Howard Mittman
Flipboard, Condé Nast, and the Mobile Advertising Problem (Updated)
Howard Mittman, VP and publisher at Condé Nast property Wired Magazine, told Ad Age's Nat Ives:
I’m interested in ways to bring advertisers in front of our community. When Flipboard becomes that, I would love to reengage and reinvigorate our product. Until then, we have to wait and see and not allow intermediaries to build their own platforms without direct monetizable benefit back to us.
This is somewhere between a rock and a hard place. People who consume solely through Flipboard — a group I suspect is growing all the time — might not bother clicking through. The friction meant to induce users to view Wired.com might end up dramatically cutting the number of folks reading Wired’s content. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I don’t think it’s “teaser” sentences.
The ad experience on mobile is already dismal for the user — I only interact with mobile ads by accident. There must be a better way. I know Wired and other content creators need viable revenue streams, and that traditionally the primary stream has been advertising.
But the web, particularly the mobile web, doesn’t even allow for the glossy full-pagers that magazines do. Those full-pagers can be compelling, and what’s more, they can be blended with the magazine itself.
A glossy full-page ad about the newest gaming laptop would be well-received in an issue focusing on gaming hardware, consoles, and next-generation systems. The same connection is much harder to make on mobile, where space is as precious to the publisher selling the ads as it is to the reader teaching himself how to visually avoid them. Flipboard is so popular because it involves us in the content consumption beyond merely staring at a screen. It’s subtle, but that flip is oddly engaging.
If the platform won’t accomodate your advertising, it’s time for your advertising to accomodate the platform. A headline and a single teaser sentence make for bad user experience: either find a way to participate in full, or get out altogether. Half-measures suggest a lack of innovation and a willingness to make user experience secondary to revenue, when user experience is what brings (and keeps) the eyeballs that bring (and keep) the advertising dollars.
Why can’t an advertisement be “Flipboard-ized?” Why not include in Wired's Flipboard stream an article entitled “Ad: Alienware M18x Moves Gaming Laptops into the 21st Century,” accompanied by stunning images of the inner workings and outer design of the machine? This offers the same “unified experience” of which a full-page print magazine ad is capable, but maintains the user experience that makes Flipboard so popular.
Updated 8:30pm: Alexia Tsotsis briefly interviewed Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about the New York Times’ integration into Flipboard. All digital subscribers to the Times can access the newspaper’s full array of online content via Flipboard. More interesting is the fact that the paper’s Flipboard content will also include advertisements described by McCue as “full page, print style advertising.” I respectfully request some credit for at least independently coming up with the model used by the Flipboard/NYT partnership (I somehow missed Tsotsis’ headline while writing this post), but I’m happy to see someone is at least trying it out.
Something like this seems to be working for Facebook on mobile, according a story by Josh Constine at TechCrunch. Facebook’s formidable data farm social network struggled to find a viable advertising solution to massive uptake in mobile use, and they appear to be on to something.
Maybe organic inline advertising isn’t the solution for every mobile advertising problem, but it’s an example of the fact that this problem is solvable. My Flipboard/Wired suggestion probably has weaknesses, but let’s have that conversation. Let’s argue about how the interests of publishers, users, and adverstisers, for all of their apparent conflict, often converge on great value propositions: content and ads that are well-built, well-tailored, and complimentary to one another, rather than shoe-horned next to one another in a way that damages the user experience and decreases all forms of value for everyone.