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Mobile Commerce World

 06/24/2013 - 06/26/2013 San Francisco CA

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Publishers need to get their apps in gear

April 24th, 2013


eMedia Vitals

Apple is rumored to be announcing the fifth generation of its iPad on June 18. Mobile devices account for an increasingly larger share of most publishers’ web traffic – including a whopping 65% for BuzzFeed.  Publishers are delivering 1.7 million digital editions a week built with Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite – a sixfold increase over the past two years.

It may be time to take this whole mobile thing a bit more seriously.

The elements required to justify greater investment in mobile development are falling into place. More people are reading digital magazines; Adobe says per-publication readership across its DPS-based publications has increased by an average of 80% over the past six months. More devices are coming to market, with models such as the iPad mini and Kindle HD extending into the mass market.

“People are more comfortable reading magazine content on tablets,” Lynly Schambers-Lenox, Adobe’s group product marketing manager for digital publishing, said in a recent interview. “That’s not surprising, and we expect it to continue.”

Read more… 

Categories: Mobile Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Native advertising and the role of ‘brand editors’

March 8th, 2013

eMedia Vitals

As publishers add native advertising and other content marketing services to their product portfolios, there’s a growing need for business-side editorial teams to manage this content. Sales teams have staffed editors as part of their custom publishinggroups for decades. But the role of business-side editors is expanding as native advertising programs lead to more commingling of editorial and sponsored content.

Publishers that are experimenting with or considering a native advertising program may need to invest in a dedicated editorial team to help advertisers develop, optimize and publish content. Deploying “brand journalists” on native advertising projects – separate from the rest of the editorial staff – will also help publishers protect their own brand from thinly veiled press releases or other low-quality drivel that advertisers submit under the guise of “real” editorial.

There’s an urgency to get this right. In a recent study from Econsultancy and Adobe, content marketing was deemed the top priority for 2013 among digital marketers. And native advertising – in which branded content is published on third-party media sites – is quickly becoming a key piece of brands’ content marketing strategies.

Read more…

Categories: Advertising & Marketing Blog, Digital Media Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tablets take off; will media innovation follow?

February 15th, 2013

eMedia Vitals

Apple CEO Tim Cook says tech innovation is moving from PCs to tablets and smartphones. Slowly, magazine publishing is following.

Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco, Cook said there’s a “sea change” taking place in the PC industry as development shifts from PCs to mobile devices. “But we’re in the early innings of this game,” he added.

Not too early for magazine publishers to start shifting resources toward their tablet strategies. A new study from NPD Group found that more than one-third of consumers are transitioning some of their content consumption from PCs to tablets and smartphones. Combine consumption and engagement trends with rapidly growing tablet sales – Apple shipped 23 million tablets in the fourth quarter alone, and lower-priced, 7-inch tablets are rapidly gaining share while creating a mass market – and the stage is set for a significant uptick in sales of digital content, including magazines.

Last week’s magazine circulation report from the Alliance for Audited Media shows the gains digital editions are making – but also the untapped opportunity. Digital replica editions among the titles reporting to the AAM more than doubled over the second half of 2012 from a year earlier, accounting for nearly 8 million digital replicas. That number is still just 2.4% of total circulation, however. And just 65% of magazines in the AAM report reported digital circulation; several large titles did not, including Better Homes and Gardens, Barron’s, AARP, TV Guide, and Time Inc’s major titles such as Time, Sports Illustrated and Southern Living. This suggests even higher sales of digital editions.

Continue reading… 

Categories: Mobile Blog, Mobile Research | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Study: Search, email remain strong in driving B2B traffic, leads [Infographic]

January 24th, 2013

eMedia Vitals

Two “old school” digital platforms – organic search and email – remain key drivers of traffic and leads, respectively, to B2B sites, according to a new study by Optify.

Organic search drove 41% of traffic to B2B sites in 2012, according to the Optify study, which analyzed more than 27 million visits from various sources to 591 B2B sites in North America. And Google accounted for 90% of that search traffic.

But while organic search is the top traffic driver to B2B sites, it lags in converting visitors to leads. Email remains the lead dog for leads, with a 2.9% conversion rate – double that of organic search (1.45%) and social media (1.22%).

“Organic search is still the strongest traffic driver, but email is the best way to get people to engage,” Optify CMO Doug Wheeler said in a phone interview.

“I really thought, in the age of content marketing, that inbound marketing was the way to go,” Wheeler added. “But the real secret is getting them onto your outbound list. Publishers may not want to dial down email just yet.”

Here’s an infographic from Optify that summarizes the results of the study.

Categories: Digital Media Blog, Digital Media Research | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Content marketing services: a prime opportunity

July 2nd, 2012

eMedia Vitals/Scott Vaughn, UBM Techweb

B2B marketers understand that engaging customers in today’s environment requires a depth of high-quality content designed to attract prospects that seed their websites, feed their marketing programs and fuel their marketing automation systems.  That’s an opportunity for publishers. Typical quarterly goals for today’s B2B marketer: Generate 25,000 leads, host 26 events, create and manage thousands of web pages and enable hundreds of sales calls.  These mammoth goals and the expanded requirements that come with them are creating a great opportunity for savvy, nimble publishers that can evolve their culture and skills to navigate beyond traditional advertising into marketing services.

Read more… 

Categories: Digital Media Blog, Digital Media News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

CMS overhaul: Rebuilding a ‘rickety house’

June 27th, 2012

eMedia Vitals

Publishing systems are becoming increasingly complex as the digital marketplace evolves. Keeping pace with rapidly changing audience and advertiser demands is forcing many publishers to ask a tough question: Can our existing databases and content management system carry us into the future?

For IDG’s Consumer & SMB group, the answer was no. “Our systems were not built to anticipate recent changes in the marketplace and in the technology,” said Aaron Jones, the group’s chief technology officer and vice president of product development. In response, the IDG unit has spent the past six months building a new publishing system that leverages HTML5,responsive design and a host of new back-end components to accommodate shifts in the digital publishing landscape.

http://bit.ly/LBdNai

Categories: Digital Media News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Making a case for HTML5 investment

June 26th, 2012

eMedia Vitals

HTML5 promises to get publishers closer to digital media’s Promised Land: create once, deliver everywhere. As deployments increase and the standard evolves, media companies are finding it. At last week’s MPA Digital: Technology conference in New York, media executives and vendors discussed HTML5’s potential and some of the early lessons they’re learning from their HTML5 projects. The consensus: HTML5 enables publishers to maximize resources as content distribution expands across an ever-expanding variety of tablets and smartphones. HTML5 also provides investment protection against future devices in a mobile market that is still forming.

Some publishers are already re-building their digital foundations around HTML5, having justified that responsive design and web apps are more cost-effective than native, device-specific apps. “Finding iOS programmers can be expensive,” said Don Peschke, CEO of August Home Publishing, which is transitioning its portfolio of woodworking, garden, cooking and home improvement websites to HTML5.

Executives added several other reasons to begin making the transition to HTML5, including:

Less code. A common code base for web and mobile environments will reduce the amount of code that developers need to maintain, thereby decreasing the chances of errors that lead to broken links or other negative user experiences. IDG’s Consumer & SMB group, for example, is consolidating its PCWorld.com,Macworld.com and new TechHive.com websites around a common HTML5 code base – which Chief Technology Officer Aaron Jones estimates will be about 20% the size of the existing code base just for PCWorld.com.

Continue reading…

Categories: Digital Media News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

SEO vs. SMO: Why Google may favor social media optimization

May 31st, 2012

eMedia Vitals 

Google has been a traffic bellwether for more than a decade, enabling those who embraced search engine optimization (SEO) to disrupt those who didn’t. Now, Google seems to be turning on SEO in favor of social media optimization (SMO), launching several initiatives that directly disrupt those who have been able to game their algorithm. Sites like Huffington Post and Gawker, who recognize this sea change, stand to benefit greatly from Google’s moves while content farms like Demand Media, Associated Content and even hybrid sites like About.com are already suffering. Where do magazine and newspaper sites fit in the spectrum of winners and losers? We’ll look at today’s winners and losers later in this post.

Read more… 

Categories: Digital Media News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

4 trends fueling mobile advertising

February 2nd, 2012

eMedia Vitals 

There’s no denying the growth of mobile advertising. eMarketer has increased its forecasted ad spend for 2012 to $2.6 billion, an increase of 80% over 2011. Mojiva’s mobile ad network manages about 45 60 billion ad impressions a month. Another ad network, InMobi, sayssmartphone impressions on its global network grew 488% in 2011.

To learn the trends click here

Categories: Mobile News, Mobile Research | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Only About a Third of Tweets Are Worth Reading [STUDY]

February 1st, 2012

eMedia Vitals 

Do you ever wonder how people react when they see yourTwitter updates? Odds are, most would fall under the category of “meh,” according to a new study.

Find out more… 

Categories: Mobile News, Mobile Research | Tags: , , , , , , ,