Freedom's iPad app targets a new, younger audience
Case study
Company: Freedom Communications
Media properties: 41 daily newspaper; 8 broadcast and 19 varsity sports sites throughout the United States
Initiative: iPad app
Key executive: Douglas Bennett, President, Freedom Interactive
Background: Freedom Communications has led one of the most aggressive drives to launch iPhone apps, building more than 50 mobile platforms and 71 mobile apps inhouse in 2010. And those efforts paid off; Bennett says mobile traffic rose from 3% of total pages views in early 2010, to 12% by the end of the year and 14% in January, 2011 with the expectation that mobile will account for a full 20 to 25% of online traffic companywide by the year's end. In total 40% of the mobile traffic comes from mobile apps.
The first 17 iPad apps launched at Freedom properties were extensions of these iPhone apps. However, Freedom is about to launch an iPad aimed at a new audience.
“A smart phone is always with the (user),” Bennett says. “As long as they are awake, they use it...Research shows that smart phones are also used “more and more for utiliarian type functions” that is, photos, map, prices and e-mail, while surfing the web on iPhones is mostly for tacking down information.
In contrast, iPad usage is heaviest in the morning and in the evening. “It’s becoming much more of a portable computing device, not really a mobile device.” The audience is also unique.
Challenge: The key challenge for Freedom is to develop an iPad app that can capture new audiences and grow each market's audience overall.
The typical iPad user is the coveted 35 year to 45 year old, 60% male, and most importantly, not a typical consumer of newspaper sites, who remain roughly 50 years of age and older.
Strategy: Until now, the strategy at Freedom and most newspaper companies is to transition the existing newspaper site audience by repurposing iPhone content to the iPad with a slightly richer experience.
The second approach, now adopted at Freedom, is to target new audiences by creating new and different content packages..
“Instead of, basically a dying audience, you can look at demographics and usage and ask what can you do have an opportunity to finally grow an audience," Bennett says.
“We are thinking first and foremost how do we get a young audience and how do we use this device to do that.”
The new iPad version aimed for a March launch date, is built around six categories, displayed in visual boxes on the iPad home page (a preview of the mock-up under develop is in the images to the right, click to enlarge). Each category has ten stories each including graphics and video, and is up-dated twice a day.
“If we are running a story on school rankings, you may still see it somewhere, but it may not be a full page, because there may be a bigger opportunity in another story.” .
The site is updated twice a day, with more stories added at 5 p.m., when people are coming home from work. These features are magazine style packages on celebrity interviews, mixed martial arts fights, etc.
“We treat it much more like a magazine. Our whole goal for the (2.0) project is information not news, curated in a fashion that's designed around the younger audience.”
Sales on the iPad will initially use a sponsorship model, taking into account an anticipated $45 CPM. Freedom is building customized sample ads for most of the larger advertisers, some of whom will be on the site from the launch and "are going to be part of the process of learning with us,” Bennett says.
He considers the key category for the iPad to be retail and says there is strong interest from Macy’s and Paul's TV, a privately owned regional television outlet. The first closed sponsorship is for a casino, since the higher end, 35 to 45 male demo is their primary target audience.
One of the challenges for Freedom on the iPad app is structuring iPad ads (they run as banners along the bottom of the page) to create a great user-experience.. To police aesthetic choices and user-interfaces, ad formats have to flow through another level of management. "We want to make sure that we don’t just take ads and repurpose them because it will ruin the experience.”
Freedom plans to push syndicated content to smaller sites that do not have the resources to deploy a new product and to have updated iPad apps in 70% of Freedom markets by the end of 2011.
“The question is can we create (content) so that we can syndicate it out. Most of the topics are not centric to just (one area)."
Lessons learned:
1. The culture of cost-cutting may need to be re-examined in light of the fact there are now new audiences to be had via iPads and other reader devices. A variety of companies from car dealers to credit unions are looking for way to reach younger, affluent buyers that the iPad provides.
As Bennett puts it, “If we are not trying to figure this out, the what is going to differentiate us going forward that will allow us to build new audiences?"
2. iPad users are not only different from web site and cell phone users, they also read the iPad at different times for different purposes. "Even calling them both mobile is not really the correct way to go."
3. The iPad has generated a new interest in good design by newspaper executives, who realize design and user-experience is part of the upscale brands they are trying to create - and that younger users have higher expectations.
The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and MediaExecsTech, developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine, to showcases perspectives from around the world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.
Keywords
freedom, ipad, freedom communications, Doug Bennet,
