by Sam Granleese on September 10, 2010
If tablets like the iPad are the next screen in the media evolution – they are going to need to have great advertising in addition to good content and a fair access price.
I think creative agencies hold the key to this puzzle. Or, more likely, the publisher and app developers themselves. In my opinion most creative agencies still fail to grasp effective digital advertising – if this continues, the publishers of apps will need to take charge of this role to ensure their clients get business results and so they as a publisher can maintain their ad revenue yield by keeping rates up.
There have been two mainstream news apps published by Australian firms so far: the government-owned ABC news app (which is excellent) and the News Corporation national broadsheet newspaper The Australian.
Content Pages
Navigation from section to article is by touching on the article. Section-to-section navigation or article-to-article (within a section) is achieved by swiping sideways. Pretty simple. A hidden nav menu on article pages acts as a contents menu and allows the reader to select a specific story quicker if they don’t want to spend all day swiping.
If tablets like the iPad are the next screen in the media evolution – they are going to need to have great advertising in addition to good content and a fair access price.
I think creative agencies hold the key to this puzzle. Or, more likely, the publisher and app developers themselves. In my opinion most creative agencies still fail to grasp effective digital advertising – if this continues, the publishers of apps will need to take charge of this role to ensure their clients get business results and so they as a publisher can maintain their ad revenue yield by keeping rates up.
Let’s have a look at the Australain iPad App – arguable the largest investment so far in the iPad from Australia by a mainstream publisher (aside from the commercial-free ABC’s excellent app).
Advertisers
Ads are added in between content, and only interrupt the reader when they are either swiping from one article to another, or in between navigating to an article from a menu.
News Ltd signed up four partner advertisers for the launch of the app: Emirates Airlines, Commonwealth Bank, IBM and telecommunications firm Optus. Of the four, only Emirates took advantage of the medium, incorporating a video TVC into their full-page ad (and demonstrated below). This is a shame, as the plain ads are unlikely to generate much of an impact for the $50,000 investment paid compared to Emirates slightly more engaging ad.
Note: I have only included landscape examples, but all ads automatically resize when the iPad is rotated to be in an upright portrait manner.
Emirates example
Other advertiser examples
Verdict
The Australian (ad capability): 3/5
Advertiser Executions: 1/5
by Sam Granleese on August 29, 2010
The HuffingtonPost.com iPhone app is possibly one of the best news applications I have used. The HuffPost, as both an aggregated blog and news website has the challenge or organising a vast array of specialised topics and blog streams. This requires a greater degree of user empowerment and control, instead of relying on a linear homepage for editorial authority. The manner in which this user control is exercised, as well as customisation and sharing functions, are detailed below.
Sections are colour coded and navigated via a scrolling bar at the top of the screen under the HuffPost mast head. By swiping the home screen for a topic (i.e. politics) the reader is taken to the following home screen of the next topic (i.e. media). This is a very easy way to flip between sections. The order these appear in can be customised in the app settings (see bottom of post).
When reading an article or post the menu hides automatically. It is returned when you touch the screen without scrolling. This provides a greater portion of the screen for the body of the article or post.
Articles can easily be saved for later reading or reference via the footer menu that also contains links to sharing, comments and text-size controls. The app allows the reader to comment using their HuffPost login or Facebook Connect.
Saved articles are accessible via the main footer navigation. The can easily be deleted after reading. Other settings allow the customisation of topics in menu, city control for local news, and user controls (such as landscape viewing, swipe settings, Twitter client for sharing and HuffPost login details).
Overall, this is an app that I personally feel is a better reading experience than the actual website because it puts so much control in the hands of its user. And while this is not necessarily a requirement of all news sites, for the HuffPost it is essential in order to navigate the myriad of content it feeds out every hour.
What was missing?
1. I didn’t notice any advertising and the app is free. I assume guess that HuffPost are waiting to v 3.0 before introducing advertising to the app after they build up a strong audience and can scale their offering to advertisers.
2. Customisable aggregation – I think there is an opportunity for HuffPost to allow readers to add a non-HuffPost blog feed or news feed to the app – so that it could take on the role of both publisher and aggregator. This might increase daily usage and app loyalty.
3. Night mode – or black-background mode. This something I have noticed creeping into other news or text reading apps that allows the user to invert the main body area of the app to be black-background with white text. This is less glaring on the eyes of the reader if they are reading at night. This is something the HuffPost should definitely implement soon.
Links:
iTunes link to Huffington Post iPhone app
HuffingtonPost.com
by Sam Granleese on August 26, 2010
The irrepressible Ben Shepherd asked on his blog today: ‘Can Google give mobile advertising the shot it needs in AU?’ He wrote in context of a vacant sales role at Google-owned AdMob in Australia (that I understand hasn’t been filled for around six months now).
How crucial is the sales representation to Google’s success in mobile? Well it depends on how they approach the challenge they will find themselves in.
If mobile media operates in a market, which I believe it is, then it is subject to rules of supply and demand.
Google, I think, is doing its job in terms of supply. In fact there is a glut of impressions and clicks available on AdMob that could satisfy a country with a population ten times Australia at reasonable costs per impact or action. Also the AdMob mobile ad formats are very good and not too far off the impossible-to-build-in-reality Apple iAds.
So – the real question is: where is the demand?
Agencies? No.
With a few exceptions, there is usually one pro-mobile person at each agency, mobile is not on the radar of media agency planners and buyers.
My guess is that a big part of Karim Temsamani’s job, as Head of Google Mobile, will be creating that demand by kicking down the doors of big marketing teams and getting them to demand it from their agencies.
They should.
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In related viewing – Business Spectator published a four-part interview with Karim Temsamani on their KGB video interview series today. There are no bombshells, admittedly he is new in the job after previously being head of Google Australia, but it is frustrating how politically correct Google personalities are becoming. Check it out anyway if you are curious.
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Links or references mentioned in this post:
- Talking Digital – ‘Can Google give mobile advertising the shot it needs in AU?’
- Business Spectator KGB.TV – Karim Temsamani
by Sam Granleese on August 25, 2010
My New Career
I haven’t written here for some time. Four weeks ago I started a new career with First Digital Media. I had a good innings at advertising agency Mojo & ZenithOptimedia and will miss my work family and mates there.
My new role at First Digital is predominantly in an internal commercial strategy role working on their media titles BusinessSpectator, Crikey, SmartCompany, ClimateSpectator and Eureka Report and an exciting new website starting next week called Start Up Smart.
I am a big believer of competition and diversity in media, and in investment in quality content. These are thing that are happening at First Digital and I am looking forward to helping them grow their audience, screens and market position.
Blogging
I have been reather absent from this blog over the past month and a bit. Mainly due to the change in jobs, quick holiday up north and distracting election (which kept me busy both as a punter and as a volunteer for a particular political party).
I have been committed to blogging mainly about mobile media here. My blogging will continue a lot more now, though you will notice more general ‘digital media’ and business idea related articles here over time.
iPad
I recently started using an iPad 3G as a reading device. As a means to consume media, I absolutely love it. Video is also great, I’ve been giving the ABC News24 app a hard workout throughout the election streaming via my wireless network at home. YouTube is also a great viewing experience on the iPad.
What I am finding interesting at the moment is the complete lack of consistency in usability and navigation. There are some well known apps by Wired, Popular Science and Marvel Comics I have been reading that are incredibly rich and all different. Conversely, the way you navigate a website in Safari, or use the ABC or The Australian news applications are again different.
I think the main point of confusion at the moment is, to paraphrase Jakob Nielsen, some publishers want to emphasise user empowerment (i.e. modern website standards) and others author authority (i.e. traditional linear newspaper and broadcast style). I’ll expand on this later in the week with examples and some results from a recent usability study Jakob Nielsen’s firm did on various iPad apps.
Links:
businessspectator.com.au
smartcompany.com.au
crikey.com.au
eurekareport.com.au
climatespectator.com.au
startupsmart.com.au
useit.com – Jakob Nielsen
by Sam Granleese on July 12, 2010
There was again news this morning that another casual game developer has been acquired by a large media organisation – in this case Tap Tap (and others) app maker Tapulous was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Disney. Further, Techcrunch reported over the weekend that giant social gamer Zynga had a ’secret’ injection of capital from none other than Google itself.
It seems investment in the casual gaming sector is really starting to speed up each month, with substantial sums trading hands and strategic positioning occurring between large digital companies like Google, Yahoo, Softbank and Disney’s Interactive Media Group.
To keep track of this, I’ve decided to crowd-source a list of investments made over the past 12 months in these firms – as Crunchbase doesn’t break down these firms into specifically mobile/social and casual gaming. I am keen to see how this increases, and get other opinions on whether these are worthy investments and are they paying too much (or too little) to get part of the action.
This table is below – to help me out and edit please click here and click on the ‘edit this page’ link:
Further reading and links below:
SmartCompany – Google invests $US200 million in social gaming company as industry heats up
TechCrunch - Tapulous Acquired by Disney
Companies mentioned:
Tapulous
Disney Interactive Media Group
Zynga
Google Inc.
by Sam Granleese on July 6, 2010
by Sam Granleese on July 4, 2010
The latest News Corporation experiment of broadening its news paywall to TheTimes.co.uk went live last week. Many in our industry are wondering, can the mass news brands replicate the micropayment success of specialist business publishers like FT.com and WSJ.com or the many of the mobile news applications already charging subscribers for content.
Hitwise has some interesting upstream and downstream statistics on competitor news websites analysing the impact of this paywall on Times readers. So far the impact has not been as catastrophic as some media analysts have predicted – see chart below of traffic to competitor sites from the MyTimes+ paywall splash. However the full impact after the inital 30 day special offer finishes will be more illuminating.
The full blog post from Experian Hitwise can be read here.
by Sam Granleese on June 17, 2010
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately using news and applications. I’ve installed and tried quite a few, so many in fact I filled up out two screens on my iPhone.
The Al Jazeera app is almost, but not quite, a single purpose news application. This is a good thing. Single purpose, in that it is the most aggressive of the International News Networks in promoting its streaming video direct from the cable feed. You can view news stories in text format (with toggle for Arabic and English) – but the kicker is in the live video feed.
The app itself crashed a few times when I tuned in, but this could have been my own hardware (16Gb 3G iPhone) which has been struggling lately. Nethertheless, the best apps are often the most simple.
As a publisher, if your strength is your reputation as a TV network then surely it makes sense to simply increase the number of screens you make this available on (monetising this through the same TV spots bought on air? In other words, publishers should first and foremost stick to what they are good at: in this case making the feed and app stable, and making as much video available as possible.
Competition is fierce in mobile news apps, so Al Jazeera would be wise to leave the image & text news apps to others from whom the audience already expects it.
Download it here for free: iTunes Link
Note: Using the app is reliant on having a generous data pack, or access to WiFi, as you will go through your data faster than usual.
by Sam Granleese on June 15, 2010
This is a beautifully designed, if not perplexing, application by watchmaker TAG Heuer that was released in December last year for their then new V4 timepiece.
Featuring an exausting amount of content that tell the same story on innovation: that the Monaco V4 is the only watch in the world to use mini transmission belts instead of certain pinion wheels in the movement. That there are very small micro-ball bearings uniquely used in the movement, as well as quad mainspring barrels on the rear of the watch. And that this watch is the special automatic winding mechanism that uses a solid tungsten rod that moves up and down in a linear path instead of the traditional half circle oscillating weight.
If the objective of the app is the educate the potential audience or increase consideration over several years, this may have a chance at being successful. The watch retails for around the $100,000 mark (much more than your standard TAG) so the sales target will no doubt be small, and thus the most immediate outcome of this application may be a positive brand halo effect.
Download the free 164 MB application here – iTunes link
Web link: www.monaco-v4.com
by Sam Granleese on May 24, 2010
How many people have downloaded the ABC’s iPhone app in Australia?
Well, Manuela Davo, a mobile producer from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, just tweeted that they had passed 700,000 users in Australia.
That is approximately 35% of all Australians with an iPhone (currently estimated to be 2 million). This would have to be the most popular media app in the country and with good reason. It is the most comprehensive, varied and frequently updated of all the news applications (think text/image, video, radio). It rarely crashes. And it is free.
Simple.
