Naysayers used to scoff at newspapers’ mobile offerings, saying they’ll attract large numbers of users and advertisers at around the same time as pigs fly. But that’s exactly what has happened at The Cincinnati Enquirer for two years running.
The paper’s mobile site, CincyMobile.com, partnered with organizers of a local race—the aptly named Flying Pig Marathon—to provide real-time status updates. Users could go to Cincinnati.com or CincyMobile.com and enter their favorite runner’s bib number ahead of time, and results were beamed to their mobile phones via SMS during the race (see pig.zebramm.com). More than 7,200 people signed up to receive results during the most recent race in May. Along with advertising revenue, the Enquirer garnered a fee paid by marathon organizers for developing the service.
“It’s a good example of how mobile can be tailored to unique market opportunities,” says James Jackson, the Enquirer’s vice president of new media and product development. “Because mobile is so new, from the get-go we’ve begun developing business models that go beyond the 20th century advertising model.”
Jackson founded the Enquirer’s Cincinnati.com network in 1996, a year that weighs heavily in his discussions about the paper’s forays into the mobile space. Twelve years later, CincyMobile.com has evolved to offer a three-pronged mobile approach—a menu-driven site, rich personalization options, and the ability to receive customized SMS alerts on any mobile device. Together, the Enquirer’s mobile offerings garner more than 500,000 page views per month.
To Jackson’s thinking, the mobile space is as immature now as the Web was back in 1996, in part because offerings are still limited by “walled gardens”—the limited and, at times, conflicting standards promulgated by the bewildering array of cellular providers and handset manufacturers that ply their wares in the United States.
“Because of the walled garden, you [currently] have to take it very slowly,” he says. “But in the next two years, we might go from 1996 to 2008 very quickly.”
A Little More Personal
Driven by the alphanumeric menus known as “WAP decks,” CincyMobile.com includes content from the Enquirer, its weekly newspapers and classifieds, as well as yellow page data provided by Cincinnati Bell as part of a broader, longstanding online partnership. The site is organized by category, not by content provider, and offers personalization features allowing users to add categories and subcategories to their WAP deck or create targeted SMS alerts. The ability to personalize goes beyond broad categories and subcategories—for example, users can add a menu item for news about the Cincinnati Bengals, or refine that further to include just stories about “Bengals arrests,” an alarmingly commonplace occurrence in recent years.
Personalization also extends to classified content, allowing users to receive SMS alerts for homes for sale in certain areas or specific makes of vehicles. Further options can provide driving directions or allow users to use their phones’ click-to-call feature to reach the Realtor or dealer.
One strength of the site’s personalization options is its ability to allow users to configure and fine-tune mobile offerings from a regular PC Web browser on Cincinnati.com (see cincinnati.zebramm.com). Along with setting up personalization options and configuring alerts, the site’s classified features allow users to upload their resume from their PC, then send it to a prospective advertiser at the push of a button from a mobile device when the right job comes along.
It’s all part of “the ability to access local content regardless of location, device or platform that provides the greatest opportunity to newspapers in regaining their competitive position in the local marketplace,” says Vincent S. Broerman, managing partner of Zebra Mobile, which has powered the Enquirer’s mobile platform for nearly three years.
A Ripe Market for Mobile
Cincinnati has long been a ripe market for mobile products, thanks largely to its dominant wireless provider,Cincinnati Bell. The “Baby Bell” commands the lion’s share of both traditional and wireless accounts in the region, not to mention traditional land lines and Internet access. “Because of that, it’s been easier for us to develop critical mass in this market, because we had fewer of the walled gardens to navigate,” Jackson says. The longstanding partnership also landed the site on the wireless carrier’s “home deck”—a mobile device’s answer to a default home page.
Matthew Jones, Gannett’s director of mobile strategy and operations, calls the longstanding partnership between Cincinnati.com and its Baby Bell “a really good example of the big local brand partnering with the regional telco.”
Database publishing, e-mail products and similar technologies were among the early focuses of the Enquirer’s Web operations, so “mobile and text-friendly formatting were always on our radar screen,” Jackson says. The Enquirer launched its first mobile product on the AvantGo platform in 2000; its first true mobile site followed two years later. “It was basically a WAP deck with mobile-friendly stories scraped from the Web site,” Jackson says. “There wasn’t much in the way of database content and didn’t represent our best work in terms of continual updating.”
Constant refinements followed; the current three-pronged mobile platform, launched in partnership with Zebra Mobile, went online in early 2005. Zebra Mobile focuses exclusively on building mobile platforms for newspaper companies and counts MediaNews Group Interactive, Philly.com, Hearst and Morris DigitalWorks among its clients, but the Enquirer is its only Gannett property to date.
“Together, we test many, many ideas,” Broerman says. “Some work well; others not so well. The relationship with CincyMobile enables us to take what works and replicate it with our other customers, helping the industry as a whole.”
That’s been true with Gannett’s mobile operations as well, where as a major-market metro, Cincinnati’s mobile site ranks among the company’s most trafficked. “They’ve gone and done things ahead of other Gannett markets,” says Jones. “It’s one of those markets where we’re incubating different ideas and seeing how they pan out. If we’re seeing success there, there’s a chance [they] might be more widely propagated.”
User Behaviors
CincyMobile has several thousand registered users. According to Jackson, the site’s mobile users fall into three broad buckets: the “professional digitally connected native” who’s intimately familiar with mobile technology; casual users browsing the site in small, bite-sized chunks while traveling or doing other tasks; and people with little or no traditional Internet connectivity at home or work.
Traffic patterns at CincyMobile are almost the opposite of those for the paper’s traditional Web presence, where usage is heaviest during normal business hours and “prime time” is the lunch hour. Mobile usage is concentrated during the evening hours—from 7 p.m. to midnight, with prime time at 10 p.m. “We’re either reaching a different audience or serving our audience in a different way,” Jackson says. (Because the Web and mobile sites use different registration systems, Cincinnati.com staffers haven’t correlated the two user databases, though Jackson acknowledges overlap between the two groups of users.)
Of the 543,000 monthly page views, about 10 percent go to classified content; the remainder goes to editorial. The most popular personalization options have involved general local news, followed by Cincinnati’s Bengals and Reds teams. One surprise has been how much more likely users have been to stick with mobile alerts than e-mail ones without unsubscribing—a trend Jackson attributes largely to mobile users’ familiarity with alerts, though he points to the site’s ease of configuring alerts as an important factor.
One disappointment has been a slow adoption rate to the site’s personalization tools—an industrywide phenomenon CincyMobile has in common with its Web sibling. But Jackson argues, “It’s especially important to offer [personalization]” in the mobile environment, “because it makes some of the awkward things about the mobile experience a bit less user-unfriendly.” A related challenge has been communicating the variety of options available on mobile devices to those less familiar with what the technology can do. One successful strategy has been promoting mobile offerings via “contextual widgets” on related areas of Cincinnati.com. For instance, Web stories about the Reds are paired with widgets allowing users to sign up for personalized sports alerts on CincyMobile. The signup widgets also include co-branding opportunities for mobile advertisers.
Advertising: Back to the Future
It’s in advertising that Jackson most strongly believes the mobile world is still stuck in the 1996 era. As with the rapid proliferation of the World Wide Web at that time, there’s “good advertiser interest, especially on the part of organizations wanting to reach the younger digital audience they intuitively know uses mobile as a platform,” he says. Big-box and key account advertisers, including large classified advertisers, have led the charge, he says. But, the medium is still new, particularly to local advertisers. All told, fewer than 50 local advertisers have experimented with CincyMobile’s offerings in the past two years, according to Jackson.
Advertising appears on CincyMobile’s WAP deck and, at times, in opt-in mobile SMS alerts. The site offers the “CiN list,” a weekly dining-and-entertainment advertorial touted as a roundup of things to do offered as part of a joint print/online promotional package for bars and restaurants. Broerman argues that such multimedia packages help prove his belief that newspapers should not consider mobile “a standalone initiative.” “It’s about providing readers an opportunity to engage with content and advertisers regardless of location, platform, or device,” he says.
Still, offering mobile options to local advertisers remains a challenging proposition. An opt-in SMS promotion for a local grocer only drew about 100 subscribers, though Jackson believes they may have tried such a campaign too early. The tiny amount of real estate such ads offer on mobile devices’ equally tiny screens makes it difficult for some advertisers to see much value in mobile advertising, Jackson says. “The need to educate comes into play,” he adds. “So many interactive marketers are really focused on trying to convey a strong digital message, [but] unless you adapt their thinking to mobile, they’re not going to see the opportunity.”
Based on the success of its partnership with the Flying Pig Marathon, Jackson also sees similar sponsorship opportunities around other personalized services—election results, school closings and the like. “People can already get non-local solutions from other providers,” he says. “But unique local content made possible by the publisher’s deep relationships with local entities are an opportunity.”
Looking Ahead
Although Apple’s first iPhone made full-featured Web browsing on a handheld device a viable option, many CincyMobile users continued using the mobile-optimized site instead of pointing their phones at Cincinnati.com. Even among users of other mobile devices, the media frenzy around the iPhone—which is being repeated again with the recent release of its new 3G model—“stimulated activity, interest and awareness—and among advertisers as well,” Jackson says.
Despite the attention being paid to the iPhone and the other flashy smartphones to follow in its footsteps, “the existing [mobile] site and SMS [services] are going to be around for a long time,” Jackson says, citing the higher cost and complexity of newer, more Web-centric devices. CincyMobile’s current platform, he says, remains “about the best you can do in the walled garden approach of American carriers and manufacturers,” which will likely characterize the cellular marketplace for some time to come.
At the same time, the relative ease of developing and distributing iPhone-specific applications, with Apple’s software development kits and the iPhone’s centralized platform to distribute third-party applications, could open a fourth prong to the Enquirer’s mobile strategy. “I expect development specific to each mobile application is going to be a whole new mobile track for us,” Jackson says.
Jackson envisions multiple iPhone-specific applications serving up content optimized for that device. In July, Cincinnati.com released its first iPhone offering, a general news application similar to ones developed by the Associated Press and The New York Times. Plans are in the work for more interactive applications that “help promote us locally,” Jackson says. One such app under consideration is an iPhone version of CinciNavigator.com, which plots such disparate data as crimes, property sales, news stories and gas prices on maps of the area—a potentially powerful tool when married with a GPS-enabled device like the iPhone.
Along with the iPhone, Google’s Android project, which offers similar third-party development opportunities, is expected to be tapped by a variety of handset manufacturers in the next generation of smartphones. Because of that, it will also help “break down the walled garden between carriers,” Jackson says.
Broerman agrees that as new platforms emerge and evolve, newspapers should follow Cincinnati.com’s lead by building their own mobile brands and owning their relationships with users. “History has proven that walled gardens do not survive,” he says.
Mark Toner is a freelance consultant. More...