DIGITAL DRIVERThis is another in a series of exclusive interviews with magazine executives responsible for leveraging their brands on digital platforms.
Steve Zales, President of Digital, Time Inc. Lifestyle Digital Network
Steve Zales is President of Digital for Time Inc.’s Lifestyle Group and responsible for managing all of the business and operational functions of the websites for seven different Time Inc. titles, including Real Simple and Southern Living, as well as the group’s two hub sites, MyRecipes.com and MyHomeIdeas.com. Zales is at the forefront of building audience, advertising revenue and market share digitally for these products.
What is the most difficult thing about building and maintaining audience online and how do you try tackling it?
The greatest challenge we face is in finding a balance between delivering page views in order to meet short-term advertiser demand and generating long-term audience growth. The demand for our digital properties has been strong this year, despite the economic downturn. As a result, we’ve had to turn our attention and our audience-development activities to ensuring that we deliver against advertiser impression guarantees in specific sections of our site, which takes time, attention, and funding away from our longer-term unique user growth objectives.
The Lifestyle Group newsletters are the most valuable tools, along with great editorial content, for dealing with inventory needs. Through effective content targeting, compelling editorial features and other site content, and effective subject lines, the open and click-through rates we achieve are well above industry averages. So we can use newsletters to address inventory commitments to advertisers.
We address the longer-term challenge, even during times of extremely high advertising inventory demand, by continuing to maintain some focus on brand-building initiatives such as our social media outreach activities, promotional programs and in-book advertising and editorial mentions. We have had great success attracting Facebook fans and Twitter followers. As an example, the Health brand now has over 125,000 fans and nearly 900,000 followers. And MyHomeIdeas and Southern Living operate a promotional program called Choose Your Home Giveaway, in which the winner gets to choose one of four homes. That program generated over 5.5 million entries this year and brought in new unique users who became engaged with the home design and decor content on those two sites.
How difficult is it to get so many employees at so many different entities onto the same page as far as how content and advertising is handled online?
Some days are more challenging than others, but we are getting better all the time at coordinating our activities and business units. And we realize great value from experimentation with different approaches to content development and managing the business.
With sales, we are experimenting with a few different structures. One organization sells across seven of our sites. Another sells digital for Real Simple.com. And the rest have integrated (print and digital) sales organizations combined with a few digital-only sellers.
We see advantages and disadvantages to each. We have one head of digital sales who either manages or coordinates the online selling efforts across the division. Throughout Time Inc. there are many different models, and many others outside of our company. One thing that is certain, is that nobody has yet created the perfect solution. And with the advertising marketplace still rapidly evolving, any solution that seems to work now will need to change in the future.
We are very much focused on trying to deliver to each advertiser an approach that best suits that advertiser. As an example of that, the cross-title digital sales group teamed with the Cooking Light print organization to create a print, online, and mobile program for Unilever that runs throughout 2009. Unilever had requested that we pitch them on an integrated basis, rather than come to them with digital ideas from one team and print from another. The program, and the approach, has been a great success for both organizations.
Advertising online is an ever-changing animal. What kind of process do you go through before you try new ways of generating advertising revenue online?
Competition in the digital world is so different from that in the print world that we have to think and operate differently. We face off against some of the same brands online as we do in print. But they are often not our biggest competitors online. We might be very conscious of what Martha Stewart or Rachel Ray or Good Housekeeping are doing in print, but we’re more focused on what FoodNetwork or HGTV or AllRecipes or iVillage are doing online.
Equally important for us to consider is how much business ad networks like Advertising.com are getting from us by offering very inexpensive inventory across a range of sites, or how much business is shifting to highly targeted search advertising on Google. And these days, even the larger social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are getting the attention of our traditional advertising base.
As a result, advertising needs are addressed not by the ad-sales organization alone, but through a coordinated effort led by ad sales, plus content, sales development, business development, and audience development. We need to think creatively about how to package offerings for advertisers, what they will find compelling and how to ensure that the program we create will deliver results. The ad sales and content teams meet regularly so that the sales team can effectively sell and package what is being created for our sites and so that the content team can consider its emphasis based, in part, upon what is generating interest from the marketplace. The audience and business development groups focus their energies on building traffic to areas of our sites in which advertisers express interest. In some cases, the content team looks to the ad-sales group to find an advertiser for something they wish to create and for which they need funding. Earlier this year, through just such an effort, we developed a dinner timer that Kraft sponsored and drew huge interest and rave reviews from our audience.
The nature of the web is such that ideas can be turned into content or tools or applications fairly quickly, and then taken down when they don’t work. And when we put forth ideas to advertisers, if they aren’t getting traction, we can move onto the next without hesitation.
What’s your hope for the digital future in the magazine world? What are the things magazine publishers should be watching for to happen in the digital world in the next year?
The two most important things that we will need to do in the next couple of years are to create true web properties out of our powerful brands and develop an approach to research that will prove the value of display advertising in premium environments for our advertising partners.
We need to take advantage of the strong connection that our print properties have with consumers and translate that into wbsites that have that same strong connection and can leverage the viral nature of the Web to grow at a fast pace and engage a large user base.
And to succeed in the long run, we’ll need to convince advertisers and agencies that display advertising in premium sites is worth the significant increment they pay on a CPM basis. It will be critical that we move advertisers away from a cost-per-click evaluation criterion to something that takes brand awareness, interest, intent, response and purchase into account and identifies and implements a research solution that convincingly demonstrates the benefits of advertising in our sites.
Interview by Mark J. Miller
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