot and podcasts. HBR is now working on a new mobile product for managers in India.
I came away from my two days at FIPP Mobile a little bit terrified by the pace of change in mobile consumption, and the awesome focus of the digital start-ups like Popsugar, Quartz and The Daily Beast. How can traditional publishing brands evolve at anything like the pace, when they have a structural and cultural challenge on top of a steep customer insight and technology learning curve?
But then there are plenty of examples of “heritage publishers” making dramatic shifts onto mobile content, from HBR and Martha Stewart on Facebook to The Economist Espresso and, not least, the New York Times venturing onto new territory with virtual reality.
The ideas that really resonated were as follows:
* hire your audience, especially those with a social following
* design products for mobile first – make them useful as well as interesting
* learn how to do native advertising so well that your audience uninstall their ad blockers
* build your video production skills
* experiment with multiple social platforms and monitor which work best
* engage with and listen to your audience
* think about the purchases your audience make and how to design an e-commerce offer
* get nerdy about analytics and be prepared to keep changing
You have to admit, it’s scary, but also rather exhilarating. And do buy the Google cardboard VR viewer and download the NYTVR app to see a possible future for journalistic storytelling…
