With publishers trying to negotiate the shift to mobile formats, received wisdom dictates that there are only two options available: replicate or redesign. Group FMG’s UK Managing Director Mark Inskip explains how, by looking at high street retailer M&S, publishers will find a cost-effective third option
Digital publishing is, without a doubt, brilliant. More so than ever before, designers are getting to grips with the capabilities of new platforms, and we understand much more about reader experience and how people interact with content.
The good news is that this is only set to improve. Market forces appear to be driving screen sizes to their optimum aspect and publishers now have a variety of tools at their disposal to help populate their digital titles with content. Tablet sales are up, and there’s an appetite for more – in fact, sales are expected to reach more than 30 million in the UK alone by the end of 2015. Publishers like the Guardian are now adopting ‘digital first’ strategies, and the tablet editions of Condé Nast titles continue to impress and delight.
So if it’s all going so well, where’s the catch?
Conditions in the print industry are still tricky to say the least. Circulation figures are down, and despite the efforts of the publishers, readers aren’t swapping paper for tablet. On top of this, more screens and better connectivity mean greater competition for reader attention.
It’s easy to understand why publishers are turning to tablets to boost revenues, but in the run to plug the revenue gap, many have overlooked the finer details. Currently the belief appears to be that there are just two options for transferring a printed publication to the iPad; either you just reproduce it as a bunch of flat PDFs that you can flick through, or you create a custom built app from scratch.
Simply reproducing a magazine on the tablet doesn’t count for a digital content strategy. Not least because the iPad is smaller than the format of most magazines and users find themselves zooming in and out to read the pages. Ultimately this becomes a cumbersome and unrewarding experience. On the other hand, completely redesigning a magazine as a bespoke iPad app can be hugely expensive, almost prohibitively so. This lack of choice can be extremely restrictive for publishers and explains why relatively few have made the transition effectively and many more are resisting the move entirely for as long as possible.
However there is a third option, as has been recently demonstrated by M&S. At this point you might be forgiven for asking what a high street retailer could possibly teach the publishing industry, but the reality is that retailers face the same issues as publishers; having to embrace the same shift to mobile and digital to talk to their customers. As such they are faced with the prospect of moving their printed collateral – such as catalogues – over to digital platforms.
Catalogues fulfil an important role in providing an inspiration to buy, but rising production costs and changing shopper habits mean that the convergence of digital, print and ecommerce is inevitable. M&S has got round this by taking its existing printed assets and reformatting them specifically for the iPad – creating its hugely successful M&S Home iPad app in the process.
The pictures have been resized and text overlayed to fit the iPad’s screen size, and most importantly hot spots have then been added to the pictures to allow users to interact with the products, share them over email and social media and ultimately to purchase them. And all this has been done without having to undertake a costly redesign. The effect has been to create 80 per cent of the experience of a bespoke app for around 20 per cent of the effort.
This isn’t about replicating or redesigning content for iPad, it’s about repurposing it and making it work better in that format. And it offers publishers a viable and cost effective alternative in the shift to mobile.
Mark Inskip, UK Managing Director, Group FMG
Figaro Digital, 28 September 2012
Utalkmarketing, 28 September 2012
Internet Retailing, 9 January 2013
Mobile Marketing Magazine, 10 January 2013