Rebekah Billingsley, Mobile Publisher, Immediate Media Presentation slides, Mobile Media Strategies 2012

1. How To Develop
Successful Digital
Magazines
Rebekah Billingsley
Publishing Director, Mobile
Devices

2. Agenda
1. Immediate Media and roadmap to success
2. Be prepared to be surprised
3. Engage internally
4. Understanding the implications
5. Creative thinking
6. Let a thousand flowers bloom

3. •Formed in November 2011
•BBC Magazines, Origin Publishing and Magicalia merged
•3rd largest Magazine publisher in the UK
•We publish 34 websites and 50 magazines
•Over 1 million subscribers and a brand reach of 11 million UK consumers

4. Our digital magazine timeline
• 2010 launched enhanced Focus
and Good Food apps
• Launch of Apple’s News Stand
in October allowed us to grow
magazine sales overnight by
400%
• Raft of bookezines launched
2010 to date and sell
consistently month to month
• Launched History Magazine onto
Kindle in October
• March 2012 started to roll out all
titles as PDFs onto News Stand
• June 2012 all 35 titles live on
News Stand

5. Our success to date
•2nd largest apps publisher in the UK
•Over 1.3m downloads to date
•Subscriptions account for 63% of our
total sales each month
•48% of all our revenue comes from
outside the UK
•Our monthly PDF revenues have grown
500% since launch
•16 Immediate Media apps are
downloaded every minute on the app
store
•Good Food is the second best selling
female title in the UK and the highest
rated magazine app on the News Stand

6. Be prepared to be surprised..
• Surely “consumers would only accept
enhanced, fully interactive products
on a tablet...?”
• In the recent digital ABCs, 4 of the top
10 sellers in the UK are PDF replicas.
• 10% of Zinio magazines are read on
phones
• Launching all our titles gave us access
to data in lots of countries, price testing,
subscription behaviours
• Plan our development roadmap based
on actual data
• Don’t assume - test basic products for
immediate insight, don’t hold off for
perfection or huge investment...you
need to be learning

7. Engage your best thinkers
•You have people all over your
organisation with the right skills
•Good Food magazine app launched
from heart of magazine team
•We ramped up magazine team
temporarily and moved permanent staff
into a team to launch the app
•Subscriptions team responded with
incredibly mature strategy
•Sub groups can help you navigate
through areas you might not even know
exist
•Cost effective, multi platform and great
for morale

8. Understand potential implications
• For example pricing:
• Digital only price; ‘x’
• Bundle price; x for digital magazine,
y for paper issue and z for both
• Digital only and your digital
magazine to existing subscribers for
free
• Implications:
• one product across any platform or
giving your emerging product away?
• ABC auditing
• VAT
• Technical capability
• Also technology, third party terms,
ads...
• Use your internal resources, test as
much as you can

9. Apply creative thinking
•Advertisers wanted to know the scale so
we added analytics.
•Reach was smaller so we used free
sample
•The agencies didn’t have the assets they
needed, so we created an in house
production service
•iPads weren’t making it down to
planners so we hired 20 and sent them
out
•Presentations had to show off the
platform’s key features so we equipped
sales team with iPads and presentations

10. Let A Thousand Flowers
Bloom
• As long as you’re using cost
effective technology and testing
you can try new things
• Test strategically
• Test longer tail products
• Repackage existing content or
look at brand extensions to test
• Keep your eye on the ball; be
nice!
Thank you!