MEDIA & MARKETING:FOR THE last couple of years, newspaper publishers have been trying to come to grips with the digital world. For the most part they have been giving away their content away free online, but the revenue garnered from online advertising doesn't compensate for declining circulation. Now the Financial Timesin London is pointing the way forward with a web app that solves the puzzle of charging for content.
What's unique about the FT'sweb app is that it works on an Apple iPad but bypasses the Apple gateway.
When the iPad was launched last year, like many publishers the Financial Timesjumped in with an app designed to work on the new platform.
This process has some major drawbacks. For a publishing app to make it to the iPad, it has to be approved by Apple, a time-consuming process not helped by Apple’s renowned reluctance to enter dialogue with its customers. Secondly, Apple takes a 30 per cent cut of the publisher’s sales revenues. Thirdly, Apple refuses to share with publishers information about who has bought the publisher’s app.
The Financial Times'ssolution to these problems has been to devise an app that is based around HTML, the language for structuring and presenting content on the web. The FT's app uses HTML5, the latest version of this internet language. HTML5 is designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plug-ins, and to enrich the semantic content of documents.
The result is the new FTweb app looks and feels exactly like the old app that previously had to be downloaded through Apple's App Store. What's clever about this web app is that it constantly updates content on the reader's device, and downloads it quickly so you can read it offline. For the FTreader boarding a plane, this is an extremely useful function.
According to Mary Beth Christie, the FT'sonline product management director: "Our core objective is that we have to know who our users are.
“That wasn’t going to happen with Apple and that was our issue. We started to look at this soon after the iPad app was launched because we were looking at all these other devices coming on to the market and were wondering how we were going to support them all.”
For publishers, Christie says HTML5 offers several advantages. “It is compatible with different kinds of browsers and you don’t have to have different native apps for different types of devices. You also don’t have to go through the arduous approval process with Apple every time you want to fix a bug. We fix the bug ourselves immediately and we can put out any kind of updates quickly.”
The FTdiffers from most newspapers in that it publishes niche content for which users are prepared to pay. Its website has a pay gateway that charges for content above a certain usage threshold.
The new web app works the same way: users can view 30 articles per month before their access is blocked unless they pay up for a digital subscription.
And a lot of people are paying up. The FT'sdigital subscriptions have increased by one-third over the past year to 230,000 and mobile devices such as the iPad account for 15 per cent of new subscriptions.
“The tablet is an amazing product and the fact you can read very nicely presented content through an app is great,” says Christie. “It’s even better when you can read that content offline too.”
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Customer loyalty is a very important marketing objective for retailers and Cormac Tobin, managing director of pharmacy chain Doc Morris/Unicare, believes the language around loyalty is abused by retailers. “It’s not about the customer being loyal to the retailer. It’s about the retailer being loyal to the customer. Consumers love the fact that retailers know who they are.”
Tobin was discussing customer loyalty at a breakfast seminar organised by An Post yesterday.
He is in the throes of rebranding the Unicare Pharmacy chain to Doc Morris. Eighteen months ago he launched a loyalty programme which to date has signed up 40,000 customers. “For the moment our customers don’t collect points. We just send them out generic offers that are particularly high value.”
Tobin says he spends 0.3 per cent of the company’s annual € 150 million turnover on direct marketing mailshots to his loyalty scheme customers.
But are loyalty schemes effective? “To be honest, even a lot of the biggest retailers are not entirely sure if they work. But I know I consistently get vouchers for products I don’t even buy. If I buy Coca-Cola, I want the voucher for the free two-litre Coca-Cola and not the two-litre Pepsi.”