Articles by: "Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove"

Inside USA TODAY NETWORK’s strategy to ignite video growth with passion brands

September 24, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Brands and companies are well acquainted with the power of video to communicate stories and drive consumer connection, but the real growth opportunity is in virality. In a market where 92% of mobile video viewers share stories they love with friends and family, it’s a smart move to expand the creation and distribution of video content that is both effective and emotive. USA TODAY is doing both, organizing and leveraging its portfolio of content brands and experiences to deliver video content that moves and motivates audiences at scale.

Kate Gutman head of content ventures, USA TODAY NETWORK

Peggy Anne Salz – mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove – catches up with Kate Gutman, who joined USA TODAY NETWORK, part of Gannett, Co., Inc., in July to head the company’s newly formed Content Ventures division. Gutman, who previously served as VP of Strategy and Digital Media at A+E Networks International, discusses her focus on revenue diversification opportunities and ambitions to extend the content and experiences offered by the media and marketing company’s niche brands.

PAS: You have just taken the helm at Content Ventures, a new business where you can draw from your expertise and experience at A+E — where you grew the company’s distribution and launched new digital products. What are your priorities and how will you measure success?

KG: I was quite fortunate in coming into this role because there is a lot of exciting work already in place here. My focus will be to put all this under one umbrella, and that’s a lot of what I’m doing right now. Over the next six to 12 months I’m also going to be focused on potential new acquisitions and investments that will fuel growth. We have strong organic growth, and video is an example of that. But then you have to go out into the marketplace and see what you do, or with whom you can partner, to get more scale and unlock the real potential of businesses that are growing fast. I’m reviewing our activities to find the opportunities to scale what we’re doing—where we can supersize growth to go 4X, not 2X.

PAS: You call out video. How does that fit in the content brands and experiences that extend the portfolio beyond USA TODAY and 109 local news brands?

KG: I oversee a portfolio of niche brands. However, I describe them as “passion brands” because they appeal to audiences who want to dive deep into the content. For example, the content group that runs our sports media division falls under me. This is a group that publishes 45 different websites — ranging from team-specific sites to sites about recruiting — targeted at the hardcore sports fans. Grateful and Reviewed.com, both of which were Gannett acquisitions. These are examples of passion brands.

Grateful is a site that aggregates content from food influencers, and also creates their own content, including recipes and videos. Overall, it’s a content vertical that is appealing because it opens up a new advertising category for us around consumer products and food advertising.

Reviewed.com provides reviews of products ranging from consumer technology to appliances. What makes Reviewed.com interesting and relevant to my team’s mission is the model. A significant amount of the revenue it generates comes from licensing and affiliate fees. In this way, Reviewed.com offers us a way to experiment further with affiliate revenues and models which are not a large part of our traditional business because that has been driven by ads and news subscriptions.

PAS: You could say you have a fascinating sandbox to play in, where you can explore content areas and monetization models.

KG: Yes, definitely. “Sandbox” is a good description of it. But it’s more of a “targeted sandbox” because I’m also very focused on our primary goals of revenue diversification and audience diversification. With Grateful, for example, there are more possibilities to integrate consumer brands into recipes and some of the videos that we do in the food space. With Reviewed we have the opportunity to explore affiliate marketing.

But there’s also the opportunity to go beyond this—and this is what we want to do in order to target specific passion groups looking for the niche content or niche information that matters. To engage these audiences, we’re exploring new kinds of subscription models and experimenting with monetizing live events.

PAS: Passion groups, as you call them, are universal. What are your ambitions to take this content to an audience beyond Gannett?

KG: One of my goals is to grow Gannett’s off-platform distribution revenue further. So far, our ad sales team monetizes our print products and our digital products including mobile apps. Now we’re looking at ways to distribute our content to other platforms, whether that’s with partners like MSN, or social platforms like YouTube, or Facebook.

In the case of MSN, our partnership centers on the distribution of our content, local and national news, news video and what we call our franchise videos–which are not news-related, but rather news-adjacent. MSN syndicates the content across all of the MSN sites and they compensate us for that content.

I think there’s a lot of growth in video, and right now we’ve got a couple of tests in the works with some platforms that we hope to have larger partnerships with going forward. Growing mobile video, both video creation and distribution, is one of our key targets this year, so you’ll be hearing more about that, and you’ll be seeing us doubling down on video and a couple of businesses and initiatives that are already in the works.

PAS: Video is the new black, and the space is crowding as more media companies and brands get in on the action. How are you going to stand out and—more importantly—appeal to the passion groups that expect a more personal touch?

KG: In the last year or two, we have created some very interesting “franchises,” specifically, HumanKind, AnimalKind, and MilitaryKind. These short-form videos, anywhere from 30 seconds to maybe five minutes long, are positive, inspirational clips that are created from raw news footage and user-generated content from our local news markets. For example, MilitaryKind focuses on feel-good, really wonderful moments that involve someone who is part of the military. These are stories that resonate and inspire: families reuniting, a father overseas learning about the birth of his child, just feel-good, amazing videos.

The videos move people. As a result, they’re wildly successful and incredibly viral. Some of the top-performing videos in these franchises have been viewed by 100 million people. Overall this year, our Kind brands have generated more than 4 billion views across platforms. I want to develop this further, and I would also like to see them living on social media, on partner sites, on additional platforms. And advertisers want that, too. There’s a big difference for an advertiser to sponsor these human-focused and genuine stories versus a consumer-generated video. The message is positive and uplifting—and that’s what the world and our country need right now.

PAS: Publishers also need advice as they seek to grow the content and relationships that will allow them to thrive in digital. What are some learnings or recommendations you can share?

KG: I think all publishers need to think about how they can diversify revenues and audiences. It’s more important than ever now, particularly since the traditional newspaper audience is growing older. It’s about thinking of new ways to diversify that audience, reach people’s passion points in new ways and grow revenue beyond advertising. Advertising comes in a variety of different flavors, including branded content, but publishers have to innovate and think about other potential revenue opportunities.

Freemium models, offering content as a free service with some sort of upsell, are popular and successful models in mobile and apps. Publishers can harness freemium models to provide packages where consumers can pay a little bit more to get additional content, additional features or additional services. Subscriptions are another model publishers can innovate and move beyond just offering a paid subscription to their core product. They should be thinking about what else they have, what other resources can be packaged or enhanced in some way to create new subscription offerings.

Perspectives | Revenue

The simple formula that works for The New York Times’ T Brand Studio

August 28, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

In just a few years, the number of publishers building out branded content has soared from 15 to more than 600—and counting. But it’s not just their ranks that have grown. Many publishers have expanded their capabilities, harnessing teams, talent and tech to help brands create sponsored content and capture audiences. The New York Times has gone one better, establishing T Brand, a complete content studio, to create unconventional immersive and artistic projects that go far beyond native advertising.

Graham McDonnell, International Creative Director for T Brand Studio

Through the strategic acquisitions of Hello Society, an influencer marketing agency, and Fake Love, a design-driven agency specialized in one-of-a-kind live experiences, T Brand has also nurtured new expertise in video, 360-degree filming, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Here, Peggy Anne Salz – mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove – catches up with Graham McDonnell, International Creative Director for T Brand Studio, to discuss the company’s mission to create dynamic and innovative content with a decidedly human touch.

PAS: T Brand is leveraging its tech abilities and acquisitions, but it also benefits from audience trust in The New York Times. How do you make the most of both without blurring the lines between content you create for your brand partners and editorial content?

GM: There is quite a clear divide between the newsroom and advertising; it’s very much church and state. We obviously can’t use journalists from the newsroom. However, the studio is staffed with fully qualified journalists, many of whom have come from our competitors. So, we have the strength of a newsroom, in integrity, and talent, and we leverage this for our advertisers. We also maintain a high standard for our audience. After all, the audience coming to The New York Times expects New York Times journalism and content. So, it’s expected that our branded content should hit those heights as well.

It’s also very important to identify branded content as a piece of advertising content. As soon as an audience feels duped or tricked into reading branded content it will lose trust in the publisher and—ultimately—in the brand. Our most common branded content pieces are labeled “paid posts.” Traditionally, that post was a destination. So, it was a URL that readers could visits via our website or via our app—content that was paid, posted and lived indefinitely. The aim was to make that content accessible to audiences. We still make branded content a destination. But we also make it a journey because getting eyeballs on a page isn’t enough. We’ve started to add what we call “branded footers” to each piece of sponsored content we produce. This way, when a user is finished consuming a piece of content, we offer the opportunity to continue that conversation outside our paid-post environment.

PAS: Branded content is a major revenue driver for publishers, but not all publishers have been able to get brands to buy in for the longer term. How can publishers make that connection?

GM: Storytelling is what we as humans do and relate to—going back to cave paintings and hieroglyphics. Storytelling is an intrinsic part of our human nature and the best branded content taps into that. The best stories come when publishers partner with the client and dig deep into the story the brand wants to tell. You want to nail the narrative first, and you want to think about the execution second. It’s important to tell a human story, one that’s relatable for the audience, and not get ahead of yourself by trying to figure out if VR, for example, might be the best way to tell the story. This is a point many brand marketers forget and it’s up to the publisher to remind them. No one knows their business better than our clients, but no one knows our audience better than us. Put the two together, and that’s when you get the best—and most sustainable—results.

It’s all about the ability to marry the storytelling expertise of the in-house team with the advertiser’s goal to address its audience and express its point of view. So, brands come to us with their brand message and they look to us to position that message within a story that will resonate with our audience. Of course, brands will push hard to put their message first. It’s up to the publisher to push back and put the storytelling first.

PAS: Does it requires some “tough love” to strike a balance between the two?

GM: Yes, and that’s what will drive results. For example, some clients come to us and say they want AR or VR. They want all the bells and whistles and all the flashy toys. But we tell them it’s much more important to think about the story first and then how to tell it. Even in the word ‘storytelling,’ the story comes before the telling. This means taking a step back to think about the type of story your audience will want to engage with, not the tech you’ll need to tell it.

We were one of the first content studios. So, over time, we have found what works, and what doesn’t. Over time we’ve seen that we have much more time spent on our content than on the content given to us by brands. Sure, we get brands coming to us saying, you know, “We have got this video of our CEO. He’s very engaging. It’s 32 minutes long. We just want to put it and you don’t need to do anything with it. Just put it on and people will love it.” My response is, “No, that might not be the best idea.” You have to put the brand message in a story people will like – one that will take them on a journey not blast them with details and stats.

PAS: What is the best way to tell brand stories?

GM: There’s a simple sort of formula that all good stories follow called the narrative arc. The first thing you do is introduce an element, usually a character, that the audience likes and is emotionally invested in enough to care what happens to this person. Then you present a problem or a hurdle, some sort of challenge that must be overcome. Finally, you reveal the outcome, some kind of goal or reward. The brand message is an integral part of the story, but it shouldn’t be too obvious. Just like parents who convince their children to eat vegetables by hiding it the food kids are sure to like, branded content blends the brand story within the story—because these are the things you want your audience to digest. Making the brand message part of the storytelling makes it much more palatable. Once you’ve got the story, then you think about the execution.

The biggest trap content marketers fall into is trying to tick all the boxes. Sometimes they are pushed by their brand clients, and other times they are pushed by their own ambitions. They put together a package of four videos, three infographics and loads of cool stuff for impact across every channel. Without a strong narrative to link each piece to the next the outcome is a Frankenstein monster of fragmented content. We have found it’s more effective to limit yourself to telling very focused stories.

PAS: It’s clear that branded content has to be emotive, but it must also be effective. How do accomplish and measure this?

GM: The best results come when you have a deep partnership with the advertiser and a deep understanding of how audiences engage with content. Knowing the time of day people are consuming content on their devices is an important data point. It’s part of a larger, much more data-driven approach to know when to serve the right content at the right time. Targeting context increases engagement. If you have created a data-heavy infographic that is best consumed on the desktop or tablet, then there’s really no point in serving that during commuting times when most users will be viewing their mobile feeds and devices.

We’ve also found that around three-quarters of our programs have dwell times above the Moat benchmarks for audience attention. So, not only are we getting people to visit our content; we know they are staying to engage with it. Moreover, a vast majority of our programs surpass the Moat benchmark for scroll depth. This means they are scrolling down and exploring the content. We have succeeded in building a narrative arc that offers a reward well worth the audience’s time and attention. You’ve really done your job if you can bring rather drab content to life and a great example of this is when a client wanted us to help promote a white paper. We decided to do it in a quiz format that would draw the reader into the content. We had seven questions and after every question they asked, we gave them a little snippet of content, a statistic related to the answer they just gave. It was a reward scheme, and it worked—showing that it’s a very underused tactic but effective tactic to keep people engaged.

PAS: The international arm of the T Brand Studio is perhaps best known for its award-winning campaign for UBS, highlighting AI and what it takes to be human. The native advertising included a chat bot, a five-chapter article and a documentary-style video, surpassing target reach and engagement metrics. Another more recent campaign for Kia brought the Cadenza model to life in a series of live events. Should traditional creative advertising agencies feel nervous?

GM: As I said earlier, the best content comes from partnership. We don’t usually offer our services like an off-the-shelf product; we build a relationship with the client to tell a story in the way our New York Times audience expects it to be told. It’s not a case of jumping in on every brainstorm or every RFP; it’s a case of looking at what the client wants to achieve and answering the brief with a strong journalistic approach because that’s our strength. A lot of the time we’ll partner with other agencies when we create content for brands. We’ve also worked in tandem with other publishers on certain program to suit the needs of the client. The industry is moving fast and getting faster. Therefore, it’s important we all learn from each other, not fight against each other for first place. The bar for branded content is high—and so are audience expectations.

Innovation

How the new Economist app helps its audience feel less guilty and read more

August 6, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

As the saying goes, sometimes less is more. In the case of The Economist, the breadth of articles and analysis, which have been its hallmark since it was founded in 1843, was starting to fall out of step with today’s time-crunched readers. To realign with readers who need to digest a lot of information while on the go, The Economist released a new mobile app in May that focused on heightening interest all of the content it produces. And, even more importantly, the new app was designed to demonstrate a value proposition that would help it retain, rather than overwhelm, app subscribers.

The company doesn’t just rely on a better UX to help readers navigate content. The Economist app harnesses human judgment to curate content and surface interesting and relevant stories. It also introduces a welcome element of serendipity into the mix. Efforts to increase retention and become a “subscriber-first publication” are critical considering subscriptions and circulations make up the lion’s share (58%) of the Economist’s revenues and continue to grow at 21% year-on-year. Peggy Anne Salz, mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove, catches up with Richard Holden, Deputy Head of Product at The Economist, to discuss the role of content choice in the user experience and the value-add provided by human judgment and editorial curation.

PAS: The Economist has 10 different apps in the Apple App Store. What are some of the differences in the apps and the audiences they serve?

RH: When we started out, the focus was to replicate our print edition on the digital platforms in ways that our users would find useful. At the time, the answer was to produce an app that was a replacement for print and a companion to the user. Fast forward a few years, and we arrive at Espresso, our real mobile-first daily update product and a great example of what a proper app can deliver if you put the user at the center. At that time, we wanted to offer a different user experience and go beyond just providing readers a digital version of the full Economist: It made sense because this was a different audience from the users who had embraced our first app and the full print replica if offers. Economist Espresso is a morning briefing from the editors of The Economist delivered to your smartphone or inbox before breakfast telling you what’s going on in the world.

PAS: Where does the new Economist app fit in that continuum?

RH: As we evolved, we saw the opportunity to find new ways to offer an experience that delivers the Economist in a way that provides value, but not necessarily the full Economist experience. So, we did quite a lot of user research and developed an app that makes it possible for us to do the job that users have essentially hired us to do when they commit to a subscription. They subscribe to the Economist because they want to access and experience the breadth of what the Economist has to offer, but they don’t just want the full print edition.

Following this is how we got to the user experience the new app offers. We didn’t just copy over the print edition and say ‘job done.’ Yes, the full print edition is available in the app, but it’s not the first screen we show the reader. We start by showing them what we call Daily Picks, which is where we give readers a valuable view into the breadth of what the Economist offers.

It’s not about providing breaking news. It is about serving up our analysis of what’s going on in the world. It’s about sharing stories that are interesting, informative—the stories our readers might not have known about otherwise—or even cared about—until we showed put them in our Daily Picks. This is where we use the power of our editorial curation to help users get that broad view of the world that they come to the Economist for—and the reason they subscribe to our app

PAS: It’s the “power of your editorial curation,” as you say, that adds value. Where do the stories come from and how are they chosen?

RH: It’s all within the Economist, but it’s full breadth of the Economist. This means, in addition to the full print version, we pull in and publish the stories that previously were only available on our website. The editor, the curator of the day, brings this wealth of content —all Economist content — into the app. And we’re seeing that our readers appreciate the mix. They don’t subscribe to read what they already read. So, a reader in Britain might want to read everything in the Britain section as a matter of habit. Our readers don’t want to go down a singular route to read the Economist. They value curation that introduces them to stories they might not read as a rule or even know exist.

PAS: Your readers look to the Economist to provide breadth, not just depth. But delivering it via an app is another matter…

RH: It’s hard to do in digital, for sure. In a magazine, people flick through and stop when a story catches their eye. It’s not as easy to do in digital. What we found in our earlier app is that there would be a considerable bias towards whatever was at the front. It was harder to get that serendipity because people had to swipe through a lot of content to get to the stuff in the back of the print edition on a mobile app. It was work, in a way, and users were taking the easy way out by reading what came first rather than swipe to the end. That’s the habit we’re breaking with the new app which is focused on removing friction and making reading an adventure again.

PAS: Curation is at the core of your app experience, but it relies on human editors, not AI technology. Tell me about the user experience.

RH: Our editors using their editorial judgment. When we talked to our readers, they told us they trust us to curate, and this is what they are paying for when they commit to a subscription. They want us to help them work out what’s most important or what’s most interesting, and this is what our editors do for them. That’s why we’ve chosen to use human judgment rather than go down the road of asking our reader their preferences or harness the technology to make suggestions or recommendations based on what they are reading.

We did think about AI, but our research told us users expect us to curate content. Perhaps, over time, we can refine editorial curation with the help of AI, as the two aren’t mutually exclusive. It may be that we can combine human judgment with AI in a way that still makes sense for our readers. It’s a route we may want to explore in the future. But AI won’t be a replacement for human curation. Right now, curation by our editors is the way we want to go. It’s what our subscribers pay us to do for them.

PAS: Beyond improving the user experience through expert curation what other innovations can we expect from the Economist?

RH: To be honest, I’m less enamored around new technologies like AR and VR and more interested in using technology to reduce friction. One of the developments I’m most excited about is the password management improvement we’ll see with iOS 12. It’s perhaps not very glamorous, but it will make it easier to log in to apps with the same password you use for websites, and that is useful for our readers.

As we shift from advertising, we have focused on subscription. In the future, we will be looking at commercial opportunities for the app. While recognizing that ads are a part of the revenue streams that we need to have as part of a business, it’s also clear the commercial experience cannot be interruptive to our readers.

PAS: What’s the biggest challenge in bringing readers content from across the full breadth of your print and online assets?

RH: We see that the problem our readers have quite often is managing to read all the content we offer. They find it quite hard to finish the whole thing every week. It’s a significant time commitment. And, like a gym membership, even people with the best intentions just can’t keep to the routine. People can start to feel guilty if they’ve got a pile of print editions on their coffee table unopened, or a load of bookmarks. So, rather than enjoying reading the Economist, you’ve got a situation where readers start to a bit guilty. We don’t want readers to give up; we want to make it even easier for them to get value from The Economist without feeling they have to read it all. That’s where our focus on curation comes in. It’s our service to make life less complicated and the experience more enjoyable.

Moving forward, we’re not going to just add more content and make it complicated. It’s not about adding new tabs to make it tough to read. We keep it simple and surface relevant with interesting content that helps them get value out of their subscription.

PAS: Maintaining a user-centric approach often requires publishers to adopt a different mindset. What advice could you offer companies based on your journey at the Economist?

RH: Stay focused on your readers, not on the needs of different parts of an organization. If we’re honest, all editorial organizations struggle because different parts of the organization will always want their content to be top, front and center. If you do that, you can end up with something that’s very bloated and hard for the reader to navigate. It can be challenging to move from that mindset—thinking you know what’s best–to providing the readers what’s best for them. It requires companies to put the user first, and it requires constant testing and iteration to find out what works, rather than making assumptions about what works and what doesn’t.

Innovation

How UPDAY’s unique blend of human and algorithmic intelligence delivers value to consumers, and the bottom line

June 27, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

The blind reliance on algorithms to sort and target content has resulted in a tidal wave of fake news. The resulting consumer sentiment is that all companies, not just Facebook, should guarantee greater transparency and accountability around the content they produce and the audiences they reach. While we have an opportunity to improve how we use technology to weed out disinformation, we also have a responsibility to invest in human effort to ensure the spread of high-quality news, not low-quality content.

UPDAY has embraced this view. The mobile news app owned by digital publishing house Axel Springer pairs machine learning with human judgment to deliver users personalized news and information aligned with their explicit preferences and implicit requirements. Operating in 16 countries across Europe, UPDAY has established eight editorial “hubs” where teams of local journalists review content from the top news sources to pick top stories and news consumers will genuinely appreciate.

Peggy Anne Salz – mobile analyst and content marketing strategist at MobileGroove – catches up with UPDAY CEO Peter Würtenberger to discuss how the company’s approach to news curation and aggregation has allowed it to build partnerships with publishers, deepen engagement with users, and optimize content delivery to a plethora of devices and platforms.

PAS: AI and algorithms have a legitimate role to play in matching audiences with information they will likely appreciate. But we also see what happens when judgment is left to the machines. How do you maintain a balance?

PW: Fake news happened because companies relied 100% on technology, and this is what we have avoided at UPDAY from the start. Part of it is because, unlike the Apple, Facebook, and Google, we come from the newspaper business where journalists are the most valuable resource, not an overhead. Axel Springer is one of the leading publishers in the western world, selling over 1.5 million copies of the Bild newspaper daily. This was possible because we relied on journalists. At UPDAY, rather than leave news decisions to algorithms, we combine the intelligence of machines with human judgment to deliver personalized news that doesn’t trap audiences in a filter bubble.

The algorithm aggregates news—what you want to know—by understanding your personal interests and preferences out of approximately 300 hand-picked sources per country. There’s a dedicated team of Content Engineers that carefully checks each source in each country before integrating it into our source set. The human—in our case, eight editorial hubs in Europe where editorial teams on the ground curate news and information – judges and delivers what audiences need to know. This is the news of the day that matters, and we rely on a team of trained journalists in their fields to make this call. It’s about serving up the best of both worlds, the best of what technology and humans can offer when they work together.

PAS: You are aggregating content from original sources and packaging it with the help of personalization for your users. Tell me about your audience and their usage.

PW: The feedback we have from our users since day one is that they feel safe and confident that they are reading what really matters to them. This tells me that a user-centric approach to deliver the perfect and personalized mix of stories is working out very well. Users are engaging with UPDAY and highly appreciate the variety of our media brands. Our sources include the top 100 publishers in each of the markets where we are operating in.

We launched UPDAY in March 2016 and last year we counted around 10 million users. Today we have more than 20 million users spread across 16 countries, which makes us the fastest growing news app in Europe. A user session is around 5 minutes. We have more than 3 billion page impressions per month. And we aggregate more than 3,500 sources.

By the way, the publisher also gets a massive amount of traffic from UPDAY, and in some cases 10% even 15% of their mobile traffic comes from Upday. We aggregate their content—snippets with headlines and some body text from the publisher which they provide as part of the RSS feed—and, when the user clicks on the story, we send them directly to the property of that publisher. This is what publishers appreciate most. Unlike Facebook, which keeps all interaction and news consumption in its ecosystem, we drive traffic to publishers.

PAS: You deliver personalized news across over a dozen countries and languages. Do you rely on translations and localization to keep it relevant, or is there something else at play?

PW: We don’t translate any of the content, because that wouldn’t serve the user’s interest. Instead, we serve the users with their local sources in the local language. Our local team of journalists—the quality control, so to speak—is responsible for selecting the 30 to 40 most important top news stories per day and curating them, so they appear in the top news section we show to the user.

Clearly, this isn’t the way all media companies approach localization. Some agencies prefer to translate content from English to Spanish, for example, in order to serve it to large audiences. But we don’t believe this is the right way. In our view, it’s a better experience to source the local sources and media brands in the local language. And that’s the beauty of UPDAY—and now we see that other products and offers are changing to do it this way, too. I can only say we have been doing it like this for over two years and it’s great to see how others are understanding why this is the better way to deliver news and now come up with similar offerings.

PAS: You have engineered the algorithm that you pair with the human intelligence of your editorial hubs to deliver personalized news. How does this combination work to ensure the delivery of more relevant advertising alongside this news content?

PW: Our editorial competence and the understanding of the user behavior enabled us developing an offering that addresses various needs of the advertisers and brands. UPDAY offers a premium user experience with a flow of content and integrated native advertising which does not disturb the flow. It’s not a layer ad that users see and click it away. It’s in the natural stream of the news stream, showing every sixth card on average. It’s also the approach that kicked our monetization forth.

We started with an offering for so called direct sales – premium formats adjusted to the needs of our clients. We talked to clients and agencies and they booked display ads and video ads. At all times, our priority was to develop an advertising offering that enhances, not interrupts the user experience, where we could be the platform that brings advertisers closer to users. Our understanding of the users’ interests plays a crucial role here.

We also integrated a programmatic technology into UPDAY. It became the second phase of UPDAY’s advertising. But we established our capabilities as an SSP. We did this together with AppNexus and with Google. We started with programmatic native advertising that was perfectly aligned with our content. On UPDAY every news card has a photo, a headline, and text— native advertising looks similar to that and attracts the users with a great strength. Together with the data, it boosts our capabilities to deliver the right advertising in the right moment to the right user.

PAS: So, what are you seeing –and what are the lessons for other media companies that seek to monetize their assets and audiences?

PW: Our click rates are beyond expectation because our experience pairs human sense with data intelligence. We are seeing between 0.5% and 0.8% for display and more than 1% for native ads – regarding formats which are non-intrusive and integrated in the flow of UPDAY news. We’ve also seen native campaigns where we get between 5% and 6% click-through thank to our optimization measures. Overall, this is far above the industry standard, which hovers at around 0.1%.

It’s a combination of our human salespeople with our ad tech that leads to a success. We have teams that go to the companies and brands and say, “Hey, we have a high-quality, Europe-wide platform which is a perfect place for your marketing communication.” Once the brands realize there is more than Facebook, they are on board. We are running direct campaigns for SEAT in five major markets as a result. This is premium advertising with higher CPMs on a high-quality platform. We rely on human teams to understand what brands want to communicate and work with them—and really show them–what is possible on our platform. It’s a dual play between people and a constantly developed advertising product, and that is the play that gets advertising right.

If I look out at many media companies out there, they are still filling their pages with what they have been showing for last 20 years. It’s nothing more than a copy of the first page in their newspaper. Advertising is similar. It overwhelms the user with too many blinking parts, banners and annoying interruptions. This is a mistake, and so many content companies are still stuck in this rut. I would recommend content companies change this by introducing more user-friendliness and personalization into what they offer and how they deliver it. For the companies that make the algorithms—the Facebooks and Googles that read the user signals to personalize the content and advertising—they should look for ways to introduce a human touch and ‘humanize’ their tech because that is what they are lacking. It’s got to be user first —and the advertising needs to be highly personal and highly relevant.

PAS: You are also aligned with technology and your partnership Samsung is evolving to take you beyond the smartphone. What are the new opportunities on the horizon?

PW: It started out as a strategic partnership between Axel Springer, an expert in journalism, news, and creating a digital information brand, and Samsung, an expert in engineering and building devices. We pair our learnings from the news business and our learning algorithm with Samsung’s leadership position in devices and distribution. Remember, globally Samsung is far bigger than Apple.

However, it’s not just about having a larger share of the smartphone market. It’s about the breadth of devices and platforms where we can provide news content. We are already on the smart watch, and we are also the news source on the Family Hub that Samsung enables on its smart refrigerators. Most recently, Samsung has integrated our news app on their ambient QLED TV screens. These are screens that just turn on when you pass them, and UPDAY news is what consumers will see when they interact with that screen – across 12 countries in Europe.

Now other industries are contacting us. The car industry is asking us to develop an integration for smart cars to deliver personalized news in the car. We are thinking about how we can provide news in this environment, and it’s clear that the news we aggregate will also have to be read out-loud to the consumer.

PAS: But that also brings challenges as humans can’t scale, and your editorial team will have to…

PW: It has to be scalable. And you do this by making sure all the content comes from a single platform. If we were to start building content data platforms for each of the platforms we serve — for smartphones, watches, fridges and now TV — we would be dead from the sheer complexity of it. All those different devices and platforms must be served from the same content engine, from the same algorithm engine, and from the same journalists who are curating the content. This is what we have built and manage.

It’s one content platform, and you see the same content — even the same headline — on all four platforms. But it will get more complicated when we add voice—and voice is coming. It’s very early in the market, and there are great text-to-speech engines around, but this is just the beginning. Some of our main challenges will be: How to deliver the most relevant content in the most convenient and appealing way to the audience? There are legal issues to solve and we have to consider ways to monetize most efficiently, of course.

Print media was disrupted by the Internet and mobile is disrupting online. Now voice is poised to disrupt everything we as an industry have known or done so far. The best preparation for a media company is to be paranoid. Watch everything, experiment everywhere and execute on the ideas with potential. It’s why we maintain and motivate a startup culture in our company determined to stay alert and always be open to drastic change. It’s better we disrupt ourselves from within than risk being disrupted by a trend or technology beyond our vision.

Perspectives

Drive customer connection and retention with the 3Cs of empathy marketing

May 22, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Our lives and devices have become inextricably intertwined. Five years ago, mobile devices eclipsed desktops to become the platform that defines our daily routine. Mobile is our go-to for advice, assistance, and access to content and experiences. This attachment to mobile and apps turns up the pressure on brands and content companies to engage with consumers in ways (and contexts) that demonstrate a deep understanding of their needs and a genuine desire to put people first.

Fulfilling consumer demand for content that is relevant, valuable, and in no way intrusive is not a mere courtesy; it’s a business imperative. Mobile has created a strong sense of entitlement among consumers — particularly Millennials and younger generations, which are accustomed to instant gratification with a swipe or click. The outcome is an audience of empowered consumers who want what they want, when and how they want it.

Audience Appropriateness

Mobile also forces companies to obsess around what I’ll call the “appropriateness” of the how, what and when of their side of this two-way conversation taking place on mobile. In a sense, mobile has rewritten the rules of engagement. Mobile is a fiercely personal device that requires companies to ask for consent and earn trust. A major trust factor is showing that they understand and appreciate what consumers want and value most. Missing a step and delivering inappropriate experiences has negative consequences.

Recent research from Forrester suggests that companies lack the skill set- mindset required to meet customer expectations. Despite “skyrocketing” mobile adoption rates globally, the analyst firm observes that most companies “struggle to engage with consumers via mobile.” Specifically, only 32% say they have systematically integrated mobile into their marketing approach, and less than 56% say they use mobile to transform the customer experience.

Underestimating the pivotal role of mobile is everyday life represents a dangerous disconnect with business best practice. After all, mobile is not another screen. It is the screen. The 2017 Mobile Maturity study, conducted by digital media and digital marketing solutions company Adobe and based on a survey of 4,000 consumers across the U.S. and Europe, reveals that over 90% of respondents consider mobile to be their “primary device.”

The Age of Empathy

People are more connected that ever. And they also demand to be heard. They hunger for experiences that are genuine. Companies must show they listen and care, and cultivating these capabilities is at the center of Empathy Marketing.

In daily life, empathy is all about the ability to take a walk in someone else’s shoes. It’s the action of understanding and being sensitive to the feelings and thoughts of another human being. In a company-to-consumer scenario, empathy is an approach fueled by hard data and soft skills to deliver people content and experiences that are amazing, appropriate and deeply engaging.

Empathy Marketing is mobile-first and consumer-centric, wielding the unique ability of the mobile channel to deliver personally- and contextually-relevant content and experiences that move the needle. But it’s not about technology. Companies must also move our hearts, with approaches that show they listen and care. Based on nearly two decades of research and writing about engagement marketing examples and best practice, I have identified 3 approaches (the 3Cs) that demonstrate empathy and drive results.

The 3Cs of Empathetic Marketing

Cognitive

Content, context, and, now, cognitive. It’s the capabilities mix that allows companies to move from acting mobile-first (table stakes at this point, by the way) to being people-first. At its core, this approach builds on a deep understanding of the consumer to anticipate needs and requirements and pinpoint proper moments in the mobile journey to interject with meaningful and useful suggestions or assistance – or simply show presence. The input is data, but not just from mobile.

Companies that have a broad range of content assets should connect the dots in the online, offline, mobile, social, and digital ‘sessions’ that define our daily routine. These insights will allow them to deliver what consumers want (when and how they want it and on their preferred platform) even before they want it. The output is a clear flow of content and experiences that feels as if it has been designed specifically to satisfy the individual’s need-state. Algorithms help. But companies should also act human, asking questions and responding in ways that indicate they are genuinely interested in listening and, above all, learning. Communications (notifications, text and email) are careful and crafted to show companies are there for their audience and dedicated to making their lives better.

Convenient

Companies can blame the new breed of on-demand apps, such as Uber, for setting the bar high. Apps and experiences that have succeeded in reducing time, friction, and frustration have created the consumer expectation that everything should be so simple. Avoid complexity at all cost. Start with a design that reduces clicks to content and keeps what’s important in “thumb’s reach.”

However, it’s not enough to embrace design that reduces friction. Fuel interactions with deep customer connection and automation where it counts. Avoid making consumers repeat actions or input information, particularly if they already provided at an earlier stage of the journey. Build in features and functions allowing consumers to save settings, store what they have read (or want to read later), make lists, and share with their communities. Think about the actions your content is likely to inspire plan to make sure their individual path-to-action is hassle-free. This starts with a review of your landscape to identify options and partners (for example, complementary content companies and apps) essential to delivering consumers a one-stop experience.

Borrow a page from the Ubers of the world — companies that offer services from the source down the last mile to the customer — and position your content within a tight-knit ecosystem with you at the helm. For example, if you have travel content, pair it with sites or apps that allow consumers to book a hotel or trip directly from the same page in the app or on the website in the all-important moment of inspiration. Remove the wait, reduce the friction or just enable an impulse action. Whatever you do, demonstrate a laser-focus on making experiences easy and enjoyable and consumers will reward your efforts with intense loyalty.

Creative

Effective approaches move the needle, creatives move the heart. Acquire and retain audiences with the help of authentic marketing creative that shows you understand and uphold what is important to them. The right creative resonates with your audience. Making that match requires a firm grasp of data that goes beyond demographics and location. Do your research, starting with consumer studies and surveys to open the aperture of how you see your audience. Harness psychographics to understand where your audience is coming from and help you map a journey that is aligned with their lifestyles and life stages (not just the stages in the funnel). There are no blueprints. But there are valuable lessons and guidelines if you have the vision to look outside your vertical.

A great example is finance, which has seen a massive decline in consumer trust and brand love. Mobile fintech apps and startups are gaining traction with the help of approaches that show they understand what their audience want and are sincere about helping them to achieve life goals. It starts with something as simple as imagery that is inclusive. For example: showcasing women in campaigns creatives and empowering them with the feeling they can take control of their financial future. Effective assets and advertising demonstrate traits women value most (trustworthiness, dependability, and accessibility). Companies can adapt these key takeaways to power approaches that drive consumer connection and deepen trust.

As the saying goes: Actions speak louder than words. This is a connected age where consumer crave authenticity. So, companies must use everything they know about their audience to deliver experiences that address needs, anticipate interests, or simply go the distance to make their life better. Anything less shows disregard for the individual and tells consumers you’re not listening, or worse, you simply don’t care.

Innovation

ABC News offers 3 tips to personalize push and maximize the magnetism of breaking news

May 4, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

When Andrew Chen, mobile growth guru and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, revealed research that showed the average app mostly loses its entire user base within a few months it triggered an avalanche of interest in understanding the characteristics of an exceptional app. Chen suggested standout apps owe their high metrics and user appeal to efforts early in the funnel to build consumer connection and demonstrate value. He also warned that sending “spammy notifications” was a strategy sure to backfire.

Fast forward, and more companies are following his advice, using notifications to enhance the app experience, not annoy app users. In a recent interview, Doug Vance, Vice President, Product Development, ABC News, discussed how the company has harnessed push notifications to help consumers personalize breaking news alerts. It’s part of a wider strategy to put consumers in control of their news experience, on smartphones and on the web.

Takeways and Tips

The ABC News journey to redefine the push experience started in 2016, when it made the decision to relaunch its platforms to serve a national audience with election coverage that was highly engaging and locally relevant. The process—segmenting the audience according to their explicit news preferences and then automating campaigns to deliver notifications that would activate, not frustrate, users–taught ABC News three key lessons around the right way to personalize push.

1. Capture audience attention with high visibility.

As Vance sees it: it all starts with having a conversation with your users in a way that really “speaks” to them. Determining the news consumers want more of, or want to avoid altogether requires continuous dialog that is not limited to the times when a user opens the app. “We didn’t offer this via the app; we offered it directly within the app,” Vance recalls. To this end ABC News automated the process including questions [about user preferences] in the news feed in what the company internally called an Election Module that users would see every time they opened the app.

2. Build trust through frequent interaction and education.

Marketing wizard Seth Godin once pointed out that frequency, familiarity and “saying it more than once” are essential to building customer relationships. The same factors are essential to powering effective push notifications. With this in mind ABC News didn’t assume consumers would jump on the opportunity to personalize their news consumption from the get-go. It reinforced this feature with frequent interactions and opportunities educating users about the “how” and “why” of volunteering information about their interests.

“In the summer leading up to the election, we gave users the opportunity to answer questions (about their news preferences) in the app and tell us, “Hey, look, I really love politics, so send me everything that you think is important about the election,” Vance explains. Users could also choose to receive fewer alerts, and they also had the option to ignore the question altogether and just scroll past it. The point is: users were in complete control of their experience. On election ABC News had the data to deliver users real-time results based on their explicit interests. What’s more, the 2016 election emerged as the “high-water mark” in how ABC news could deliver personalized push and engage audiences.

3. Let users fine-tune their local experience.

ABC News reasoned that users who opted in for new alerts would be most interested in what was happening in their own individual state and want to how more about how their state voted in the presidential race. To meet this expectation, the company ensured that push notifications were aligned with users’ preferences and user location. “We saw that giving users more granular control over the news alerts they received and then using geo as a means to segment and personalize these push alerts served us very well.” In fact, push was one of the most-used features in 2016, with ABC News sent over 25 million alerts to its user base. “Overall, we saw a massive increase in the open rates of regionalized push notifications and, more importantly, we didn’t see increased uninstalls due to the huge volume of the alerts we delivered.”

Real Results

Building on these best practices has allowed ABC News to chalk up an impressive 2 million-plus user base for push notifications in native apps. The challenge will be to grow that number and deepen engagement. This is where a multi-channel approach to user education can pay dividends.

Information about the app and personalized push alerts as a value proposition figure prominently in every aspect of how ABC News interacts with its audience. During the recent Mark Zuckerberg hearings before Congress, the company cut into regularly scheduled network coverage to remind viewers that they can download the ABC News app to follow developments and get more from the story.

Encouraged by engagement metrics that have in some cases doubled thanks to personalized push for news ABC News is evolving its strategy. An example is Start Here, a new daily podcast where ABC News’ approach to push doesn’t just let users opt in for alerts that tell them when a new episode is published. The platform allows users to open the podcast from the in-app notification and play it right there. ABC News is also focused on doing the same for its digital originals and features brand, allowing users to set and receive an in-app notification when a new documentary is published.

Push notifications are expanding in their uses and use cases. They span alerts that deliver short, relevant, time-sensitive messages, to in-app notifications that can deepen users’ engagement by removing the friction (and the clicks) that separate people from the content they love. The question is not whether to use push, but rather how to prioritize and sequence push in its many forms and formats to drive app engagement, not abandonment.

Innovation

How ABC News uses push to deliver news that is personal and pervasive

April 24, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Push notifications are growing up, and content companies are getting smarter about ways to deliver them. Once, they were little more than generic (often spammy) alerts deployed to grab our attention. However, push notifications – in all their forms and formats – have evolved to become regarded as the “first mobile-native messaging channel.” Deployed properly, push notifications don’t simply trigger us to check our lock-screen; they can inspire us to engage with content frequently and care about outcomes.

ABC News is using push to power personalized news experiences that are as unique as each user, aligned with a deep understanding of user interests and ideal contexts. Peggy Anne Salz – mobile analyst and content marketing strategist at MobileGroove – catches up with Doug Vance, Vice President, Product Development, ABC News. Vance is responsible for product development and strategy for ABC News digital properties including ABCNews.com, GoodMorningAmerica.com, mobile apps, OTT channels and other emerging platforms. They discuss how the company is extending its push strategy to drive consumer connection and keep the conversation going inside the app and beyond the smartphone.

PAS: You offer a general news app and you pursue a goal to deliver the right news to the right person at the right time. What role does push play in the mix of capabilities you have built to reach and engage with your audience of more than 100 million users across devices and platforms every month?

DV: Push notifications sit at the center of our wider strategy to drive relevancy through personalized news and communications. More than two million users are subscribed to our personalized push alerts on native platforms, iOS and Android. Another half a million or so are subscribed on our Apple News channel. That’s a solid reach, and it’s because of how we use push is aligned with how consumers interact with their mobile devices. As we know, mobile devices are truly the most personal devices we own. Therefore, it was obvious to us that the way to reach and engage our audience starts with understanding how we can deliver the most relevant news offering on the mobile device and then take those learnings to the other platforms that are growing quickly for us.

Relevancy is not about blasting users with several alerts per day. It’s about sending alerts when you are confident your audience will appreciate them. For us, it starts with breaking news. We call them Everyone Alerts because they go to a multi-million size audience. These are the alerts we think our entire audience needs to know or would want to know. We take this very seriously. We don’t want to interrupt people on their very personal device unless we think it’s critical. Generally speaking, we send one or two Everyone Alerts per day. Then there are the personalized alerts we send to segments of our user base that we’ve created based on their interests. This can be between 5 to 10 personalized alerts around broad topics – like the conflict in Syria, all the way down to granular topics, like the recent Parkland shooting – that our users tell us they want to follow as it unfolds.

PAS: That’s a lot of user choice, but it also requires automation to deliver and track results. How do you orchestrate the types of push you offer to fit what your users have said they want and drive results for your business?

DV: We’re very interested in delivering an experience that will give the users the freedom to interact with push without necessarily having to open their app. It’s removing a step in the process that gets them faster to the content they want. Of course, they are not opening the app to do this, which means the industry KPIs that track the success of notifications through open rates need a rethink. We work with Braze (formerly Appboy) to deliver and personalize the types of push we offer and together we’re also working to better understand what comes after open rates.

It’s critical to understand this. If a piece of content that’s delivered in a push notification – let’s say a headline, an image, or a video – gives users the ability to take action or to share that notification, we have to know what to measure and what the data and analytics are telling us. This is the first step to tracking the success of these types of push notifications. Granted, in-app push that may not result in an app open, but it is an interaction that contributes to a user’s overall happiness with the state of our app and the service that we’re offering. As an industry, we need to understand these new types of push. It will be a big focus for us in 2018.

In the news space, a lot of our alerts are reactive, reacting to things that are happening in the world and therefore notifying our users about those events. Our audience development team stands ready 24/7 waiting to send those notifications segmented and personalized to users’ interests and geo. When we know about events that are going to happen in advance, we can script out how we will handle that from a push perspective well ahead of time. Take the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle coming up in May. We see incredible interest in these types of stories, so we’re actively planning our strategy for that event. We’re going to launch a few new features in our app to coincide with that event, which I can’t disclose now.

PAS: Your success in personalizing push notifications and measuring the results beyond the open rate has produced a wealth of best practices. ABC News is part of the Disney ABC family; how do you share learnings across the company?

DV: We see it as a two-way street within the Disney Company. The Walt Disney Company owns eight local stations in some of the biggest markets in the U.S., and there’s a product group within the company that specifically manages local news applications. Of course, we work very closely with them. We’ve been updating them over the past few years on the success of our personalized push notification strategy. When they launched a new suite of local news apps in late 2017, personalized push and the ability to follow topics was a strong focus of their apps. Their research also confirmed that audiences were seeking more personalized experiences. Now, users can receive more information about micro-targeted communities in New York or LA, for example. Local stations have seen remarkable success and audiences are excited about their experience with personalized push.

More recently our sister company ESPN launched a big update to its native app offering. It now includes ESPN+, the first-ever multi-sport, direct-to-consumer subscription streaming service from The Walt Disney Company’s Direct-to-Consumer and International group. As part of that update, they’re also giving users more ability than ever to personalize their newsfeed. They can make that newsfeed personal around the teams they follow and the sports they like the most. They’ve shared learnings regarding how to encourage users to add favorites – for example, their favorite teams – and to then use that information to better personalize a newsfeed and push offering. Throughout the company, we are sharing information, and multiple groups within the Disney Company use Braze as well. Together we’re learning, and to benefit from learning from some of the best-in-class companies under the Disney umbrella allows us to continue to experiment and excel.

PAS: Finally, you talk about learnings and their importance in your roadmap. Can you share a few?

DV: We’ve talked about the millions of our users who are subscribed to personalized push alerts in our mobile apps. But our Web audience is much bigger than our native audience. This is why we are bringing the learnings from our native platforms into our web platforms. Today when you go to abcnews.com on your desktop or phone or tablet, you’ll see interest iconography. When you’re scrolling down the homepage, you’ll see a band – a series of modules – that will show you updates on the latest interests that you’ve set. You’ll receive notifications on the web for those interests just as if you had set those interests on the phone. We’ve also introduced login and registration to allow cross-device syncing as part of this experience.

It’s what our users told us they value most. If they’re spending the time to set up their interests and curate their experience in their mobile apps, they want to have that same experience on the website. So, if we think an alert or a notification rises to the level of sending to everybody on their mobile phone, we’ll send that alert to everyone who’s subscribed to Web Push as well. It’s the same with personalized push. We see the web as another channel for personalized notification.

If you want to deliver push that users will appreciate, you need to start by explaining the value proposition of push to your audience and make it a core part of your overall offering. Don’t make it a tab in your app. It has to be everywhere. At ABC News we overlay our videos with interest iconography that allows users to favorite topics from within a video, from within a headline list, from within an article itself. It also has to be core to what you do as an organization. Push isn’t just a product feature; it’s part of the ethos of the entire organization. From the editorial process to the user experience, push has to be pervasive.

Innovation | Perspectives | Revenue

Why many mobile ad experiences fail and how to make yours work

April 3, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Mobile is as personal as it gets. That’s why people feel annoyed when mobile ads delivered to their devices and apps are a mismatch with their desires and expectations. To cut out unwanted noise and shut out ads that deliver a poor user experience, consumers are reaching in record numbers to mobile ad-blocking technology. Unfortunately, bad ad experiences don’t only alienate and frustrate consumers; they also deprive publishers of an important chance to monetize their assets and audiences.

So, what is a bad ad experience? Unsurprisingly, ads that disrupt or distort content people are trying to read or enjoy lead the list of most “hated” annoyances, according to research from Nieman Norman Group. Pop-up ads, auto-playing video with sound, interstitial ads that must be viewed before content can be viewed, and postitial ads that obscure the content or just breaking the browsing flow are ad approaches and formats that people want to avoid.

Naturally, in the Age of Personalization—marked by milestone studies that reveal 78% of consumers said they would be happy to receive mobile advertising that is relevant to their interests—mobile ads that are out of sync with people’s interests and context are also a “fail.” However, this doesn’t appear to deter publishers and brand marketers from plowing huge amounts of money into mobile ads that people ignore.

It’s a dynamic that threatens to bankrupt the entire digital ecosystem. At one level, mobile ad spend is rising into the stratosphere. Research firm eMarketer reckons ad spend in the U.S. alone, which accounted for 66% of all digital ad spend in 2017, will increase to 72% (or $65.8 billion) in 2019. At the other end of the spectrum, the vast majority of brands and publishers are wasting budget ads that fail to inspire or influence consumer behavior.

Dangerous Disconnect

New research based on internal data from Verve, a location-based mobile marketing platform that connects advertisers with consumers, puts this dangerous disconnect into perspective. Over half (56%) of respondents surveyed in the U.K. think most ads they see on their mobile phones are “boring or dull.” As a result, the average person in the U.K. ignores 7 mobile ads each day. When looking at the national population, this figure translates to a massive 20 million. “In their current state,” Verve reports, “mobile ads are not making the cut.”

Only one in ten respondents (11%) believed their mobile ads were genuinely helpful. This figure increased significantly with the quality of the mobile ad experience. While just 17% said they were “likely” or “very likely” to interact with a generic ad on their phones, over twice that number (38%) said they would do so it the ad was related to their interests or hobbie. And 34% said they would engage if the ad was related to where they were at that particular time.

Lack of relevancy is part of the problem, lack of imagination is the other. A 2017 survey of 100 advertisers and 1,000 consumers regarding their recent experiences and preferences toward mobile ads conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by digital advertising creative management platform Celtra found that poor creatives may be at the core of bad ad experiences.

The study revealed that more than two-thirds of advertisers believe at least half of their mobile advertising budget is wasted, sunk into the development and deployment of mobile ads that can even harm their brand image. In fact, a whopping 73% of all mobile ads seen in a typical day fail to create a positive user experience. “The overall digital content experience is littered with creatively uninspired ads, irrelevant ads, and intrusive ads with slow load times,” the report states. “The consumer experience has gone terribly wrong.”

The solution is more engaging ad creatives. Companies that crack the code, using creatives that are more relevant and less disruptive are sure to see improved customer response rates and higher brand recognition, the report concludes. As Mihael Mikek, Celtra founder and CEO, put it in a press release at the time: “Smart advertisers have a significant market opportunity to drive high levels of customer engagement and sustained competitive advantage by leveraging strong creative in their mobile ad campaigns.”

Vendor spin aside, the data suggests positive mobile ad experiences promote positive consumer perceptions and influence actions. The findings also support my personal view that the ability to craft and evaluate effective mobile ad and in-app creatives is at the core of what marketers must learn and master to ensure their campaigns move the needle, not miss the mark.

Inspirational and Relatable

Effective marketers follow the data to determine what works. “But it’s not just about amassing Big Data,” Haydon Young, Director of User Acquisition at Dots, writes in an insightful post. “It’s about creating a Big Picture view of your users by blending what you know about them in the digital world of mobile and apps with what you observe about them in the “real world”.

He recalls how a re-think of ad creatives rocketed conversion rates for Covet Fashion – an app for fashionistas and the shopping obsessed. Observing shoppers in real-life, at malls and shops, helped his team architect an ad experience catered to its unique audience demographics (“moms, daughters, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, and everything in-between”). It allowed them to align with their aspirations (“a vast and diverse group of races and body types united by the singular desire to be a part of the fashion and beauty world”). Rather than use ad creatives that depicted super-models, he removed the faces altogether. This encouraged users to picture themselves in the clothes and look they wanted most. The creatives worked because they spoke to the audience ambition to be and look amazing.

The takeaway: Ad creatives succeed when they address audience demographics and desires and encourage people to unlock their real potential. It’s no coincidence that brand creatives “rooted in real life” are crushing it, according to the Global Marketing 2018 Trends study from Freedman International. From fashion brand ASO that refused to photoshop models in its ads to Fitbit that has switched from using professional athletes to showcasing average people working out, companies are winning audiences with imagery that portrays the real world as it really is.

Test for Success

Authenticity is a must across the entire ad experience. Be upfront about what your app offers and choose mobile ad creatives that are descriptive, not deceptive.

“The most important thing to do creatively [in the ad] is to show users what the experience is within the app,” observes Helene Trompeter, Media Manager at The Weather Company and a Mobile Hero recognized for her app marketing accomplishments. “Being straightforward and visualizing the benefit of your app capabilities [in the ad creative] almost always outperforms lifestyle imagery.”

Even the coolest creatives won’t appeal to everyone in your customer base. So, use data to develop effective segmentation and targeting strategies. “Ad copy and images may perform differently depending on user demographics, operating systems, and interests,” Trompeter explains. Choosing the right creative for the right audience is an ongoing task that requires the discipline to test and the courage to innovate. It can be a daunting task, but Trompeter tells me there are some shortcuts. Dynamic ads and creative templates can remove a lot of the heavy-lifting, making it easy for marketers to mix and match hundreds of creative variations to ensure mobile ads are fresh, relevant and engaging.

Trompeter achieves this by applying what she calls the “80/20 rule.” In practice, she runs “about 80% of budget toward historical performers and 20% toward testing.” It’s a smart approach that recognizes the hard truth about effective advertising. Marketers have to focus ad spend on what is proven to work. However, they also need to experiment with ideas and ad elements that take them outside their comfort zone.

Push the Boundaries

Verve Foundry can use part of the screen or all of it to create an animated experience.

Meaningful and effective mobile ads follow the data and demographics to appeal to the target audience. But using the right ad format can also make a huge difference. Walter T. Geer III, VP and Creative Director at Verve, tells me new ad formats that build on existing ways people interact with the mobile Web and apps on their devices are boosting audience engagement. “Scroll, pinch, swipe—it’s all about delivering the best possible ad experience with ad formats that let consumers use their fingers and put them in control.”

The days of using the consumer’s mobile device as a “launching pad” for ads that disrupt and annoy are over, Geer says. “The future is about creating an opportunity that is cohesive to the device and using the data to ensure mobile ads deliver the right opportunity and one that is relevant to the individual.” This is also where ad formats that “augment and enhance user activities” play a major role, enabling a positive brand experience and driving closer customer connection.

A prime example is Canopy Onscroll, a new ad format developed by Verve that combines two engaging experiences into one without interrupting the consumer’s core app experience. Animation beyond the banner activates when scrolling. “It’s one of our highest engaging ad units and a great example of how giving users choices. In this case, showing subtle animation completely activated by scrolling—is capturing people’s attention with advertising that is effective, not intrusive.”

Effective and emotive mobile ad creatives are a huge departure from the annoying screen-takeovers and one-size-fits-all ad experiences that characterized the early days of digital marketing. Stronger creatives, real-life imagery, and innovative formats that push the envelope point the way to positive ad experiences that will engage, motivate, and activate consumers.

Innovation | Perspectives

How to master app store optimization by thinking locally and globally

February 27, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Think of it like products in a supermarket. Content companies with mobile apps are locked in a fight for two incredibly scarce resources: consumer attention and shelf space. Unfortunately, on the digital shelves of the app store, discovery is the bottleneck. Consumers can’t download apps they don’t know exist in the first place. (And how can they in a market where the number of apps submitted to the Apple App Store in the month of January alone topped 500 submissions daily?)

To rise above the noise, and drive app installs in the process, app owners compete for a top-notch spot in search results. Smart companies are winning the battle with App Store Optimization (ASO) by tweaking keywords, icons and other assets to make sure their app store landing converts. It takes dedication and budget to get ASO right, which is why companies that succeed and boost downloads in one country or store are leaving money on the table if they don’t publish their apps in more places.

But before you go global with your app, double-check that you have mastered more than the ASO basics. The checklist is much longer than it was just a year ago because ASO has evolved, expanding beyond the app store presence and deeper into the funnel. Looking back, the first wave of ASO was a lot like the early days of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Companies could score quick wins by hacking Google algorithms or focusing on “long tail” keywords. Moving forward targeting “killer” keywords is not enough. ASO is morphing into what I call AMO (App Marketing Optimization) and ready for a rethink.

Rethinking ASO

ASO/AMO tops the agenda at every stage of the app lifecycle. But it’s never a case of set-it-and-forget-it. It requires app owners to monitor and manage a laundry list of elements that starts with keywords and ends with compelling video clips. It’s an ongoing effort, but the pay-off is massive organic growth that every app owner can afford to tap for their app. The key is to take the right steps in the right order.

It all starts with testing, refreshing and optimizing all of the moving parts of your app (titles, descriptions, icons, screenshots, videos, and reviews) on a regular basis. Once you have the processes in place to achieve positive results for your app at home, it’s time to take your app abroad.

Mobile Games companies need little convincing. They were pioneers in aligning app elements, visuals and gameplay with the preferences of a global audience. Consider Candy Crush, a blockbuster app with audiences in nearly 200 countries thanks to a look-and-feel that is a match with local tastes and trends. Now other categories of apps, notably those in the Entertainment category, are following a similar blueprint to attract and acquire more users.

Localization differs from internationalization

But before you embark on a strategy to take your app global, know the difference between localization and internationalization. Think of internationalization as table stakes. It encompasses what you need to adapt your app to different languages, regions and cultures to reach a global market. Your focus in this stage is on the basics: changing time, dates, region format, and other aspects of your app to fit with your target markets and audience.

Localization goes deeper. It starts with translating the language of the app and other elements (keywords, description, and even the name of the app) to be a tight fit with your target audience. If you plan to engage in commerce, be sure to adapt your app to local regulations and payment methods to avoid any legal battles further down the line.

Clearly, localization is not a job you want to leave to Google translator. Amateur efforts rarely pay dividends, and literal translations can do your app brand more harm than good. (Case in point: KFC’s famous finger lickin’ good motto for its fried chicken is a notable example of a bad translation. In Chinese, it urged consumers to bite their fingers off.) It’s also important to resist the temptation to localize every aspect of your app from the get-go just because you can. It pays to pace yourself.

If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, or the countries to target, then start with your app name and keywords and localize these assets for popular countries or languages. As a rule, use your organic app installs as a guide. Pinpointing countries where your app is taking off allows you to prioritize your efforts, starting with keywords. Use tools to check traffic volume for specific keywords and bake the best (yet most relevant) keywords into your app assets. If you see a bump up in your app downloads, then take it as a sure sign you can move on to localize other assets, such as the app description, followed by other marketing collateral including screenshots.

Cater to local cultures

From here on, industry literature tells us localization is just a matter of “wash, rinse, repeat” for every additional country or app store on your list. But is it really that simple? In a word: no.

An effective strategy to go global with your content goes beyond the pure “science” of ASO/AMO to the “art” of understanding how addressing individual cultural preferences and nuances. Pay close attention to other aspects of your app—such as colors, images and user interface—to build a loyal audience for your content.

Do your homework and use common sense.

Primary design considerations:

UI: Does your audience read left to right or right to left? Or is it vertical? Make sure you factor in how the text and images are read. And make doubly sure the use of directional icons in your app are logical and genuinely helpful. It impacts engagement and dictates how users will interact with their device, especially as they swipe left—or right—depending on the app and activity.

IMAGES & CONTENT: Brush up on ethnology (or hire someone with those skills). Adapt the ethnicity of your visual elements to local culture and pay special attention to skin, hair, and eye color. It’s a no-brainer that Asians or Indians might be wary of buying into localized content that displays blonde-haired, blue-eyed models, presenters, or families. Rethink the obvious icons and idioms. Sure, using a piggy bank icon as a metaphor for saving money works well in North America and much of Europe, but it’s a miss in most Middle Eastern countries.

COLOR: First impressions count, and different colors resonate with different cultures. For example, Japanese players like subtlety and pale, softer colors and shades. Chinese users, on the other hand, prefer vivid, strong and bright colors like red and orange. The mobile games industry learned this the hard way, so deep-dive into posts and publications (such as Pocketgamer.biz) where they share their tips and tricks.

From images to music, be prepared to adapt every aspect of your app to match your target markets.

Pay attention to the political spectrum

Done properly, localization engages your audience with content that resonates because it respects their local customs and cultures, not just language. Significantly, the same rules apply to your choice in app marketing and advertising messages and ad creatives. Sure, it’s a must when you take your app global. But the surprise success of SmartNews, the news app that delivers the top trending stories downloaded by over 25 million readers in over 100 countries, suggests the same approach can boost results and user loyalty in your home market as well.

In the case of SmartNews, it started with the realization that readers in North America were divided by political parties but united around one goal: the desire to access to real news, not fake news. “The most effective way to show we understood our audience and their concerns was to adapt our marketing to appeal to all sides,” Fabien-Pierre Nicolas, Head of Global Growth at SmartNews, told me in a recent podcast interview.

SmartNews bet on a simple creative capable of delivering a powerful message that would appeal to a broad political spectrum of users.

A review of app data and demographics revealed that the SmartNews audience was a mirror of American society. “Our readers are mostly between the ages of 35-65, and they range from liberal to moderate conservative in their politics,” Nicolas explained. An effective campaign would have to be objective and emotive. Nicolas, recently named a Mobile Hero for his user acquisition approach and accomplishments, went to work and immediately rejected flashy images and trendy buzzwords. Instead, he worked with his team to develop a simple creative capable of delivering a powerful message.

The approach worked, boosting usage and earning the app positive reviews. Nicolas says the results are still coming in and a focus group will provide the inside track on audience and brand impact. In the meantime, internal data shows the focus on eliminating the filter bubble has allowed SmartNews to increase app appeal to both genders at all levels of society and across the complete political spectrum.

You’ve invested time and resource to make your app a hit at home, and it makes business sense to take your app to global in order to maximize exposure. Yes, that starts off with mastering the fundamentals of global and local design considerations to adapt your app to your audience. But we all know that designing a terrific app is not enough given the glut of products in the market and the increasing consumer requirement for apps that are aligned with local tastes and trends. Discovery is a critical component of conversion, but apps have to strike a chord. Moving from simple App Store Optimization to an effective global app marketing strategy will help you maximize your investment so that your app will be popular with audiences everywhere.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Innovation

How AI and data are allowing the Associated Press to tap new revenue streams

January 15, 2018 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

In an age where exclusive content is pure gold and data is the new black gold, smart news organizations are looking for ways to unlock their frontline information and insights for maximum exposure across a multitude of platforms.

Ted Mendelsohn, AP Vice President, Commercial and Digital Markets

The Associated Press — a 170-year old news organization with teams in over 100 countries and one of the world’s most important archives of audio-visual archives of news, social history, sports, and entertainment — is going one better. It’s exploring new and rather unconventional opportunities, in areas ranging from data-mining to data journalism, to identify new markets and revenue opportunities for its wholesale and non-profit businesses.

Peggy Anne Salz, mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove, speaks with Ted Mendelsohn, AP Vice President, Commercial and Digital Markets. They discuss the company’s mission to expand distribution of its archival content, extract value from its data, and enhance news-gathering capabilities.

PAS: On any given day, more than half the world’s population sees AP content. But that’s just one side of your business. Tell me more about your wholesale business and the opportunities you pursue.

TM: When I was brought into AP some 25 years ago, the commercial business focused on selling AP content into the federal government, corporate markets, and large clients, including Prodigy, LexisNexis, Dialog. Expanding this by identifying new markets and opportunities is very much what my job is about today.

Another part of the business is our retail business, where AP mobile comes into play. The focus is on making our own content available on AP-owned and operated sites and monetizing through advertising.

Finally, there are content services, where AP — because of its huge footprint worldwide and access to photographers and videographers — can work together with clients. It’s a service and a business opportunity that we see expanding. are exploring opportunities where brands might sponsor content like the AP Top 25 college basketball or college football rankings. There are also opportunities for companies to sponsor unique content. This might be along the lines of the top 5 things you need to know about ways you can improve health and fitness. We are open to doing more of that and that’s also where having our own platform opens a whole line of revenue and opportunities.

PAS: AP is perhaps best known for frontline, breaking news content…

TM: Yes, it’s our bread and butter. We’ve noticed that our audience is heavily engaged with our content — stories, photos and video — and that the sessions are long. In fact, in August 2017, a survey from NewsWhip showed that AP drove higher total engagement on Facebook than any of the Top 10 individual publishers in June and July. This achievement is also linked to our ongoing efforts to update our content and add value. We provide alerts, but we also add to the news content from every angle, enhancing the story with text, photos, and video.

PAS: You’re using technology to expand and enhance distribution of your content. What is the role of technology in the production of content?

TM: AI is a technology that has an impact at several levels. We’re using it, but we’re also educating the media by showing the example of how we use AI within our newsroom. A lot of our efforts around understanding and using AI in the newsroom is focused on producing the routine news, like sports scores, and have them generated through AI technology.

But it’s not just about automation; AI can open opportunities for our reporters to cover more important stories and produce the exclusive in-depth content that wins us — and our clients — audiences on mobile and other platforms. And that is what drives the higher engagement. A good example is one of our most successful stories, what we’ve been calling the “Seafood from Slaves.” Here our reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their investigation that exposed slavery in the Southeast Asian fishing industry.

PAS: What are the other technologies top of your radar?

TM: At one level, AP is a retail store, for lack of a better word. We focus on approaches that will allow us to appeal to our readers directly. We ‘sell’ them on our content on the platforms, such as mobile, where they want to consume it. But it’s also about understanding how other companies and platforms are going to impact how we engage audiences. A prime example here is voice and deciding how we engage with companies that are creating voice-activated content.

It means talking to the Amazons, the Apples, and the Samsungs — companies now looking for content that is driven by voice-activation. For us, it’s becoming a new way of engaging with the customer, if you will, by creating content and adjusting our content for this market and working with companies who are attracted by the content we have and the platforms we can serve.

In other words, it’s not just the technology that we use internally. It’s working with the companies who are really technology-driven and finding ways to use our content to improve their technology and, at the same time, to make our content available in new and different ways.

The number one question for AP is: how do we move our content and make our content play across the platforms? My first boss at AP used to say he wants to ride every horse in the race. And, in some ways, that’s what we’re trying to do. We are on the horse that allows us to display and distribute our content. And we are riding the horses that allow us to get our content to the companies out there that need our content to engage their customers.

PAS: AP is exploring AI, launching a VR and 360 video channel in collaboration with AMD, examining the opportunities around voice and Internet of Things. How do make choices about the companies or platforms to explore and the ones to ignore?

TM: It’s not about betting on the newest technology or the ‘Next Big Thing.’ You also have to be flexible enough to adjust to what is coming out on the market. As an industry, we couldn’t have anticipated a technology like Amazon Echo and its impact. We also couldn’t have known the content these platforms require. But once it’s gaining traction on the market, like it is now, the best advice I can give content companies is to be flexible. You cannot shut them out; you have to engage.

What do I mean by engaging? It starts with the way I organize my group. Specifically, I’ve brought people together who have a focus on vertical segments. Some are in continuous discussions with industry leaders — they are in talks with Amazon, Apple, Yahoo!, and so on. It’s not a discussion like “Oh, we have this content for you, why don’t you sign a deal with us?” It’s a dialog where we want to understand where they’re going and they’re coming back to us with insights on the tech and opportunities that have real potential.

In this Oct. 20, 2017 photo, Jamain Lee, center, looks at classmate Andre’veon Mosby at Milwaukee Math and Science Academy, a charter school in Milwaukee.

PAS: Data is hailed as the new black gold, and you have stockpiles of it. How do you view the opportunities in unlocking that data for clients?

TM: On the data side — for example, election data — we are the primary source for our clients. We’re finding that election data, even older data, is highly valuable to hedge funds. We make that data available for them to study and make whatever algorithmic assessments they feel necessary based on the data.

Data is also at the core of our edge in investigative reporting, identifying trends and news ahead of the competition. For example, an AP analysis of charter school enrollment data allowed us to expose the growing level of racial segregation in schools. Recently we reported on crime in the cities, using the data to take a different perspective. Rather than look at crime growing in cities, we used the data to examine crime in particular neighborhoods. Data allows you to see this, and so we are finding ways to make this data available for our reporters and for other organization to use.

PAS: So, data has become a new commodity?

TM: Maybe commodity is not the right word. Let’s say it’s a valuable good that we can offer and sell because other companies — businesses, financial institutions, hedge funds — are evolving to use data in ways that we don’t.

There are two ways to look at the way marketplace for data is developing. One is the opportunity at the consumer level, where more and better data can improve marketing, advertising, and understanding your audience. The other is the opportunity at the commercial level. Companies need access to data — for example, election data — to identify and understand the trends, and make investment decisions based on the combination of data.

It’s early days, and frankly, no one is exactly sure where how data will play out. But we are seeing that a number of financial institutional are looking for data to enhance their own data. It’s why I have some people on the team who are working with financial institutions, trying to understand what they need so we can extract data to make these datasets available in the way our clients want them.

PAS: Content and data — the opportunity is in being flexible in your choice of platforms and models…

TM: Correct. And the third part is being flexible in how you do business. You can’t be limited in how you do business or the kind of business terms you negotiate. All of us in the media industry have models, pricing lists and stuff like that. I threw those models right out because I realized they don’t work. The next technology comes around, and whatever pricing model you have doesn’t work. Instead, you have to adapt to change. You have to adjust your content, and your business model has to be flexible as well.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Innovation

Why AccuWeather takes IoT personally

November 16, 2017 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Steven Smith, AccuWeather President of Digital Media

Given its effect on pretty much everything people do, weather sits at the sweet spot between content and commerce. However, it’s also information that companies can harness to do much more than trigger a purchase. AccuWeather, a weather information and digital media provider, is focused on platforms and partnerships that deliver accurate weather content and data in the proper context at the appropriate moment. The company, which counts over 30 billion data requests daily, is pursuing a strategy that spans multiple channels and touch points – ranging from apps and bots, to watches and wearables, to connected cars and devices in the home. Peggy Anne Salz – mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove – catches up with Steven Smith, AccuWeather President of Digital Media, to discuss how the company, established in 1962, has evolved with technology, devices, and IoT to power content and services with a personal touch.

PAS: AccuWeather brings together weather information and digital media. What is the role of the data you provide across the products you power and the partnerships you pursue?

SS: To be clear, it’s more than weather data; it’s a type of content that makes what we offer part of the equation in people’s everyday lives. It is content geared towards helping people plan their day, plan their lives, plan everything around it.

It’s also part of a concept we call Weather 2.0 – making our content relevant to the user ‘in the moment.’ That moment is influenced by the decision people want to make and dictated by the device they’re using at the time. To be relevant to their needs and their context ‘in the moment,’ you have to be on the traditional platforms – including browsers and mobile apps. But you also have to integrate into a range of other platforms, devices, delivery vehicles – or whatever you want to call them.

PAS: AccuWeather has a presence in the connected car. This makes it possible for drivers of Ford SYNC 3 cars to operate the AccuWeather app using voice commands or buttons on the vehicle display screen. What did you have to consider in order to deliver, as you put it, “meaningful impact?”

SS: Obviously, a five-day forecast is probably not the most useful piece of information at that time, in the moment. So, the product we’ve developed here tells you when it will start raining along your route, and answers key questions: When do I need to slow down? When will that heavy snow start? And it’s the same approach for a whole variety of IoT devices – whether it’s wearables for fitness or wearables for health. It’s why we have put forth several initiatives to tailor those products and the content we provide, to be contextually relevant. It’s the reality of what our content – and really all content today – needs to be.

PAS: I hear Accuweather is making a personalization play as well as a platform play. Is one more important than the other?

SS: From the browser products all the way to the traditional flagship apps, it’s about being on the relevant platform. And we make our platform choices by watching our audience. We have 300 million monthly active uniques interacting with our core digital properties. It’s activity and usage that allows us to see where there is a desire to use a product.

For me, connected car tops the list of practical platforms, which is why we are developing a product that provides users with minute-by-minute forecast along their route. The product has been developed to support driving, whether that’s a person in their car, a ride-sharing platform or an autonomous self-driving car. So, you can see how our content is transcending beyond being a feature within an app to become the heart of the driving experience. Right now, it’s contextual content, just-in-time. There’s a safety aspect as well as just what is going on with the weather.

PAS: Where do wearables come in?

SS: Wearables is also at the top of our list, and we break those down into categories. There’s Fitness, where we’ve had a partnership with Garmin for a number of years that’s geared around providing weather content related to the fitness activity like running. Our Minutecast, which is minute-by-minute forecasting for basically every exact GPS point on the route, provides the user what they need based on where they are, or will be, for that period. We also have a partnership with Samsung and a number of others in that space that we haven’t announced yet. Another category is Health. It’s where our content focuses on conditions that tangentially impact to health. So, how air quality impacts asthma, for example. We have partnerships, where our big data on the back-end is used to personalize and predict conditions.

PAS: It’s all about delivering accurate and actionable content – regardless of platform. You offer an AI-powered weather assistant for Facebook Messenger. What is the fit with bots?

SS: Imagine a scenario where there is a major line of thunderstorms coming. That’s where you want advice and help, not just the weather. It’s where a bot experience meets the requirement of the individual for real assistance in the moment. It’s why we launched a Facebook bot, and we just did the same on Google. It all gets to your point that there are scenarios when the consumer needs to make a life-management decision, and a bot is a good fit.

Voice is similar, in this respect, which is why we consider it a future path for the delivery of content and – more importantly – interaction with the consumer. We have been active in that field for a while. In fact, we power the weather on the Amazon Alexa product and the Echo. This quickly taught us how to create a voice experience and meet the consumer expectation for an answer coming back within milliseconds.

PAS: What about the role of content in effective and relevant advertising? You have a partnership with Swirl, a mobile marketing platform provider, giving them access to your weather data sets to tailor and trigger in-door shopping experiences based on the user’s local weather conditions…

SS: Weather is a universal language. It’s the classic conversation starter, regardless of language or dialect. It has relevance in all our lives all around the globe. Of those 300 million monthly active users I mentioned, 65 percent come from outside the U.S. The reality is, as an organization, we have to be global-first, and this also applies to partnerships. On the handset side, our partners range from Samsung to Sony. We also work with Naver, the popular search engine in South Korea. Globally, we have a joint venture with the Chinese Meteorological Agency within China, as companies must be licensed by the Chinese government to distribute weather data.

In all these partnerships it comes down to the same principles and paving the way to deliver meaningful content and experiences regardless of the platform consumers prefer. Advertising is also about delivering experiences. Imagine a user who’s looking at a flu index, because we create flu forecasts influenced by weather conditions. It’s not inappropriate at that point to present a product that will help with the types of conditions the user is interested in at that moment and in that context. It’s all about the ability to wrap contextual advertising around something that we know a user will find interesting.

We’ve been talking about consumer-facing scenarios, but AccuWeather is also very much a B2B partner. We help companies, do everything from logistics planning and supply chain planning, to a product by product roll out. Weather heavily influences what consumers want and product usage, so we also help companies to make decisions around where to place those marketing and advertising dollars.

PAS: I’ve been reading about how Starbucks Corporation uses your predictive analytics to gauge how many iced or hot drinks it may sell in a given season. It’s a great example. Can you tell me more about your experience with brands?

SS: That’s an interesting one. We have also partnered with Spotify, on a new site titled Climatune aimed at giving music fans around the world the perfect musical score for any weather. That’s a perfect example of how we are at the intersection of where weather meets and mixes with another data set – and it shows how companies can deliver experiences by taking our unique data set and combining that with another data set to offer a service that is unique and personalized. Frankly, we’ve been doing this type of big data look-up for years, long before brands and marketers got a hold of it and understood how weather influences consumer preferences and behavior. The Spotify example is interesting because it provides insights into mood and what people do musically.

PAS: We agree that weather content must be contextual and can be incredibly valuable to users. What is the best way to get it in front of consumers in a way they will appreciate, and not find annoying?

ISS: n our product team, we talk about push moments, as opposed to pull moments. Before everything was about the user pulling information. They opened an app, went onto a website, entered an environment to access content. As a content company, you tried to triage the three pieces of information about the user to decide what to present them. Today, it’s about creating push moments, where content and information is front and center – right in front of the user at the right time, and when they want to see it.

PAS: So, we’re right back at personalization?

SS: Yes, it’s personalization, and it also takes contextual awareness into account. Am I at the office? Am I at home? In each case, the content and information will differ. But what’s really key is how you craft that delivery. We all know what it’s like to have too much clutter – like 17 notifications on your smartphone and more coming in. The push I’m thinking of adds value by delivering what people expect in the way they need it right then and there. This why much of our product development going forward focuses on technologies to avoid clutter. Whether it’s a push technology or some of the new notification technologies on the market – or whether it’s a wearables device or a connected car – it’s about using the right platform to bring that content – that experience – to life for that user in that moment.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

How to build an app subscription model that works

October 10, 2017 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

A year after Apple announced the arrival of the subscription app model as part of a wider sweep of changes it made to its App Store policies, the size and scope of this new app category is exceeding analyst expectations. It is also paving the way for content companies to grow audience numbers and engagement.

Content companies that embrace the model can plan their business with high confidence that they will attract high-value users and generate a predictable cash flow. This is because consumers who buy into subscriptions commit to a recurring fee and – generally speaking – stick to their decision. Their resolve is inextricably intertwined with a concept known as the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Simply put, people who have invested time or resources in something don’t want to see it go to waste. Think of the times you rented a movie and, even though it wasn’t great, you watched it to the end. Now you’ve got the gist.

Consumer commitment colored by this fascinating bias bodes extremely well for companies that offer subscription apps. In fact, as far back as 2014, research found consumers would buy into subscription apps if the price was right. Specifically, the Branchfire research into consumer attitudes toward subscription apps found that “$10 a month is the sweet spot for subscribers.”

Are subscriptions right for you?

Fast forward, and the range of subscription apps has expanded to include much more than streaming media providers like Netflix and Spotify. Data provider App Annie reports that “in-app subscription revenue from non-game apps, particularly within the media streaming, news and dating categories, is rapidly increasing.” Overall, App Annie forecasts revenue for non-game apps to grow at an incredible rate of 25% – reaching $33.8 billion in 2021.

It’s good news that subscription apps are gaining traction. But not all media companies that can offer their app as a subscription model should do so. If you’re asking users to open their wallets, you need to offer value for money.

A crowd-pleaser across the board is fresh and relevant content. Obviously, media companies do this by definition. That said, in order to merit a monthly recurring cost, the content must be exclusive, or engaging – or both. Regularly releasing new features is also a plus.

Finally, apps that remove the friction from navigation, or help users accomplish important tasks (book a reservation, register for more information, streamline sharing) are also a hit with time-crunched consumers and multi-tasking mobile users.

Do your homework

Before you decide to release a subscription app, do your homework to make sure your audience engages frequently, and deeply enough, to merit the investment in the first place. This is where audience measurement data around the who, when and why of app usage in the form of behavioral data and insights is a must. Even better if this data spans all the platforms that encompass consumers’ daily routines.

Finland’s Verto Analytics focuses on precisely this, quantifying the user journey from one device to another and measuring from the point of consumer interaction across all platforms, media, content and devices. In April Verto posted high-level research into news access and engagement across platforms, highlighting how (and when) valuable audience segments engage with news content.

The day-in-the-life data and visualization underscores the importance of offering content to consumers on their terms – and across all platforms. But it also reveals interesting “windows of opportunity” during the day when content companies might use their presence to interest consumers in a subscription offer.

Raising awareness of your app is an important top-of-the-funnel activity. However, you also need additional data to plan your app marketing and acquisition campaigns – and ultimately benchmark your performance against your peers.

You must also consider several important criteria, which are raised in the 2017 Subscription Apps Report, such as: What is the proper price range for a subscription app? How long is too long to wait for a user to convert and commit to paying a recurring cost? When are the best months to reach and engage potential users?

Compare costs and contexts

The report finds that it costs $161.38 the cost to convert an app user into a subscriber. However, the number may skew high since the subscription app category Liftoff tracks includes Dating Apps, Utilities, and Finance. These types of apps vary significantly in the value they offer and the monthly subscription fee they charge.

It is essential to remember that subscription apps (and their users) are about long-term gains, not short-term bargains. Granted acquisition costs high, but media companies can also increase conversion rates by using all channels at their disposal – including email, push notifications and print ads in their own media properties – to reinforce their value proposition.

Provided they are powered by appropriate messaging and effective targeting, subscription app campaigns can engage and re-engage audiences all year long. This is very different to other categories, such as commerce, which take their cues from seasonal triggers such as holiday sprees or back-to-school shopping.

Companies that offer subscription apps have a huge window of opportunity in which to run campaigns and hit targets. Liftoff also finds that there are some stand-out months, such as September and March, when the “cost to acquire a user who subscribes to the app pays dividends beyond the promise of a more predictable business model powered by more sustainable revenues.”

Above all, keep in mind that driving high conversion rates for your subscription app a journey, not a destination. Regardless of your app subcategory (news, lifestyle, sports) or your campaign objective, your results will be determined by your ability to orchestrate all of your channels to take advantage of all the opportunities to communicate with consumers in ways that are easy, engaging and effective.