Apps: Love Them or Hate Them, They Are Here to Stay

Apps are now part of the landscape. Finding the right ones for the audience will spell the difference between their success or failure for print publishers.

By Linda Ruth
05/21/2012 -01:39 PM

Discovery Girls has always been interactive. This magazine is written for “tween” girls ages eight to 12 and the publication uses real girls for models, and real girls’ questions, problems and experiences as part of its editorial content. The interactivity of its website and its apps are a natural extension of that which has always characterized the brand.

Jason Pontin’s recent Technology Review blog post, “Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps,” identified many factors that we have all been tiptoeing around for some time. Creating apps can be expensive; it isn’t so simple to adapt print publications to apps; the landscape versus portrait thing is a pain; too many versions are required; and yes, our readers aren’t flooding to them to the degree we had hoped they would.

Discovery Girls’ publisher Catherine Lee might respond by saying it doesn’t matter if you like apps or not. The real question is: do you believe that tablets will be around five years from now? That people will still be using their mobile devices? And, are you in this for the long haul?
Lee answers “yes” to every one of those questions.

“Eventually everyone will have a tablet of some form,” she says. “That being the case, we as publishers need to figure out how to provide content and reach our audience on tablets and mobile devices. We need to figure out how to do it while supporting our brand.”

Many publishers approach apps as digital versions of their print publications, the outcome of a create-once-publish-everywhere strategy. They see them as nets to catch the exodus of readers from print, to shift the readers from one platform to another.

Lee doesn’t. Her apps are created in support of her print publication and are designed to expand her brand overall.

Few publishers stay as close to their audience as Lee. Wherever she goes, an interaction with a girl between the ages of eight and 12 becomes a focus group: on airplanes, at photo shoots, in random encounters. At various stages as she develops her apps she gives them to girls to try out, and she tweaks the product based on their response to it.

She uses the product to encourage sales at retail. The June/July issue of Discovery Girls magazine promoted a free “embarrassing moments” app on the cover. With the issue barely on sale, the publisher has already seen 20,000 downloads.

The app on the cover encourages sale of the print publication at retail, while the interactivity of the app encourages connection to the brand. As girls read the publication they are more inspired to try the app. As they play with the app, their relationship with the publication is strengthened.

“These girls still love print, and they love the content we offer,” Lee says. “We want to offer our content on every platform so they have access to it. But we don’t just give them a replica of our print publication. We make it interactive. It works better for this audience. They want to be a part of what the photo shoot is about, they want to say ‘Hi’ to all the other Discovery Girls, and we make this possible in our apps. It brings the entire brand alive across all of our platforms.”

The important thing, says Lee, is to figure out how people are using their devices. For Lee’s audience, the iPad is more conducive to games; the Kindle is more about books. Through content offered on these devices, Lee has crafted a strategy to supplement and support the power of print.

“We’re reaching people through our apps that would have never seen our magazine otherwise,” Lee says. “All over the world—in China and Australia—we have girls who are using these apps. It becomes a marketing tool that enables us to reach as many people as possible, so we’re really reaching a global audience.”

For publishers still developing their mobile content strategies, Lee has some advice:

• Take your time. Don’t just throw something out into the market to get it out there. What a new reader is going to remember is the first encounter they have with your brand. What an existing reader will remember of your app is the first thing you put out.

• Do it right. Your readers have a relationship with you that is based on trust, and you need to honor that trust. Even if you just do a digital version of your print publication you need to do it well.

• Believe in your print publication. If you do, your apps will enhance print so your readers can take the brand everywhere.

• Your app is an investment. It will take longer and cost more than you anticipated. It might not pay off short term, but it will be worth it in the long run.

• Don’t turn your art director into a software developer, or your software developer into an art director. It’s inefficient. Find the right person to develop your apps and let your designers design.

Like apps or hate them, they are part of the landscape. Finding the right ones for the audience will spell the difference between their success or failure for print publishers.

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Linda Ruth is Principal of Publisher Single Copy Sales Services. Her book of case studies, "How to Market Your Magazine on the Newsstand," is available at BookDojo.com and at Amazon.