Digital Directions: Breaking Away 
From the App Herd

Publishers and media types often fall victim to a herd mentality, in which one and all jump on the latest bandwagon, the latest "hot topic." The realm of digital publishing is especially susceptible to this bandwagon effect. Digital media will require a fundamental strategic shift for many media organizations, involving new business models and unfamiliar technical issues. It is often tempting to hope that some simple, magical solution will pave the way to a digital future. And we are often too willing to jump on the bandwagon of each hot new topic that comes along.

Ten or 15 years ago, many felt that the implementation of some digital asset management (DAM) system was all that stood between them and their digital future. Some educational publishers felt that if only their print-ready PDFs were put in some kind of repository, they could be sold as digital product, such as selling textbooks by the chapter. No doubt, the implementation of a DAM is an important digital step forward. But alas, DAMs did not, in and of themselves, represent a digital product solution.

Along comes the next bandwagon: XML. By maintaining works in XML, content can be dynamically formatted for a variety of print and digital formats. Jump on this bandwagon we did. XML is clearly a powerful standard that will have a transformative effect on publishing, but does not intrinsically have any value to the marketplace, to customers directly. It is also not a strategic product solution.

Now we are immersed in the frenzy of the mobile app, the deployment of content and services via smartphone or tablet. If I had to name the top area of interest and aspiration among publishing and media companies, it would be the desire to get an app. A not-uncommon sentiment of this summer has been the imperative to deploy an app by the fall, or the end of the calendar year at the latest.

Onto the bandwagon we go. Guy Tasaka, a mobile strategist and veteran of both LibreDigital and The New York Times, bemoans the lack of strategic planning: "Many publishers think they need an app without ever asking why."

Key Points to Consider

In this rush to get a mobile app deployed, three strategic areas often are overlooked:

1. Leveraging the capabilities of the mobile platform. Smartphones and tablets are amazing devices, equipped with GPSs, accelerometers, interactivity and wireless capabilities that allow for dynamic content refresh. Yet many "apps" don't use these capabilities, and look more like static e-books with new wrappers around them. Developing a product strategy that uses these new capabilities is a challenge—it is all so new. Yet, without taking advantage of these capabilities, it is no wonder that some potential customers ask, "Why would I want this?"

2. Segment-specific requirements. Effective digital initiatives are specific to each market segment, each content type, and "vertical" served. An effective digital strategy for food and cooking would likely be quite different from higher education, poetry or trade. Yet the bandwagon effect often has everyone jumping on the same solution, often with disappointing results. Publishers need to step back from shoveling their backlists into mobile wrappers, and consider what mobility means to their specific customer segments, and how new value can be delivered to their customers' specific needs.

3. Business model. The impetus to get out there with a mobile app often supersedes the imperative for a well-considered business plan for the projected impact on revenue and earnings. An encouraging aspect of mobile content is that it is an opportunity to overcome the "all content is free" paradigm that became such a disaster on the web. "There are many financial implications that need to be explored," says Tasaka. "If publishers don't address this now, they are in danger of reliving 1997 and [free-content] websites all over again."

Maximizing the Mobile 
Opportunity

These three points are connected: A strong mobile app business model is created both by understanding the unique requirements of customer segments and by leveraging the unique characteristics of the mobile platform to serve those needs.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I believe the mobile device to be the most significant digital platform for publishers. The platform's capabilities have the ability to deliver significant incremental value to the marketplace to a far greater degree than the web and conventional e-books. This incremental value provides the opportunity to set and maintain price points for mobile offerings. However, like XML before it, a mobile app does not a product strategy make.

How to get started? Keep tracking the market penetration of mobile devices, and understand the capabilities of these devices, and the carriers that support them—but do so within the context of your specific customer segments. And most importantly: Get off the bandwagon, hit the streets and talk to customers to determine the best way to provide new value in the marketplace in the form of mobile content and services. BB

Andrew Brenneman is founder of Finitiv, a consulting and services organization that develops and executes transformative digital strategy for publishers and other content organizations.