Optimizing Digital Editions

Usage is growing but too many publishers are sticking to the basics. Here are four examples of publishers taking full advantage of their editions.

By Bill Mickey and Matt Kinsman
Monday, June 1, 2009

GOING CUSTOM

Cambell-Ewald produces a series of regionally-targeted magazines that maximize rich media features.

Digital magazines are increasingly being used as a custom publishing platform. Advertising agency Campbell-Ewald tapped Zmags as the platform for a series of regionally-targeted digital magazines as part of a Chevrolet Cobalt campaign aimed toward a young, tech-savvy audience. Each issue was geared toward moving prospects toward readiness to buy and enable them to link directly to the Chevrolet Cobalt Web site in order to price out a custom vehicle. Digital editions were developed for North-Central and South-Central regions.

“We focused on the users themselves and partnered with bloggers and Cobalt enthusiast clubs,” says Joe Ferraro, art production manager at Cambell-Ewald Publishing. “The idea was to get actual users to share stories, as well as feature local musicians driving the Cobalt to and from their performances.”

Campbell-Ewald incorporated rich media including videos of the cars in action and interviews with the drivers into each edition. The agency created a home page to house the digital editions and formed a relationship with some of the leading blogs who sent the page out to their groups. “We didn’t want to just spit out what we could do in print but do something that fit the medium,” says Ferraro. “That included a lot of flash-integration through which we created sidebars, callouts and pop-outs. The editorial was readable and we could expand upon that edit when needed by use of flash components to build out sidebars—we didn’t have to clutter the online page with a lot of text.”

Video was embedded in each digital edition much like using an image in magazine layout. “Placement of the video was integral to the magazine layout,” says Ferraro.

Juggling a graphic presentation with readable content was key. “We did this using the first edition of Zmag, and a lot of things we were doing were in beta or not released yet,” says Ferraro. “This wasn’t traditional media, we thought of this more as frames on the screen than traditional pages. When we redesigned it, we increased our point sizes to make it easier to read.”

Campbell-Ewald produced seven different digital issues for the campaign and the South-Central component ran for more than a year. The agency partnered with several Cobalt enthusiast events and says that the digital editions helped drive a four percent increase in attendance and a 45 percent increase in the number of vehicles at the events.

Each element of the digital edition had a specific purpose, according to Ferraro. “Nothing was ever done just because we could do it, we always had a strict purpose in mind,” he says.

KEEPING IT SIMPLE

Pharmaceutical Executive boosts usage metrics with its unique, easy-to-use design.

Remember when Google first launched? Its homepage was practically cutting-edge in its simplicity. A logo, a search box and a curious choice between a “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky”—that was it. In a sense, Advanstar’s European division has taken the same path with their 18,000-circ digital edition of Pharmaceutical Executive Digest Europe. By designing the magazine strictly for the digital platform, tweaking the layout in a cleaner, more accessible way and keeping functionality simpler, the magazine has dramatically increased all the usage metrics that matter most.

It’s a strategy that editorial director Peter Houston thinks other publishers would do well to emulate. “I think what everyone is forgetting about is the reader. It’s so difficult to read some of these things. But there’s no other way for us to go, so we’ve got to make it as easy as possible to use.”

What Pharm Exec Doesn’t Have

Houston says there’s no other way to go because digital is the only platform the brand exists on. At the beginning of 2008 the magazine went digital-only—“No completely successful magazine went all digital,” Houston explains. Accordingly, the pressure was on to take what remained of the brand and make it as successful as possible. Yet the magazine languished for a year as a 40-page monthly in a portrait format.

The digital magazine clearly needed a makeover, says Houston, who found that not having to also produce a print magazine gave him the time to experiment with the digital format. “Because we didn’t have the baggage that some of the other guys have with putting a publication out with an additional workflow, we could play with the layout.”

The first breakthrough was ditching the single-page portrait framework in favor of a landscape layout. “In a single-page layout, you have to use the zoom function. If you landscape it and increase the type size, it makes it easier to read.”

Houston also bumped up the frequency to weekly and mirrored a strategy more akin to email newsletters. Increasing the frequency meant they could get away with shorter-form content, too. “That gave us an opportunity to take down the page count. In print, a 140-page magazine works. If you made 140 pages digital it would take forever to load.”
Houston dropped the page count from 40 to 15 and immediately noticed a difference. The magazine achieved as many page views in a week as it had in a month. More of the issue is getting read too—60 percent versus 40 percent—and the average time spent each visit has grown by 20 percent.

The front cover was dropped as well, taking the reader straight to the content. “If I made the commitment to download a digital edition and then had to wait for the cover to load, well it might be nice but it’s a waste of my time,” Houston says.

The robust analytics that digital editions customarily provide come in handy not just for readership behavior, but for incorporating social media metrics as well. Pharm Exec has a budding Twitter account, now at more than 500 followers and, according to Houston, more than 5 percent of visitors are referred from Twitter. “We have grown our Twitter followers from zero to 560 in just over three months, and we see significant spikes in page views when we get retweeted by our followers,” says Houston. “We use Twitter primarily as a broadcast channel, pushing out links that take followers straight to content in the digest or on the Web site.”

Yet Houston points out that a digital magazine is one part of a larger package, that it works best when in tandem with the Web site, newsletters and social networks. “If anyone says the future of magazines is in digital publishing, it’s really in integrated publishing. And it’s using the digital channel for certain things. Twitter, LinkedIn and social media channels, email newsletters and the Web site are all part of the answer to doing this properly. Just having the digital magazine would be a tough one.”

BETTING ON E-READERS

Pop Sci launches a digital edition optimized for the e-reader platform.

Earlier this year, Popular Science launched the Pop Sci Genius Guide, a new digital edition which the magazine intends to be at the forefront of consumer adoption of e-readers. The PopSci Guide will be published quarterly in 2009, with the first issue dedicated to the home entertainment experience.

“We recognize that is an extremely important direction the magazine needs to go—we’re making our product optimized for the digital platform in anticipation of the launch of a really good magazine-optimized e-reader,” says editor-in-chief Mark Jannot. “We’re figuring out how we can optimize the opportunities digital delivery gives us and how to overcome the challenges of pixels on screen as opposed to ink on paper. Our goal is to integrate features that can be done digitally while at same time not undercutting what a magazine does.”

Popular Science also aims to make the Genius Guide a paid product and tested several price points from 99 cents to $4.99 with the first issue. “One of the things we’re emphatic about is not conditioning the audience to expect this for free,” says Jannot.

The Pop Sci Guide uses videos to introduce new features and offer layered sidebars without clogging up the layout. “We’ve worked with Zinio’s flash developers to bring pages to life with flash animation,” says Jannot. “In some cases, as you turn pages, it comes together before your eyes. We’ve taken the static, standard magazine form and found a variety of ways to animate it without throwing away the conventional two-page spread.”

Jannot stresses that each item has a purpose. “On a flat magazine page, you’re limited to photos, illustrations and text,” he adds. “With animations, we can start at a high focal length for a more general look, then zero in on something and draw the reader’s eye to what they need to look at. In the first Genius Guide, one of our favorite things was the ability to turn your TV around to show exactly where the plugs are. That’s obviously not possible in a flat, static magazine. We’re finding this platform allows us to deliver that much more clearly. We’re continuing to explore just how deep you can go with a magazine spread on this thing.”

Making the text readable without having to zoom into it has been a challenge. “The relationship with the screen is far less intimate than it is with a page in the magazine,” says Jannot. “We can’t use the same fonts and we don’t want them to zoom in because it’s intrusive for the user’s experience. We also want to make sure we keep the ads adjacent to editorial visible. We thought we had done a good job of optimizing the design to meet those needs, but we realized with the first issue that we should have gone further, especially with the font sizes.”
While Popular Science has yet to do a deep dive in to the data it’s been able to pull from readers of the digital edition, Jannot says the process is quicker and cheaper than print. “The level of data extraction is much more direct and deeper than from print, where we have to rely on reader surveys that are so expensive we tend not to do many of them.”

Popular Science hopes to get 10,000 readers for the first issue but Jannot admits it hasn’t hit the five-digit level yet. With the second issue, the goal is 50,000. “The first issue focus was on home entertainment system set-up which maybe was too narrow for a launch issue,” says Jannot. “The second issue has broader appeal.”

Jannot says that while advertisers were interested in the first issue, the publisher ran out of time before it got a commitment. “Advertisers had to overcome some preconceptions of the phrase ‘digital edition,’” Jannot says. “Rightly or wrongly, advertisers think of that as an inferior, static, flat version of the magazine. We’re selling this as very leading-edge. Before too long, we think a very large chunk of magazine circulation will be delivered this way and this is an opportunity for advertisers to get on board now.”

IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT BELLS AND WHISTLES

Premier Guitar relies on its digital edition as a critical brand platform component.

Premier Guitar is one of the few success stories of a brand that has used its digital version to dramatically increase cross-platform customer engagement. By aggressively using the digital edition as a free version of the print magazine, Premier has leveraged the digital version to pull customers deeper into the brand experience. Web site visits are up and the magazine has almost doubled its print subscribers.

While the digital edition has, in two years, passed the print version in readership with its 32,000 opt-in readers versus print’s 30,000, the benefits of having a platform trifecta—print, Web site and digital edition—far outweigh any concerns of one cannibalizing the other. “We have seen a 70 percent increase in our paid print subscriptions and we’re now pushing an 80 percent sellthrough on newsstands,” says Peter Sprague, managing director of Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Premier Media Holdings.

This point alone, says Sprague, proves his theory that “eyeballs are eyeballs” irrespective of platform. Yet, he sees each version of the brand meeting very different needs for the customer. In this sense, the digital edition is not simply a nifty give-away to boost international reach—which it does to the tune of 100 signups each day worldwide via the digital blow-in card—it caters to the way readers want to consume content at a particular stage in their interaction with the brand.

In other words, Sprague says readers tend to take smaller bites out of the digital edition, but come back to it more often. Print readers will visit the print version less, but spend more time with each read. “When you start adding up the short, frequent visits they start to look like the single longer visit with the print version.”

Additionally, the sampling nature of the digital edition readers leads them to covet the print edition more, believes Sprague, so he’s redesigned the magazine as more of a coffee table book, complete with heavy cover and paper stock. “When people can sample it in whatever format they want, it leads them to conclude they want their own copy.”

But Sprague isn’t content to simply let the digital edition act as a gateway to the print magazine. A sweepstakes challenge to readers to find three guitar picks planted throughout the digital edition for a chance to win a $100 gift card builds through-the-book readership. And videos—performance and instructional—have collected 2.5 million views among the 425 offered.

Moving Away from Shovelware

These tactics help make the digital version a distinct asset in its own right, moving it away from a “copy” of the print magazine. “We’re trying to break out of the shovelware scheme and that pace is going to quicken,” says Sprague. “There will be certain com-mon content across the platforms, but there will also be unique content to meet the delivery capabilities for whichever platform.”

Print, for example, will feature more “spectacular” photos, and more videos will be embedded in the digital version.

Custom Versions
Sprague is also creating custom, sponsored versions of the digital edition. A standard issue, for example, will alter its table of contents page to link to specific sponsor content in the magazine. The sponsor emails the magazine to its in-house list of artists, retailer customers and other manufacturers. “We charge them for this,” says Sprague, “but more importantly we get to sample lists that may not be available to us.”

These sponsored distributions generally net somewhere between five and 10 percent new registrations to the magazine.