I’ve spent a bit of time recently with the iPad, looking at some apps that were developed for magazine brands. It’s an experiment I assumed would be like of the those YouTube videos in which a cat, against all rules of nature, takes to nurturing a bunny or a baby squirrel: cute, compelling and somewhat dread-inducing, because you know this moment of cross-species nurturing won’t last forever.
My conclusion, after looking at 10 or so apps, is that the iPad teat won’t yield much for troubled magazine publishers if they don’t sort out some big problems with both content and commercialization. You can already find more than a few examples of print titles trying force into the iPad content and design conventions that were honed over print’s long history. That is not a good thing, considered in the light of most print mag’s past attempts to go digital. The development of your average consumer magazine website, with its unpredictable content mix and garish, often Flash-heavy design, makes for a generally clunky experience.
On one hand, the missteps are are acceptable—it is early days after all. On the other, it’s scary, especially if you care about how these businesses will succeed in the future. The good news, of course, is that it’s far from too late to fix what’s wrong. Here are five ways to do it.
1. Make better ads.
When new mediums inspire new advertising, that advertising is always initially as annoying as possible and only decreases in its power to annoy over time, as consumer distaste grows and, with it, resistance and avoidancew. Few advertisers, agencies, or media sellers wade into a new advertising opportunity gently. In the early days of TV, when sponsors writing the programs they were ham-handedly shoving their shills into it. For a digital-age analog, think pop-ups, banners, and pre-roll.
Given our theorem of ad annoyance, there should be no surprise at all that early incarnations of magazine advertising on iPad applications from print publisher run a short gamut, from just ok to super-annoying. And it’s clear that publishers view the advent of the iPad as time to open the advertising floodgates with a lot of regard for form. But the iPad will be wasted unless publishers get both creative with they how they conceive and execute ads and respectful of their readers.
2. Ditch ads.
Thanks to the iPhone, consumers have been conditioned to paying for mobile apps. So they might just pay for the iPad version of your magazine. Why not become a premium content play that eschews the inconvenience of ads or at least doesn’t rely wholly on them? This might require a different approach to content–essentially, demanding better, more valuable information.
3. Make content shareable.
Today’s Internet is intensely social, except, of course, the part of it inhabited by Steve Jobs. Apple may view itself as a gated community above it all, but indulging that attitude won’t get publishers far. Many of the apps I’ve seen so far are missing those simple sharing tools so vital to increasing the popularity of the publisher’s apps and the content within them. Though this is a must-have for all, few, like Maxim, have the extra two feet and added buttons to share on Facebook and Twitter.
4. Geolocation-target content.
I think there’s a huge future a newsstand concept that could serve up “magazine” content based on what a reader’s doing in his or her life, based in part on where they are in the world. Assuming the popularity of Foursquare isn’t a flash in the pan, a vast number of people now are comfortable with the notion of revealing their whereabouts on a minute-by-minute basis, a comfort level that might only increase as Facebook gets into the location game. The inherent portability of the iPad makes me think context-based delivery could work–assuming of course there’s no backlash from consumers getting queasy over the privacy issues.
5. Don’t attempt to digitize your magazine.
If publishers want to come out of the iPad party with anything but some nice new code, they’d do well to not try to take the traditional form of the magazine and jam it into the iPad template. As inviting as it may be, the iPad is still a digital device with a relatively small screen. It is not a print surrogate. So forcing viewers to awkwardly pan around an outsized magazine layout trying to locate the text of a profile on, say, Ryan Phillippe, as I’ve seen with Men’s Health, is a mistake.
Drop the conventions that work on the printed page and find new ones that work in the strange new in-between environment birthed by the iPad. That means rethinking layout and content approaches and, probably ditching whatever notion of frequency you’re clinging to, something the brilliant design folks at Pentagram have called for. And this, to be clear, is not a call for simply cramming your magazine’s website, which, if you’re a consumer mag is probably lacking anyway, into an iPad form. For lessons in this, magazine publishers could look, somewhat surprisingly, to traditional media brethren like newspapers and newswires.
Specifically, both the New York Times and especially Reuters have made better bows on the iPad, mainly because they emphasized function over aesthetics. For many magazines the challenges boils down to finding a balance between the two.
