Time for Publishers to Make Tablet Advertising “the Project”

Reporting from Oslo, Norway this week

TAKEAWAY: Let’s hear it for The Guardian’s execs, who are more keen on getting advertising for their tablet edition than counting subscribers; a good model to follow.

At first,
http://paidcontent.org/2012/08/10/guardian-sees-2-1-percent-of-ipad-readers-pay/“ title=“this story”>this story about The Guardian and iPad edition subscribers could be just that: another rendering of the success and failure of publishing companies establishing economic models to see revenue coming out of their tablet edition efforts.

However, what caught my eye out of this one is an important idea: the highlight of this article is that only a sliver of people who have tried out The Guardian’s iPad edition for free end up subscribing after their trial.

But , asks the author of the piece: “Does that small percentage matter? Other publishers also see low premium take-up, The Guardian is more interested in selling ads than subscriptions.”

Refreshing to read this, as I am a strong believer that publishers are still too centered on subscription models, and, in my experience, not many are contemplating more aggressive ways of attracting advertising.

The catch 22 of the tablet and advertising revenue story, however, is a little more complicated than just deciding to go for the ads.

A majority of the newspaper tablet apps out there are still using advertising in a primitive way: either an imitation of how ads are presented online, or, worse, as they would be presented in a printed edition.

Until we at media houses begin to make Tablet Advertising “the project”, we will not turn the corner. Let’s get our own ad departments create tablet specific ads, that we can take to specific advertising clients and say: This is how your ad could look if designed for the tablet. We have done it. Here you are. How would you like to appear in our tablet edition?

The ads you are showing will be anything but static. There will be action, pop up moments, and storytelling.

As a publisher of a major European daily told me recently:

ndeed, we understand that this is the way to go, Mario, but we just don’t have the resources to do what you are proposing.

Every publishing house MUST find those resources, and learn from The Guardian’s story: subscriptions to our tablet editions are nice, and they will trickle in, one at a time, but the bigger revenue potential is in the ads.

The tablet advertising chapter has not even started. Ironically, this is the one way publishers will hear their cash registers ringing.