Traditional Media Go Mobile:The fast-changing landscape yields challenges, rewards
As the cell phone morphs into a Web-enabled information and entertainment device, most leading print publishers have begun creating editions for the third screen. But can an old medium make the leap to one of the newest?
Matt Jones, director, mobile strategy and operations at Gannett Digital, Gannett Co.’s online unit, thinks so. Jones sees mobile as a natural extension of flagship USA Today, launched for road warriors 25 years ago. USA Today has had a mobile Web site since 1999, and last summer, Gannett launched mobile versions of its 84 community dailies and 19 TV stations. “If you think about consumption habits of newspapers, you see people taking them with them,” Jones says. “I think they lend themselves very well to a digital platform.”
From their handhelds, mobile users can text short code messages to the newspaper to get scores, weather and stock prices zapped to their phones. As Jones explains, “There is a certain audience looking for the information that USA Today produces. There’s an expectation on the part of mobile users that this type of information is readily accessible.”
Many others clearly see the potential. The New York Times launched a mobile site in September 2006 and in a year and a half has racked up about 15 million mobile page views per month. In addition to allowing consumers to browse articles on its mobile site, the paper harnesses a mountain of local data by helping users find nearby theaters, restaurants and other attractions and hunt for real estate listings by ZIP code with a few pecks on their phones or mobile devices.
Such applications seem intuitive for newspapers, which trade in immediate, hyper-local information. Meanwhile, some question the ability of magazines-with their rich visuals and long-form articles-to translate their content to a tiny screen.
“Newspapers are a bit different; they’re good at delivering breaking news,” explains Davis Brewer, lead strategist for emerging channels at Spark Communications, one of Starcom MediaVest Group’s media buying arms. “From a consumer point of view, you look at magazines for more in-depth analysis. When you look at what’s popular with mobile, they’re looking at the weather, they’re looking at sports scores, they’re looking at local information that they’re needing immediately.”
But others see the logic in magazines translating service and entertainment to handhelds, whether in the form of recipes, celebrity- sighting alerts or Maxim’s photos of bikini-clad models. Every magazine has departments that could be exploited, points out Joel Lunenfeld, evp, chief innovation officer at digital agency Moxie Interactive. “Everything that the magazines have built their entire readership on, these aren’t things people think about once a month,” he says. “It’s a way for a publisher to reach out to them on a regular basis. It’s invited; it’s less intrusive than an e-mail.”
Jeff Ratner, managing partner and digital director, MindShare North America, says magazines could parlay their trusted adviser status into shopping advice for consumers on the run. “It’s a great opportunity to tie back into retail,” he says. The fact that consumers are still figuring out what to use their handhelds for also could bode well for well-known magazine brands. “At my desk, it’s easy to pop from site to site,” Ratner says. “But if I’m on my mobile, if it’s music coverage I’m looking for, I’m much more likely to go to Rolling Stone.”
Laura Marriott, global president of the Mobile Marketing Association, says that while major magazine publishers have moved aggressively to create and package content for the third screen, they need to do more to get the word out to their readers that that content is available. “The big inhibitor today is teaching consumers how to use the advanced functionality of their device,” she says. “[With] mobile Web, downloadable applications, videos, your reach still starts to get smaller.”
National consumer magazines may not be a go-to for local information, but many see mobile as a way to provide services and diversions to consumers on the run.
Hearst Magazines boasts nine companion mobile sites for popular magazines like Cosmopolitan, CosmoGirl and Seventeen, with 4 million page views per month in total. Cosmo’s site has launched some clever features like Dude Decoder, a body language guide to guys, and Fake Calls, a call-back service that helps consumers escape from bad dates. (The service was intended for women, but Sophia Stuart, director of mobile for Hearst, says a surprising number of men have subscribed to Fake Calls.)
But the company’s fastest growing mobile site is the one connected to the no-nonsense women’s service title Good Housekeeping. That’s no surprise, Stuart says, given that the magazine has a total paid circ in excess of 4.6 million, and given its audience.
“They’re moms-they’re time-pressed,” Stuart says. “With Good Housekeeping, she can read about recipes or household tips in the magazine. She can go to the Web site and read blogs. And she can read those on the mobile site as well.”
Many magazines have gone beyond essentials, seeing that in addition to looking up ingredients for paella or researching features of a new car, people increasingly are using their phones as a source of entertainment.
So while the mobile site of Hachette Filipacchi Media’s Car and Driver has in mind the car buyer looking for trusted information, Hachette’s Elle and Elle Girl sites serve up fashion and celebrity news. “It’s really about conveniences and access anytime, anywhere,” says Olivier Griot, managing director/mobile at Hachette. “The typical consumer is someone who’s out and about and has 15 minutes to spare.”
Time’s mobile site has undergone two redesigns since it launched in November 2006, adding more light fare along the way. Page views to the site doubled after the newsweekly added soft news content like “10 Questions,” in which major news figures answer questions posed by readers, as well as photo essays and the “Quote of the Day.”
“It was a recognition that users really want different things,” says Scott Williams, vp, business development and mobile at Time Inc. Interactive. “In some cases, they want to know what’s happening right now. Sometimes they just want to do something fun, to kill a couple of minutes.”
Maxim, in addition to sexy pictures, offers games centered around sports predictions and ringtones for a few bucks per month. One of its more popular features, a series of four crude, “no-rights Super Bowl” videos (humorous vignettes starring plastic figurines), generated more than 40,000 mobile downloads. “You don’t simply take the book and make it mobile,” says Douglas Warshaw, chief digital officer of Maxim parent Alpha Media Group. “You say, ‘What do people who read the book want to do that are the same sensibility as the magazine?’ What people want from mobile are features, functionality and services.”
Warshaw sees mobile having widespread application to Maxim and sibling title Blender, whose young male readers are early adopters. “Our readers always want to know what’s going on now and what’s going on next,” he says. “They are on the leading edge of technology and community. So they are the premium target for anyone who’s doing mobile right now.”
And publishers are looking to apps that may not come to fruition for a few years. A handful of publishers are testing the idea of putting bar codes in print ads that can be read by cell phones. Hachette is using the technology, from a company called Scanbuy, to link print ads for cars in Car and Driver’s annual buyer’s guides to Car and Driver’s mobile site. Once on the site, buyers can get more information on a model in a print ad, as well as Car and Driver photos and reviews. Hachette plans to roll out the concept via other publications. USA Today also is looking closely at a similar technology, says Jones.
The idea of swiping a cell phone across a bar code may seem farfetched (even though newspapers toyed with the concept as far back as the mid-’90s). But publishers have learned from the Internet experience that they don’t want to be caught flatfooted when it comes to new ad sales models in the mobile space. “I think if anything, magazines have learned we can’t sit back and wait,” Williams says. “In that respect, from a mobile perspective, magazines have been much more aggressive.”
MOBILE VIDEO RISES
Mobile hasn’t reaped much money for print publishers yet. But as magazines and newspapers add video and other features to their mobile sites, that intake is expected to grow.
Publishers like Hachette Filipacchi Media and Alpha Media Group plan to ramp up mobile video. “Within the next six months, we will have dramatically increased the amount of video that is delivered on mobile, with advertisements either as pre- or post-rolls, or sponsored by clients themselves,” says Douglas Warshaw, chief digital officer of Alpha, parent of Maxim and Blender. “In every single meeting, people are asking, ‘What can you do for us with mobile?’”
For now, publishers are mainly bundling banner ads on mobile devices with print and online, and in some cases building mobile Web sites for clients. For a Nivea campaign that ran this year in Hearst Magazines’ Cosmopolitan, the skin-cream company entered readers into a sweepstakes if they signed up to get text messages from Nivea containing skincare tips. Hearst sold 40 mobile campaigns last year for marketers including JC Penney, Clinique and Adidas — a number of which included print ads with a mobile call to action. The publisher expects to double or triple that business this year, says Sophia Stuart, director of mobile at Hearst.
Just as publishers have seen their Web sites open doors to multimedia-oriented marketers, some see mobile as a potential link to new clients. “Being active in mobile gives us a chance to bring these advertisers into the Hachette fold,” says Olivier Griot, managing director/mobile at Hachette, which is eyeing financial services and packaged goods.
In general, publishers are still tinkering with apps. Time Inc. has downloadable apps for People and In Style, but the focus is on mobile sites, which exist for Time, CNNMoney and Sports Illustrated. Time Inc. plans to launch four more sites this year.
Researcher eMarketer estimates the marketing spend on mobile will hit $4.8 billion by 2011, up from about $1 billion today. But obstacles remain. Nielsen Mobile estimates that only about 16 percent of U.S. mobile users troll the Web on their devices. And there are no widely accepted third-party audience or return-on-investment measurement methods. “This is much like the Web circa 1998,” says Scott Williams, vp, business development and mobile at Time Inc. Interactive. “The question still remains: What does this mean for my business?”
STORMY WEATHER
When tropical storms knock out power along the coasts, cell phones often become the main mode of communication. So when last year’s hurricane season began, South Florida’s The Palm Beach Post was ready with hurricane and tropical weather alerts for cells and PDAs.
Handheld users could sign up for at least twice-daily updates created by the Post or text “storm” to the paper for an update at any time. During last year’s storm season, readers punched in 10,000 hurricane-related searches, says Dan Shorter, who until last week was general manager of the papers Web site, palmbeachpost.com, with oversight for the newspaper’s mobile activities. (He took over as president, digital media at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis Feb. 25.)
Proving that newspapers don’t need a big footprint to be aggressive in new media, Cox Newspapers’ 145,444-circ daily has made its entire classified and retail ad database searchable via its mobile Web site, palmbeachpost.com/ mobile — a rare feature for newspapers. Consumers can also search for products by texting key words to the Post, which will respond with results. As with all print media, the Post is still figuring out how to accumulate a mobile Web audience and spin it into ad revenue.
Shorter says that while newspapers’ mobile news headlines haven’t excited advertisers so far, the storm-text-message service showed that advertisers are willing to sponsor specific services. Florida-based Publix supermarkets sponsored the storm service last summer, with the chain promoting the service via posters in neighborhoods where residents would see them while stocking up on water and other supplies.
Based on the success of the Publix program, the Post created a lunch-specials text service. For a daily list of restaurants offering lunch specials, cell users can text “lunch” to the paper. For advertising a lunch special, local restaurants can be included in a list of eateries.
At a time when newspapers are struggling just to maintain their print following, mobile may be a way to bring new readers — including younger ones-to the medium. But Shorter acknowledges that getting the word out remains a challenge for newspapers.
“It’s a small but important and growing part of our revenue,” he says. “[But] the audience isn’t there yet. And a lot of people we’re trying to educate don’t read our paper.”
