By: Nat Ives Published: March 09, 2011
Readers have more trouble focusing on magazines' iPad editions than
publishers initially predicted, according to the latest study in a
growing effort to figure out tablet computers.
"We thought that of course there's a lot of activity going on on an
iPad, when there's so many things you can be doing -- between email,
Netflix, playing games, reading magazines -- but they're actually
bouncing around a lot more than we thought," said Megan Miller,
research and development program director at Bonnier, which publishes
titles including Popular Science, Field & Stream, Parenting and Ski.
"If you sit someone down with a magazine, within seconds they're
researching the products that they could buy," Ms. Miller said. "If
they see a snowboard in a snowboarding magazine, they'll bounce over
to Amazon to check the prices on it."
The study, from Bonnier and ad agency CP&B, reflects findings from 15
focus groups in three cities that were designed to include heavy print
magazine readers, heavy iPad users and heavy consumers of magazine
content on the web. Next Bonnier and CP&B will try to apply the
results to developing new ad formats for tablets. A pilot series of
these ads will appear in the Popular Science iPad app late this
spring.
It's already apparent that the study has implications for magazines.
Publishers have been telling advertisers that their iPad editions
combine print's ability to engross readers with digital media's
interactivity. The way publishers have been building their apps,
however, now seems to have given interactivity the upper hand.
That might be a good thing. People want to use digital magazines as
"exploration springboards" and don't like content that seems like a
dead end, the study found. And marketers will obviously be happy if
iPad editions trigger a lot of shopping. But it also implies that
publishers need to think about their goals for the iPad edition and
how to get readers back once they've bounced off to Amazon or
elsewhere.
"We wanted to figure out ways to make it possible and make it
attractive for people to come back to the magazine content again and
again," Ms. Miller said. "And we wanted to find reasons to get people
to have more touchpoints with magazine content. And we wanted to find
a way to make ads more interesting. So we did this study to dig in
deeply and find out what exactly are the activities people have with
magazines, how they interact with online magazine content vs.
magazines on a tablet vs. a print magazine."
People often mistake editorial screens in iPad editions for ads, the
Bonnier and CP&B study also found. "It was really strange," Ms. Miller
said. "When there was a full-bleed whole page dedicated to a product,
people said, 'Yeah, that's an ad.' And we selected people who were
from an educated demographic. They were not dummies. So we realized
that we need to do something to make it clear."
And unlike a Kindle, which can "drop away" from readers' minds as an
e-book takes center stage, iPad users seem to always be aware, perhaps
first and foremost, that they're using the device. People in the study
said they weren't "reading," "playing" or "surfing"; they were just
using an iPad.
The decisions that lead to reading a magazine's iPad edition,
moreover, are very different than the decisions that lead to reading a
print edition. People traditionally pick up magazines' print editions
for a specific purpose. But they often pick up an iPad with "iPadding"
in mind and only then decide what to do with it.
