So we said ‘Let’s create accounts inside the magazine.’ That way, multiple people in the household can read the magazine and not have to worry about disturbing what was left by the previous reader.
That definitely improves the experience for readers, but how did you envision the Reader Accounts creating value for advertisers?
If you’re really looking at how to market these things correctly and bring some sort of profitability or revenue to them, it’s really got to be done through some kind of advertising or sponsorship. But if you have a device that’s in the house and it’s being shared, it’s not an effective targeting of the people who are reading the content. You can have three people reading the same magazine, but you won’t know who is interested in which particular articles or which particular products. But when you’ve got these reader accounts, you can more clearly target and create demographic profiles with specific people who read the magazine. They’re going to be anonymous so you’re not going to know who is who, but you’ll certainly be able to say ‘This reader really got into the Shopsmart articles.’ And when that reader account pops up, you can target information to them that is based on what they were interested in reading, and you can target advertising to them based on what their affinities are.
So it was the idea of being able to share the magazine within a household, but then also to be able to create these demographic profiles within a household for better targeting of content and better targeting of advertising.
BE has never had an app for any platform and this is your first time producing one. How long was the entire process, from concept to creation?
It was about a 45- to 50-day build–that was from conception. So we had to design the entire app interface in two weeks, which was every single interface screen and how it worked. In two weeks. That was a monumental task. Then Terence and his team had to turn around pages, in both orientations, very shortly thereafter. Then we had a really, really rapid build cycle. It was nuts!