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Q&A with Sol Masch, Director of Mobile Sales & Strategy, Time Inc. on Mobile Ad Innovation
This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights… If you want to learn more, keep an eye out on our site for more interviews. Today’s Three on Three is with Sol Masch, Director of Mobile Sales & Strategy, Time Inc.
Q: In mobile advertising, what is the most important thing to consider?
A: The place to begin is always around the KPIs and defining those so we can figure out how to make a campaign a success. On mobile, most clients want engagement. The question is, what does engagement mean? Then you can define the right message, the right user and appropriate data targeting. Often, engagement is defined as getting a user to interact. Then you have to create rich messaging that drives interaction. But the message can also be delivered in the form of content that will prompt interaction. We are definitely getting more requests for native and we’re looking at how it lives on the mobile screen and how it will engage readers.
One of the big differentiating factors for mobile versus desktop or other platforms, is the idea of time spent. This is a big misnomer as a KPI on mobile. Agencies often want to drive campaigns based upon how much time people are spending interacting. We don’t find that time spent is the best KPI. If you can engage a user in five seconds—if they go through the entire experience and you get them to want to share the content—you have engaged them, in a matter of seconds.
We see that it is important to be more sensitive to the issue of time on mobile. Often we see that people use mobile during “found time,” which is a couple of minutes on the bus or waiting for an appointment. Mobile demands quick hits that are just as powerful as longer times spent on other devices. The trick is in designing those experiences that last less than a minute, or even just a few seconds, to deliver impact and engagement.
Q: Describe one of your recent or upcoming mobile campaigns that you think is particularly innovative and why it worked.
A: We recently did a campaign with Infiniti promoting the Q50 vehicle. What’s interesting about the Q50 is its intuitive features: You step into the car and it knows all of the personalized features you like such as seat and mirror position.
Given how personalized the Q50 experience is, we wanted to create a similar ad experience that knew the user and that was intuitive about them as well. With our database targeting we are able to identify our print readers through our partnership with Apple and on Facebook and Twitter, et cetera. We developed an experience that gave users not only content from their favorite brands but also content tailored to their specific taste. So if we identified a mobile user as a Time reader who likes technology, the ad unit would contain a bunch of tech articles. A business enthusiast would get business news articles. We tailored this experience so that it leveraged the right brand with the right reader, but also the exact right content.
This campaign was extremely successful. By delivering the right content through the ad experience, we saw engagement levels lifted three to five times.
Q: What is working in mobile advertising, and what do we need more of, in order to drive success?
A: I think that mobile is getting a lot less clunky and more sophisticated, which is a good thing for users and the industry. A few years ago, there was marketer resistance around investing in mobile because experiences on the desktop, with flash and sexy animations, couldn’t be replicated on mobile. Now we are seeing beautiful, rich experiences on mobile that have excited a lot of marketers. These improvements have fueled their interest in investing in mobile and is making it a larger part of their multimedia platform spend.
However, we still need less fragmentation and more simplicity. Mobile is still a challenging landscape to navigate. With different devices and different operating systems, mobile is a much more complex environment to run a rich media experience in and to format them to work properly. All that device and screen variation is holding us back.
Devices and operating systems will keep on coming and we need to simplify it for the marketing and advertising community. We have made progress over the past year. I’ve seen a lot more publishers and agencies adopting IAB Rising Star units, which has been a big help for the mobile advertising industry. The more we can establish standards, the more it will help everyone. Within the structure of standards, we will be able to innovate even more.
Sol Masch, Director of Corporate Mobile Sales & Strategy for Time Inc., is responsible for mobile ad monetization across Time Inc.’s network of 32 million monthly mobile users – including brands such as People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, TIME, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Health, Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine. Prior to joining Time Inc., Masch served as the Mobile Advertising Director for Viacom Media Networks. In this role, he built Viacom’s mobile business from $0 into a multimillion dollar business. Previously, Masch was co-owner of Not13, a full service mobile marketing agency and content provider dedicated to providing interactive campaigns and services on mobile devices for Elektra Records and Fuse TV.
Note: This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights.
Also in this series:
Q&A with Brian Colbert, Chief Revenue Officer, About.com on Mobile Advertising Innovation
Q&A with Joe D. Weir, VP of Digital, A.H. Belo on Mobile Advertising Innovation
Q&A with Sarah McConville, VP of Marketing, HBR & Publisher HBR Press on Subscription Models
This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights… If you want to learn more, keep an eye out on our site for more interviews. Today’s Three on Three is with Sarah McConville, the Vice President of Marketing for Harvard Business Review Group and Publisher of Harvard Business Review Press.
Q: When conceiving of a subscription-based model, initiative or product, where should you begin strategically?
A: At Harvard Business Review, we always start with the audience. Whether it’s a strategic initiative, a new product concept or our overall subscription model, we ask the questions: For whom are we developing this? What job are they hiring Harvard Business Review to do? What’s the context in which they will be using this offering? What are we bringing to it that is of distinctive value for the audience? What can we give them that is far and away better than they could get anywhere else?
And, just as importantly, we work to ensure that all parts of our business – editorial, marketing, advertising, product development – are in sync when beginning a new strategic effort or offering.
In the past year we’ve been following the framework of a book we recently published calledPlaying to Win. It’s been an incredibly helpful focusing mechanism at all levels of our business.Playing to Winputs you through the paces of asking: What is our winning aspiration? What does winning, not just competing, look like? Where will we play? Specifically, which segments, which markets, which channels, which products? How will we win? So that we get at what our strategic advantage is in achieving our winning aspiration, what capabilities must be in place? How must we be prepared as an organization and as individuals to achieve our aspiration? And finally, what management systems are required? In other words, how are we going to support our behaviors and track our progress? It’s helped us to align and cascade our efforts from an HBR group-level down to individual units and teams.
Q: Please describe one of your subscription-based initiatives and the way in which you feel it is particularly innovative.
A: In the past year we’ve made a significant change to our subscription model by offering “All Access” as our primary offer to subscribers. “All Access” is just that: You can access your Harvard Business Review subscription in print, online, and via your iPad, and you have access to the current issue as well as our online archive of 50+ years of HBR articles. We made the move to “All Access” after hearing from subscribers that this offer represented a greater value for them than just print or print and website alone. And I have to say that we were really pleased to see that, in a time when many media brands are cutting subscription price and offering more content for free as a way of maintaining circulation levels, with “All Access” we’ve been able to add more subscribers, and increase the price with this subscription. Harvard Business Review’s 1H13 AAM Publisher’s Statement was the highest paid circulation level in HBR’s history at 260K.
Based on the success of “All Access” we’re in the process of engaging with our audience to explore other ways of adding value to a Harvard Business Review subscription at a premium level so that we can build on our success to deliver an even better experience for our readers in the future.
Q: What advice would you give in terms of approaching subscription models creatively? Are there any best practices, processes, tips or resources that you would suggest?
A: I think it’s important to listen closely to your subscribers and to understand their most important needs today, but also have an eye on the future and a sense of how you think you can grow your business. Finding this balance of today and tomorrow is critically important. Engage in ongoing audience research, follow best practices from other media brands, but have a strong point of view about what you think makes your offering unique and what you can capitalize on to deliver more value.
When considering new models or offerings, work hard to align the editorial and commercial stakeholders in a shared understanding of how you’re serving subscribers and what you want to deliver to them. But also bring in the skeptics, listen, take them seriously. They will help you gain a different perspective on what you’re trying to do and push you to think more rigorously about the solution you want to offer and the audience segments and channels in which you want to play.
Work to create value for everyone – subscribers and customers, the editorial team and contributors, advertisers, employees. It’s important that everyone involved is contributing and feels they are being well served by the outcome.
Continually check your assumptions. What is true today is sure to change in the future. Evolving your subscription model is an ongoing practice that requires you to constantly test, try new things, learn from the feedback, refine − and sometimes, take a step in a new direction. Innovation is a dynamic process.
Sarah McConville is the Vice President of Marketing for Harvard Business Review Group and Publisher of Harvard Business Review Press. In her role as Publisher, McConville leads the commercial aspects of Harvard Business Review Press, including strategic partnerships, marketing and communications, licensing, and global sales. With Harvard Business Review Group’s executive team led by Group Publisher Joshua Macht and Editor-in-Chief Adi Ignatius, McConville is helping to shape the transformation of Harvard Business Review into a multi-platform digital media brand.
Note: This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights.
Also in this series:
Q&A with Rob Grimshaw, Managing Director, FT.com on Subscription Model Success
Q&A with Michael Crosby, Chief Operating Officer, The Deal on Subscription Model Success
Optimism Despite Unresolved Issues About Video Advertising
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Customer Understanding Drives “Cultish” Devotion to the Content People Love
Perspective matters. Be it a writer with a point of view or a brand inspiring cultish loyalty, delivering an engaging experience rather than information on its own is what will drive digital consumption and profitability. As Strauss Zelnick, founder of Zelnick Media put it, “what you do has to be compelling; it cannot be generic.” This experience, he believes, will deliver much more than those dreaded digital dimes. “We ought to get to digital dollars as we create engagement,” Zelnick confidently stated at the 12th Annual OPA Summit held January 22-24 in Miami.
As OPA President Pam Horan pointed out in her opening remarks, “It’s not content that people kinda like. Or content that people occasionally pay attention to. It’s about content that people genuinely love. And use.” That love, as several speakers pointed out, is driven by genuine enthusiasm about a given subject, be it business or celebrity gossip. As John Najarian, EVP/GM of Digital and Business Development at E! Entertainment put it, during the “Creating Content People Love” panel, “When you read a sports story or a business story, you can tell that there are people behind that category that are really passionate.” Fellow panelist Forbes Editor Randall Lane agreed that point of view has been integral to his brands’ success, but to it he adds credibility as the other key component in creating content that drives engagement.
Vox Media COO and Group Publisher Marty Moe said success “all starts with great content and an emphasis on social.” And to translate that into revenue, “it takes a combination of talent and technology.” However Moe did quip that, at Vox—which is known for such digitally native brands as the Verge and SBNation—“we have magazine envy” to which Forbes’ Lane replied, “You know… we’re for sale.”
Though as Zelnick pointed out, during his interview by Krishan Bhatia, EVP, Digital Strategy and Operations of NBCUniversal, his business (like that of Vox Media) does not “have to focus on a legacy business, so we can focus solely on the future.” This notion of the peril of protecting legacy businesses at the expense of preparing for the future was at the core of Digital First Media CEO John Patton’s talk, “Past Can’t Buy the Future.” Patton emphasized the need for media organizations to invest heavily in digital “because the profound changes in digital revenue streams will require huge investments in digital products and people.”
At Vox, according to Moe, “There’s no part of our business that owning and developing a very tailored, powerful technology platform doesn’t enable and improve — from how editors and writers publish the content, how we manage it, how we distribute it and how we advertise brands. Like the printing press was key to driving newspapers, our technology is as important to the way we are doing business.”
Even talent acquisition should take a turn for the technological according to speaker Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, who believes that “Technology will bridge the gap between the physical and digital world.” He points out that currently organizations lack effective mechanisms to find talent and the most popular tools and techniques are “notoriously biased”. He asserts that using gamification and profiling tools may “inject some order and accuracy into an area where the bar has been historically low.” He also echoed a point made earlier in the summit saying that “consumers, customers and readers are potentially your best employees as well.”
Having an intimate understanding of those passionate consumers was one of the most recurrent themes in the 12th Annual OPA Summit. For media companies, this customer knowledge drives content creation, product development and helps deliver optimized marketing opportunities. Day Three keynote speaker, Tony Tjan, CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of venture capital firm Cue Ball and Vice Chairman of the advisory firm Parthenon encouraged everyone in attendance to begin with a “front-end customer strategy rather than a go-to-market strategy.”
Closing speaker Wharton School marketing professor Peter Fader, also emphasized the need to put customer knowledge at the forefront of business strategy. He pointed out that there is no “the customer” and that generalizing in that way can be dangerous. It is essential, Fader asserts, to understand who our most valuable customers are and to not only be responsive to them, but to anticipate their future needs.” Fadar’s advice to media companies planning for current and future success: “Create a cult brand.” To do so, understand your audience with the intimacy of a trusted confidant to create genuine engagement that inspires devotion, trust — and a successful long-term relationship.
Q&A with Michael Crosby, Chief Operating Officer, The Deal on Subscription Model Success
This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights… If you want to learn more, keep an eye out on our site for more interviews. Today’s Three on Three is with Michael Crosby, the Chief Operating Officer at The Deal, part of TheStreet, Inc.
Q: When conceiving of a subscription-based model, initiative or product, where should you begin strategically?
A: The answer to this is no different than any business idea. You look for a problem that exists in the marketplace. For us, it comes down to some information gap that exists amongst our clients and prospects.
Secondly, we look to whether we have an answer for that problem. Can we provide insight or analysis the fills that gap? The first two questions are the theory part, and the last two are the monetization ones.
Third, are there users out there that care about having this problem solved in the way we are solving it? And, are there enough of them to scale the revenue? For The Deal, we are fortunate that we serve a client base–bankers, lawyers, fund managers–that traditionally pay for quality information. So, determining information gaps in the marketplace and how we could fill them is the bigger question for our firm.
Q: Please describe one of your subscription-based initiatives and the way in which you feel it is particularly innovative:
A: The most exciting one we are working on right now is called “Connections.” Our clients are forever looking for new M&A and restructuring deals. We’re in the business of coming up with ideas for their next deal through our editorial insight. Often, when we write something, our clients want to quickly figure out how to get “connected” with a company mentioned in an article.
“Connections” does just that: It lists how a user is connected to a company or person mentioned in an article. It accomplishes this without requiring the user to enter any information. We are very excited about the service and have a patent pending on it. We are in the process of launching it and client feedback has been phenomenal. This finally answers the question, “How am I connected to that person” directly without a user having to email their entire office.
Q: What advice would you give in terms of approaching subscription models creatively?
A: I believe everything starts from having great product. Whether that is principally your content, data, or application layer, you need some combination of those that a user would deem “must have.” Obsessive focus on the user experience with your product, and understanding how it fits in with their daily workflow is the starting point to ensuring that a user needs to have your service.
Once you have that figured out, getting the right subscription model is based on what you have done in the past; what your competitors are doing; and how valuable you are. One of the toughest things to do is reposition a brand and product to a new subscription model. The bigger the gap, the more work you will need to put into sales and marketing. If your users know you as mostly a free ad-based model with great content, and now you want to be a paid subscription model, you need to do a lot of work to have them change their perception of you. One of the ways The Deal did it, when we shifted from majority ad-based to majority subscription-based, was doing a massive amount of user outreach where we presented a well thought out concept of where we were going. We find clients are great at giving us feedback on incremental change, but if you want to make a major shift, you have to clearly spell out your vision and have them respond to it.
Lastly, you can’t talk to enough people: your team; clients; prospects; industry players; advisors et cetera. Most subscription-based businesses operate in a competitive space so even a great strategy can be ruined by poor execution. Constant communication and belief that you can continually improve – that you are not doing everything perfectly – puts you in position to achieve success.
Michael Crosby is Chief Operating Officer at The Deal, part of TheStreet, Inc. Michael is responsible for strategy and day-to-day operations of The Deal, a transaction information service used by 45,000 bankers, lawyers, hedge fund managers, and private equity professionals. He was instrumental in transforming The Deal’s business from ad-based to a subscription model, achieving 22 consecutive quarters of revenue growth and guiding The Deal’s sale to TheStreet, Inc. Previously, Michael was a Managing Director at Thomson Reuters where he was responsible for starting their hedge fund business and transforming their buyside client model.
Note: This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights.
Also in this series:
Q&A with Rob Grimshaw, Managing Director, FT.com on Subscription Model Success
Q&A with Interview with Sarah McConville, Vice President of Marketing, Harvard Business Review Group
Picture Perfect: Inspiration in Storytelling from Bill Marr’s OPA Summit Keynote
There is perhaps no more vivid depiction of the OPA slogan “Content People Love” than National Geographic’s iconic photography. So National Geographic creative director Bill Marr’s keynote set the tone at the 12th annual OPA Summit not only by showcasing the publication’s widely-lauded imagery, but also through a demonstration of the brands’ commitment to leveraging digital to embark on a new adventure in storytelling.
The iPad, according to Marr, offered the publication new life and provided a catalyst that is driving National Geographic’s entire team to reconceive of its content creation process and to rethink the ways in which its already visual stories could be told. To do so, Marr says, they had to recognize that “short form video is not television.” For them, “it is an extension of print; it is an extension of storytelling.” While National Geographic has always embraced and supported the work of photographers, now the publication is working with them to evolve their craft using video and a wide range of technologies. The brand is also physically reorganizing its content creation team—down to the office space in which they work—to create a more “open, collaborative environment.”
Marr illustrated the result of these ongoing efforts with a range of stunning examples that had a room full of seasoned media executives mesmerized. One example in particular, the National Geographic’s most popular story of 2013 “The Serengeti Lion,” features the brand’s iconic photography enhanced with audio and video and reveals the technology it used to capture these intimate images, which included infrared photography, micro-drones and a robot.
Now that National Geographic has begun to offer these deep wells of content that go far beyond what it had previously been able to deliver in the pages of its magazine, Marr says they are approaching many other aspects of their content delivery with a new perspective, such as its “The Power of Photography” exhibit on display at the Annenberg Space for Photography. Instead of limiting the exhibit to what could fit on the gallery walls, they created a digital exhibit that uses video walls to showcase 500 photographs and accompanying information from the brand’s 125 year history.
National Geographic, says Marr, has moved away from the notion that a story is “one thing.” Instead, they are working to “envision how any story can come to life in myriad ways.” This approach is generating more powerful storytelling than ever before. It has also created an opportunity to better monetize via digital subscription offerings including iPad and Kindle editions. However National Geographic’s exploration of the frontiers of digital storytelling also demonstrates how delivering these deeper offerings creates a level of engagement—web visitors spent an average of 12 minutes with “The Serengeti Lion”—that the brand believes it can leverage to generate revenue via its site as well. Marr says they are currently beta testing a new iPad-inspired site experience that will offer a premium experience for subscribers and in turn, drive its visual storytelling even further in its next 125 years.
Q&A with Rob Grimshaw, Managing Director, FT.com on Subscription Model Success
This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights. Today’s Three on Three is with Rob Grimshaw who is the Financial Times Board member responsible for the commercial development of the FT’s B2C digital business and product portfolio.
Q: When conceiving of a subscription-based model, initiative or product, where should you begin strategically?
A: I think the key things are: First, think about what is unique and different about your product. What are people going to come to you for, as a publisher, that they won’t go to anybody else for? Perhaps it is a particular columnist or topic that few other people do. Identify something that differentiates you in the marketplace and that’s how you’ll approach it from a content point of view.
Second, take advantage of the flexibility that the web environment offers. You don’t have to put up a gigantic blank door on the site that says “pay to enter”. The web offers many ways to do these things: You can build sampling in, you can use these freemium models. Many publishers find that once the paywalls are in, you don’t see advertising suffer at all, which has been our experience.
Thirdly, look to third parties that can help with the task of building your subscription offering. It can be quite challenging technically, certainly more difficult than running a free access site. There is an ecosystem of third party providers that can help you with these projects and help you shortcut some of the processes to get something out to market more quickly.
And one last bit of strategic advice is to consider the wider benefits of having a subscription model and how to take advantage of these. Subscriptions create a direct relationship with your audience. You learn so much about them including demographics, onsite behavior and other information that can be very powerful from a marketing and advertising point of view.
Q: Please describe one of your subscription-based initiatives and the way in which you feel it is particularly innovative.
A: We’ve done many at FT.com. A recent one was fastFT, a feature we launched earlier this year, in May. fastFT is what I would call the FT’s intelligent first response to the news. It provides a continuous stream of content, managed by a team of eight journalists based around the world—in London, New York and Hong Kong—so they can maintain the output 24 hours a day. The goal was to boost engagement on FT.com.
Engagement is absolutely critical to the success of subscription models. We see very clearly that people whose usage of the site drops off are far more likely to cancel and, of course, those who don’t use it in the first place don’t subscribe: a simple equation there.
When we were thinking about increasing engagement, we factored in how competitive the web environment is. We need to communicate to our subscribers that they’ll never miss anything on FT.com so they aren’t tempted to look for information on other sites. This product marked a radical departure for the FT including changes to our newsroom culture and changes to the editorial process. With fastFT, the emphasis on speed-to-page without sacrificing accuracy, authority and all things that make the FT great.
I think that this product offers an excellent example of the commercial needs of the business being creatively translated to a product.
Interestingly, we’ve seen that over half of users come through mobile devices and a third of subscribers who visit fastFT stay longer than 10 minutes on the site.
Q: What advice would you give in terms of approaching subscription models creatively?
A: I would give two tips:
The first one is to look outside of the boundaries of the publishing industry. Think about it: The news publishing experience with pay models and online retail, which is what this is, is relatively new. There are others who have been in this game much longer. You can gain a lot of inspiration by looking at or talking to people from the online retail industry and others pioneering the space. Look at the gaming model and the way they’ve set up things to get you to make in-app purchases. They’ve developed brilliant ways to ease payment and even make you feel like you aren’t paying anything.
The second thing I suggest is to test, test, test. We are in a world where there are a multitude of multivariate testing tools available. These tools allow you to test different page designs and sign-up forms against each other live on line. The insight you gain from those processes is tremendous. Often what you discover can be counter intuitive. The data helps you understand what is really happening and design better offerings as a result.
In his role as Managing Director, FT.com, Rob Grimshaw is the Financial Times Board member responsible for the commercial development of the FT’s B2C digital business and product portfolio.
Note: This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights.
Also in this series:
Q&A with Michael Crosby, Chief Operating Officer, The Deal on Subscription Model Success
Q&A with Interview with Sarah McConville, Vice President of Marketing, Harvard Business Review Group
Digital Insights: From Chaos to Credibility
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A Good Look: Inside the Media and Marketing Opportunities of Wearable Tech
Much of the buzz at CES last week surrounded wearable technology—clothing and accessories that incorporate computer and electronic technologies. Yet given that the C in CES stands for consumer, it isn’t a great surprise that much of the coverage took the form of breathless accounts of the latest toy or snarky critiques of wearable tech aesthetics. CNET.com editor at large Brian Cooley was in attendance and turned a keen eye to the wearable tech on display as he gears up for his New Content Platforms session at next week’s OPA Summit (January 22-24 in Miami, Fl.) – the 12th annual meeting for members of the Online Publishers Association.
Right now, Cooley says there are three main classes of wearable devices that marketers and content companies need to be keeping an eye on: Fitness bands, watches and glasses. To date, Google Glass has been the poster child for this emerging group of products. However Cooley says the most mature area is Fitness Bands and one that presents some very interesting opportunities for marketers. Given that on mobile devices, consumers expect increasingly personalized experiences, wearable tech offers great promise in improving data quality. “In a way,” says Cooley, “the fitness band is the other shoe we’ve been waiting to drop since mobile started.”
As he points out, “Marketers could do a lot with the data these devices gather about users’ lifestyle and behaviors.” The data gathered, says Cooley, would be almost “100 percent pure” as opposed to other forms of information gathering. “Most of the data we have now is somewhere between a good estimation and a lie. Remember that buying athletic shoes doesn’t mean someone is active.”
The opportunity for this level of granular and accurate data would allow for unrivaled content targeting. “Think about it: you could message Nyquil only to those who are sick,” he says. There are, however, still significant hurdles to overcome in tapping into this “tantalizing data,” not the least of which is the fact that device makers he has spoken to “don’t plan to give away their customer information and risk that relationship.”
Cooley also cautions those thinking about tying their messages to wearable devices to approach this highly-personalized experience carefully, noting that “the concern is intrusion, which resonates around all of these products.” While you might be able to access a photo someone took via their Glasses while out drinking with friends—and be tempted to use it to send the wearer an advertisement about their beverage of choice—marketers must balance this with consumers’ privacy concerns.
Cooley encourages content makers that are eying wearable devices to “attack consumers’ needs and keep the products at an arms distance.” While he realizes that this may not sound ideal for marketers, he says that you have to be “even more sensitive to users’ ‘personal space’ than even smartphones. Deliver information, not ‘messages’ and you’ll connect with them.”
There may also be an opportunity for content companies and marketers to work with device makers to take these products mainstream. “Wearables in general are waiting for a killer app,” says Cooley. “The fitness bands and watches aren’t doing anything too unheard of. The trick is to put it together so that there is a compelling reason to use them. While device makers are good at building the devices, helping them to that next level of relevance is an opportunity for media companies and marketers.”
At the OPA Summit, Cooley will focus on the reality, challenges and genuine opportunities presented by wearable technology. He’ll also provide attendees with users-eye-view videos to help media executives envision the best possible experiences. And following his session, attendees will have an opportunity to get their hands on several wearable devices including the Samsung Gear Smartwatch, Atiz Innovation’s Wellograph Watch and Avegant’s Glyph Headgear.