From the archives: Five insights for transitioning from legacy media to multimedia

 

 

To watch the full five minute interview, simply click on the video above. Additionally we have highlighted our five key insights for you here: 

We, as an industry, are still getting mobile wrong (0:03)

They say it’s the future, but really it’s the present – and yet no mobile companies are really prepared. They have no mobile strategy. They’re basically taking desktop stuff and cramming it into a mobile device. So it’s irrelevant to the people who are using it… either at ‘me moments’ or at ‘instant need moment’. So we’re just not serving the customer on mobile. 

Publishers need to be more mindful of dayparting (0:39)

We’re doing a lot of work with customers who, we map their production cycle against the consumption cycle. And what we’re finding is that most newspapers and magazine don’t match their production cycle to when the readers are online looking for information. So the readers are online – or on their mobile – looking for information, but the magazines are producing content much later in the day. Then when they go home, they stop producing, but the readers are online until late at night, but nothing is fresh. 

There is a way to monetise video, but it requires discipline (1:31)

A lot of people are looking at video saying ‘Wow!’ But the trouble is video is expensive to produce, it’s complicated, and there’s no guarantee of profit. UNLESS… you look at video and say ok we are going to make this video, here are the sponsors we can get. Don’t make it until we know we have a commitment. And you also don’t need to spend a ton of money. 

Friction amongst editorial staff about multimedia is decreasing (2:22)

The friction is much less. Because now in the US 30,000 journalists have lost their jobs. So the remaining journalists look around and they say ‘OK we get it, we get it, we’ll change’. There’s still resistance because they’re not comfortable with social media, they’re not comfortable with changing the way they do business, but across the board in the world we’re seeing a lot more willingness to try something new. 

BIG Data, little analysis… (3:32)

Most companies we go into – every company we go into! – we say do you have a data analysis? Do you get data? “Oh yeah we get data, we get data!” What do you do with it? “Oh, well, I delete it…” And if you read it, typically it’s pageviews, maybe a little engagement, but those are useless, worthless numbers – any number by itself not in comparison to another number is pointless. And not seeing trends… what’s the point? 

So what we say is get a chief data scientist, or borrow one from customer relations management one day a week. But get someone in there, and tell them look, we don’t want pageviews alone. We want trends. We want you to come to every editorial meeting with a recommendation, a strategic change recommendation based on reader behaviour that you see in the data. But that’s the key: if you don’t use the data in an intelligent fashion…   

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