Ross Burridge, Head of Emerging Platforms at Dennis Publishing, tells Figaro how the company is embracing mobile technology and considers the opportunities for brands, marketers, publishers and users
According to one of the most commonly-made observations about the new digital economy, everyone's a publisher now. Clearly, of course, that isn't quite true. But it does indicate the scale of the challenge faced by actual publishers. Among the many issues thrown up by the net during the noughties was the fact that conventional publishers found themselves competing with new outlets and giving away their content for free. And since content is the only thing publishers have to sell, the business model wasn't looking hopeful.
Dennis, the independently-owned publishers founded in 1974 by provocateur-turned-entrepreneur Felix Dennis, has a stable of over 35 websites and 70 magazine titles, including Viz, Bizarre and The Week. Ross Burridge is Head of Emerging Platforms at Dennis Media Factory – a new division dedicated to mobile and tablet production. He's been with the company for eight years and recalls the point at which the ground began to shift for publishers.
"The web came along and tore up the rule book," he says. "Everything became about now. Everything became about keywords to keep Google happy." Since then, Dennis have succeeded by facing the challenges raised first by the net and then mobile technology head on. In 2008 they launched the first ever interactive gadget magazine iGIZMO, and Burridge's thinking about the relationship between publishing and technology, content and commerce sheds valuable light on the potential value of the mobile web for marketers.
At Dennis, he says, "We don't necessarily think we've got to have apps for everything. We think about what assets we've got, how can we reuse them, how can we make the most of our archive, our audience and our advertisers. We're trying to look at all the different options, and on a practical level asking, what should we be doing with Viz, Bizarre or PC Pro? How can we take not just the magazine but the brand into a multi-format 21st century?"
Right now, however, the digital picture is massively fragmented. There's an abundance of devices, technologies, formats and operating systems, all of them vying for supremacy. So how are Dennis navigating this sometimes bewildering landscape?
Know your brand
"There are definite economies of scale," he says. "Once you've started looking at one platform for one brand, there are significant ways in which you can extend that experience across other brands. As publishers we want to get our message - whether that's commercial or editorial – to as many people as possible in as many different, effective ways as possible. For Evo, our performance car brand, one of the first things we did was to concentrate on an iPad app – it's a premium magazine with lots of great content, lots of great photos – it lends itself very well to that sort of experience. The same with iGIZMO. That was very successful online but as soon as the iPad came along, it was obvious that we needed to move into that format, and seeing it for the first time was amazing. It seemed that three years earlier, when we first designed it – this was what we'd been thinking about all along."
Right now everyone's focus is on apps, but Burridge emphasises the need to be sensitive about the relationship between brand, format and content. "We're keen not to just chuck everything in a very basic framework," he says, "pile it high and then flog it cheap.
"One of our approaches is to go back to the core values of a brand and say, if Evo was a digital magazine, if it was a YouTube channel, if it was a TV channel – what would it actually be like? It's not a question of simply saying, 'what editorial have we got and can we shove some video over the top?' It's about building it from the ground up."
Get in the ring-fence
Sound advice, of course, but the mobile web presents its own set of challenges. What other issues does Burridge think are significant in this field?
"Well," he says, "first of all, what do you mean by the mobile web? I classify the mobile web as a traditional desktop website formatted for a smaller screen." Add to that, he says, a heavy emphasis on SEO and Google-baiting. "It's a pretty horrible model. It doesn't really work editorially and – people are starting to admit now – it doesn't really work commercially that well either. It's not a very satisfying experience for anyone.
"At Dennis we've really not embraced the mobile web in its traditional form. I think there are huge opportunities for people to consume non-linear editorial content on mobile devices. I don't know if it's 'mobile' as we think of it. But whether you present that through an app or through something a bit less narratively structured, there's clearly a demand for it. Everyone's got an iPhone and we sit there browsing the web. Yet half the time we're not actually browsing mobile websites – or deliberately mobile websites with a specific subset of mobile advertising. They are websites that happen to work on mobile phones, or they're websites which are effectively served up through apps.
"I think the distinction between the internet and websites is interesting. The internet is a fantastically important delivery structure and set of technologies. Websites, as we think of them now, are a very different thing. They're a front-end with information structured in various different ways with no particular beginning or end and usually lacking in much editorial hierarchy or narrative.
"With web apps, essentially you have a website which people will happily pay for because it's well structured, attractive and pleasurable to use. It's potentially a ring-fenced set of content – you can finish it. It's also predictable – you know what you're going to get from it. That's a small change in many ways, but it's also a very profound change in the way people interact with content delivered through the internet, as opposed to going to a website or browsing Google for information."
The human machine
As ever in the world of digital technology, change is the only constant. So, given the irresistible rise of the app, what does Burridge see on the horizon?
"As I say, from a publishing perspective, the exciting thing is that people are becoming willing to pay for content. That's partly due to much easier payment infrastructures, and partly due, I suspect, to what I've said about easily consumable content. That's very exciting for publishers, because we've spent a lot of time doing stuff for nothing.
"For advertisers, I'd hope that this would have the effect that their messages are much less polluted by the bouncing-on of pop-up ads and the less than exciting CPM model. I hope that advertising messages can actually become a positive part again of people's media consumption in the way that they generally are in newspapers and magazines."
Whether we're marketers, publishers, bloggers or browsers, the ubiquity and dominance of Google has been instrumental in shaping our experience of the net. For Burridge, apps and 'appification' have the potential to alter the ways in which users find and engage with content.
"Google is the machines trying to pick what's important," he says, "and then we try to trick the machines. I don't necessarily have a better algorithm lying around, but 'appification' is a step towards the humanisation of content – it's saying, 'what do we think or feel is important?' Not how many keywords does this story contain or are there spelling mistakes that will cause it to be rated as poor content. It's about the actual human interest of this story, and I think that's tremendously interesting."
www.dennismediafactory.co.uk/
Article by Jon Fortgang