Leveraging power of digital to deliver value
Asian digital leaders share strategies
at Digital Media Asia 2011 in Hong Kong
Leading Asian publishers ended a three-day examination of online, mobile, tablet and social media, with part of their deliberations looking at content strategies, but the real focus was on how to profit from all the content.
Mariam M Mathew,
chief operating officer of Manorama Online in India.
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Sushil Kamampati,
a digital media and pay TV strategist in India.
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Digital news delivery is developing rapidly, but revenues are not keeping pace. Strategies that produce significant revenues from digital content are the holy grail of publishers everywhere, and was much in evidence at Digital Media Asia 2011, held in Hong Kong. More than 300 publishers from 30 countries gathered at the event, organised by WAN-IFRA.
On the accession, Mariam M Mathew, chief operating officer of Manorama Online in India, mentioned the key factors to integrate for offering a real new media experience on mobile and tablet devices at a reasonable cost in her compelling presentation on ‘Mobile Services that Make Sense for Asian News Media’. Giving a snapshot of India, the Indian media landscape, and the Indian advertising market, she stated that India is the world’s fastest growing telecom market, with overall 80 percent tele-density. However, since there is an increased fragmentation of media, crossed platforms are employed to retain customers and attract the youth.
As India is one of the youngest nations on the planet (with more than 65 percent under the age of 35) and the young population tends to use mobiles a lot, Mariam strongly believes that mobile and tablet content have huge latent demand, which needs to be promoted and monetized by content owners and partners. In her opinion, those who rely on apps are power news customers. “Readers are willing to pay for apps, something which we all missed in web,” said Mariam. Nevertheless, she highlighted the importance to find the optimum price to get the maximum subscription revenue, through user feedback and focus group discussions. As per Mathew, the cost mainly lays on content-making, distribution and promotion costs and the platform (native app or HTML 5). For the revenue streams, they include ads that create business solutions, mobile specific revenue models such as SMS & voice, subscription fees, app sales, M commerce, etc.
Winning approaches
for tablet publishing
Nowadays, content publishers seek to offer their audiences a unique media experience on tablets. However, attractive designs can be costly and monetizing opportunities are still limited. Seeing this, Hussein Khalil (CEO of OneVision, Germany), Nikolay Malyarov (vice president in publishing and legal affairs of NewspaperDirect, Canada), Remco Koster (managing director of Woodwing Asia Pacific, Malaysia) and Suvandi were in the conference to share their ideas on the best and most efficient alternatives today.
In today’s digitalized world, Khalil reckoned that it is still important for any publishers to sell quality of content. On the other hand, he has noticed that a big spike in downloads and very good online feedbacks from readers can improve content quality and user experiences. Although challenges are huge, he remained optimistic but realistic as well. Khalil named the current phenomenon a paradigm shift, for OneVision talked to publishers in the past, but to Amazon and Apple nowadays. He advocated the idea of combining ad of iPad and printing press, and videos can work very well for advertising.
In Malyarov’s opinion, it is crucial to address the diverging needs of news agents and end consumers. Contents are abundant, so the key is how to present the contents to the readers. He also thinks that it is critical to know how to collect and monetize user data sets. "If you take the same business online and try to replicate it on the web, it doesn’t work," he said.
“Is it really a revolution or evolution?” Koster raised this question regarding tablet publishing. Emphasizing on the importance of differentiating the products from competitors and making attractive products for customers, he pointed out that a great product on print does not necessarily mean that it is an outstanding tablet product.
Suvandi mentioned that there are now three main groups of customers. The first group is small and local newspapers, which accounts for only small revenue in terms of tablets. The second group is magazines, which see tablets as a revenue, and a tablet-driven solution is required. The third group is glossy magazine, and a design-driven solution which is the best for this category.
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Sushil Kamampati, a digital media and pay TV strategist in India, introduced some innovative solutions for cost effective online content distribution with the example of HBO. Giving the distinction between video entertainment and text news, Kamampati mentioned that entertainment has a longer shelf life, while text is easier to distribute. There are possibly multiple sources for a given news story, and text news has regional and language boundaries. However, the common challenge is ensuring quality and preserving brand identification. Depicting the online news environment, he said that at present, there is a plethora of news aggregators on multiple platforms and contents from multiple sources are intermingled. There is also a lack of curation, so important stories can get lost and loss of quality may be resulted. Kamampati opined that the challenges to being exclusive are aggregated content, third party advertisements and the lack of a subscription model.
More people are accessing websites via mobile than ever before, so redirecting them to mobile-optimized sites is essential. Visitors won't stick around if they don’t like the experience, that will have an impact on revenues – advertisers are interested not only in unique visits and impressions but also the time visitors spend on sites. Mobile-optimized sites retain traffic and encourage more page views per visit. That's the lesson from Simon Shepherdson, marketing manager from Aspermont, a business-to-business publisher in Australia.
Anders Berglund, sales director of Aftonbladet from Sweden, and Kalle Jungkvist, senior advisor of Schibsted from Sweden, talked about how to reach 50 percent revenues from digital on the stage today. Those who believe people won't pay for news need to look at Aftonbladet in Sweden, which attracts half of the Swedish internet population and gets nearly half of its advertising reverences from digital media. Sales director Anders Berglund reckoned that online journalism is crucial to boost revenues – but it has to be ‘fast-live’ that reflects what people are really talking about. And the delivery must include social and interactive qualities, deeper content through multimedia and interactivity and constant innovation.
Cheryl Goh, head of E Media at the New Straits Times Press in Malaysia, suggested that if you want to get the most out of your digital platforms, engage the youngest people in your company in your digital strategy. The Straits Times' ‘Wakalabs’ does just that – it is a platform that engages, on a voluntary basis, the youth of New Straits Times and fosters ideas and innovation for products and services targeted at the youth audience. The company's ‘Hackweekend’ saw 60 young people stay in the office for 30 hours to build 13 new apps. Goh says E Media’s culture and its fun office help improve morale and attract young talent.
Professor Yoshikazu Mikami from Mejiro University brought audience into the analysis of what the great earthquake in Japan has to do with mobile technologies. He emphasized, "As long as media serves human and social needs, there is always a need for digital media and business opportunities."
Alan Griffin, general manager-Asia of consumer media at Thomson Reuters Hong Kong was on stage to share insights into using their brand power to do mobile business in Asia. He pointed out how the news agency collects story with mobile and mobile opportunities in Asia. When it comes to delivering news to their mobile sector audience, mobile journalism is all about speed, multimedia and accuracy. "Mobile empowers journalists to do better at the field," he said. The global media agency has been looking into China, Japan and India for market niche. "You have to be in it to win it," he said. Reuters is launching a new mobile subscription service next year in Japan to get a share of the large and mature market. Then what is the challenge in China? It takes time to build relationship with the officials so brand power is significant in creating the trustworthiness in the market.
Commencing a session with the global update and key implications of mobile media development, Stig Nordqvist, the executive director of emerging digital platforms of WAN-IFRA, mentioned that the number of mobile users will exceed that of desktop users in five years, and that we are living in an evolutionary age mixed with revolution. He noticed that the fastest growing mobile category in Europe by total audience is social networking. To do business successfully, he suggested to ‘do it simple, do the smallest amount of functionality, and do it well’.
Chris Watt, managing director of Tigerspike (an Australian company specializes on personal media), opined that users now spend more time ‘in-app’ than they do online. Consumers are spending much more time on applications. Therefore, it is important to develop a long term, revenue generating & innovative tablet strategy.
Gregor Waller, associate principal at Frenemies Consulting and former VP for strategy and innovation at Axel Springer shared tablet publishing strategies at Axel Springer. Speaking of how they position their subscription plans to customers, Waller emphasised that both discount on bundle subscription could be offered to price-sensitive readers. Readers save more when they subscribe print and digital at the same time. "They love their tablets and mobile device so much that they even skip the subscription of their print newspaper," he added.
Introducing the tactics of the most popular digital kiosk in Spain, Joan Figuerola-Ferretti, head of multimedia projects at Vocento, mentioned that the tablet technology transforms ways to consume and publish news. "Tablets create new ecosystem for news consumption," he added. What do publishers do with the opportunities to find new revenue streams? Figuerola-Ferretti explained monetising paid content via the subscription model. They offer single issue and joint sale to enhance the value of aggregation, alongside promotion to existing print subscribers.
Hiroko Hoshino, the regional online director and FT corporate representative in Financial Times Japan, gave distinctive comparisons on native and device-neutral apps in her speech. Speaking on ‘Leveraging on a media brand for thriving in online business’, Christine Brendle, managing director in Asia Pacific of Dow Jones of Hong Kong pointed out that technology is the missing link in many companies worldwide. She encouraged companies to leverage on new media in order to survive and thrive in today’s digital world.
Newspaper and media executives are looking for solutions to the transformation into an innovative business model. Greg Hywood, chief executive officer of Fairfax Media Australia reinforced that the business model that brings democracy in western countries for 150 years is absolutely over. The media company moves revenues across its business to meet the technological challenge. At the Conference, Hywood offered solutions to get readers become customers. The strategic framework is to first create the advertisement and get data from them before readers pay to consume. The company introduces AirLink, a camera-activated app bringing readers to multimedia contents from its print. Print ads can be integrated with digital ads so readers naturally interact with advertising.
In the concluding speech of Media Asia 2011, Michael Yung, chief technology officer of digital platform of Next Media Group in Hong Kong, addressed a very significant question: ‘Is newspaper dying?’ Yung mentioned that although there are enormous downloads from web users, its newspaper circulations have not gone down. Therefore, he reckoned that news is not dying and what we have to focus on is how to push the news to the audiences. “Contents have to be like water, have to be flexible,” said Yung. The best practice is to produce news contents that can fit video, animated and audio news.
