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Wednesday, December 05, 2012

5 tips for developing new digital products

When the iPad debuted in 2010, I began urging newspaper publishers to defend and extend their franchises by developing innovative products to attract new audiences and new revenues on this transformational platform. But I always got the same question:  Who else is doing it? 
For a year, I didn’t have a good answer, because publishers either ignored the most rapidly adopted electronics product in history – now owned by roughly a quarter of the population, according to the Pew Research Center – or slapped together retro renditions of their websites or print products for this state-of-the-art environment.  
A miracle occurred in the spring of 2011, when the Orange County Register introduced a spritely, purpose-built app called The Peel that, exercising the full multimedia and interactive capabilities of the iPad, was explicitly designed to be as un-newspapery as possible.
The miracle was short-lived. A little more than a year after it was launched, The Peel was killed when the newspaper changed hands and the new owners throttled back most of their digital initiatives to double down on print. 
It’s too soon to assess the wisdom of the bold, if counter-intuitive, print-first strategy at a time when the digital media vigorously are siphoning readers and revenues away from newspapers.  While we wait to see how that plays out, the tale of The Peel offers an excellent case study of the good, bad and ugly aspects of innovative product development in the legacy newspaper environment – a skill that every publishing company needs but few have mastered.
The perfect man to tell the Peel story is Douglas Bennett, who until September was the top digital officer at Freedom Communications, the parent of the Register.  Bennett, who exited the company when the strategy shifted from pixels to print, has five important tips for editors and publishers hoping to develop inovative products. We’ll get to them in a moment.  First, here’s the background: 
“The Peel was proposed in July, 2010, as a lean-back, media-rich experience, to be delivered at 6 p.m. each day to the sort of 24- to 44-year-old individuals who typically don’t read newspapers,” said Bennett in an interview.  “Our research showed that the younger readers we wanted – but didn’t have – were not necessarily interested in conventional newspaper content, but, rather, were interested in the weather, personalities or what to do on the weekend. So, we went heavy with video and graphical stories and left out most of the stuff that normally appears in the newspaper.”
Although the app intentionally was designed to be nothing like the newspaper, it initially carried the Register’s name and was marketed primarily through the print and web editions of the paper.  This led to two big problems, which immediately came to light in focus groups. First, the app, which largely had been downloaded by the over-50 folks who make up half of newspaper readers, hadn’t attracted the desired audience.  Second, the early-adopters were angry that the app lacked the traditional newspaper content they were expecting to see. 
“We knew immediately that we blew it,” said Bennett.  ““So, we launched a contest to find a new name and moved our marketing to such channels as Pandora, Twitter and the social media.”
Renamed The Peel within three months of launch, the product generated a few hundred thousand dollars of revenues in the first year but it wasn't making money, said Bennett, who is prohibited by his severance agreement from discussing financial details.  Although Bennett said the losses were in line with those anticipated in the two-year launch plan adopted at the outset of the project, The Peel was scrapped when the company switched its focus back to print. 
Reflecting on the venture, Bennett identified the following tips for developing a new and novel product:
∷ Do your homework. “Make sure there is a market there,” said Bennett. “Be able to prove it’s there for the people in finance and sales – and the CEO.” 
∷ Get the CEO’s backing. “Have a plan that the CEO buys into, supports and guarantees,” said Bennett, so he or she can “run interference” with finance, the newsroom, the ad sales department or anyone else who wants to kill the project if it is losing money in the early days – as almost all new ventures do.
∷ Field the right team.  “For iPad development, you need people who understand HTML5, video and design on a screen environment,” he said “You don’t have those people in today’s newsroom.”
∷ Recruit a sales champion. “Newspaper sales people already have too many things to sell,” said Bennett.  “You need a leader who buys into your project.”
∷ Build on your failures.  “The plan you put on paper never happens the way you thought it would,” said Bennett. “Recognize that you are going to make mistakes. When you do, make changes fast.”
© 2012 Editor & Publisher

5 comments:

  1. The Peel was an excellent experiment -- in concept and execution. It looked easy to produce, breezy to read and made minimal impact on regular news operations.

    Or at least that's the way it should have been on all three counts. Offered as a near-term stop on the path toward a full-fledged digital publishing solution, I personally believe it should have been left as it was, rather than scrapped for a far more mundane solution. I wish I never allowed The OCR to update my iPad app and blow away proof of that concept.

    As an independent publishing consultant, I used The Peel as a great example of what could be done, on a low-cost, low-effort basis, for a digital publishing solution. I even built a workflow where it could be built within four person-hours per issue, based on output from typical newspaper and internet copy desks.

    But as I read your column, and the lessons learned from your sources, I could tragically surmise why it didn't survive. Once again, it seems that our worst enemies are generally found within our own organizations.

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  2. Mr. Bennett's 5 step plan for success sounds exactly like a marketing class I took in 1964 at Wayne State University... while worded slightly different the 5 steps to success had the exact same meaning.. so, nothing new about how to succeed in the digital world... sometimes we just have to follow tried and true methods of successfully launching a new marketing idea..and have the balls to stick it out...

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  3. The key concept here is experiment. Iterate rapidly at as little cost as possible and relentlessly measuring the results. Beyond the will to test, how many newspaper possess the human and physical capacity to do this?

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  4. Have you seen the Arizona Republic's new iPad app? Search 'AZ today' in the app store. I think this is platform/content perfect. Visually stunning.

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  5. Have you seen the Arizona Republic's new iPad app? Search "AZ today" in the app store. Platform/content perfect and visually stunning.

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