• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 7, 2010

Can the Jesus tablet pull print back from the brink? Then what?

After two years of double-digit ad page declines and flat (at best) CAGRs as far into the future as the spreadsheet can see, the magazine industry could use a savior right about now. And that precisely is how some in the industry treated Steve Jobs' gift from Mount Cupertino -- a new tablet format that sold over 3 million units in the spring alone. "I think in five years this will be the major way in which magazines will be consumed," says Rebecca McPheters, president of McPheters & Company, whose iMonitor research of the industry's quick embrace of the platform showed 192 print-magazine apps in market by mid-July. Why such a rush to a digital app format? Magazines are hopeful that mobile devices will help reset a relationship with paying consumers and higher-paying advertisers that the Web seemed to break.

"We were so riled up about it we made a video before we even had an iPad in hand," says Terry McDonell, editor, Sports Illustrated Group. "They are so damn cool." And the "cool factor" has been in evidence in these first iPad magazine issues as designers pulled out the stops. In an early SI issue you can drag across a multiscreen panorama of the Pebble Beach "Cliff of Doom" golf holes with pop-up notes on how the U.S. Open players fared. Wired readers controlled a stop-action animation of a Lego Lamborghini assembling itself. Offbeat navigational schemes in Bonnier's Popular Science have readers swiping "pages" across X and Y axes and ever-changing background images. And an interactive Popular Mechanics Earthquake Finder tilts and zooms a U.S. map that dynamically updates with the last week of seismic activity. This is more than gratuitous eye candy, the creators insist. "It is a fantastic form for storytelling," says Jerry Beilinson, deputy editor of Popular Mechanics. "A diagram that is flat in print can become a rotating 3-D model, animated to show how it comes together."

Publishers argue their enthusiasm for apps -- and tablets especially -- is borne out by the early returns. "The 'Cosmo Sex Position of the Day' [iPhone] app sold 80,000 copies with no advertising," says Chris Wilkes, vice president of digital editions and audience development at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, referring to the companion app using the incongruent-though-sticky traditional nomenclature. Hearst is in high gear on this front, planning 14 projects through the end of the year, including Esquire for iPad. And while consumers have been griping that the absence of a subscription model in the App Store forces them to spend an unreasonable per-issue price, Wired's first release on the iPad sold over 100,000 copies, more than the typical newsstands sales in a given month. Unlike the "information-wants-to-be-free" Web, people pay for content on these platforms, and the publishers appear determined to keep them paying. "This is a premium product and well beyond just taking the magazine and porting it," says Wilkes. "If we get the product right, we think the consumer will go along. We plan to price it at least at the print rate, if not greater."

But the most encouraging sign of all is the sheer depth of involvement with touchscreen apps. Early research shows that the large screens and tactile involvement with the device may be changing the game of digital engagement. SI and Hearst say focus groups and reader response is only encouraging them to follow the app craze full bore. "The feedback we have gotten has been astonishing," says Beilinson. In coming to the Web a decade ago, magazines gave up their signature immersiveness and lush design. At GQ.com and other branded media Web sites, the typical user spends about 10 minutes a month -- dismal compared to the hour per issue print often enjoys. Usage of the iPhone version of GQ, however, "fell about where the magazine is, 65 minutes to 70 minutes," said Condé Nast vice president of editorial operations Rick Levine at an OMMA Publish panel in June. "We were surprised." So was Hearst, which is seeing six times more engagement with its first iPad app than it gets from the same brand's Web site. "It is gratifying and makes me think we are really onto something and people are interested in getting information this way," says Beilinson.

McPheters finds that the iPad is finally that digital format that overcomes the dweeby coldness and clutter of the Web and is something more print-like to curl up with. The images are gorgeously large and luminous, especially in an age of downgraded paper stock. At SI, McDonell confirms that photos are proving much more popular in the apps than even he expected. And the internal storage allows the magazine lover to peruse a library of copies without that teetering stack at the bedside. "It is better," says McPheters. "There are a lot of bad apps out there, but if you have an app that is pretty and functional, it is even better than the print experience."

But as the media brands contemplate an appy future, they also will face the challenge and cost of developing these new toys across an endless stream of devices. The smartphone universe is already fragmented among several players, all with their own operating systems and app SDKs. The iPad's success is spawning a colony of competitors running Google Android and perhaps Windows 7 in a range of screen sizes that may not support whatever looks and feels so cool on the iPad. This app-etite is going to be expensive to feed. Publishers are hoping to amortize investment by leveraging write-once-publish-anywhere tools. But "smartphone, iPad and all those in-between present whole different product discussions in addition to tech discussions," says Wilkes.

And so the magazines are also hopeful their app-azines finally will bring real ad dollars to these platforms and not just the "digital dimes" many collect from banner ads. The Wall Street Journal reported that Time magazine had extracted $200,000 each from Toyota, Fidelity Investments and others to run multimedia pages in its first eight iPad issues. Wired was said to be offering iPad placements mainly to their best print clients. The magic cast off by Jobs' alluring "Jesus Tablet" is not lost on media buyers, says SI's McDonell. Going into ad calls with major brands, "I feel like Elvis Costello at Studio 54." Everyone wants a piece of this. The early iPad magazine ads -- from financial services and automakers especially -- felt more like TV spots and microsites, with fifteens and thirties embedded on the page and multiscreen slide shows of product and messaging. Both McDonell and Beilinson say their own respective focus groups are doing something neither has ever seen before -- asking to go back and look at the ads again. "You are giving an advertiser a way to become real content," McDonell says. "They are all like Bill Paley programming their own channels. They can take you as deep as they want to take you."

McDonnell's invocation of icons ranging from the '70s Costello to the '50s Paley may indicate how the magazine industry regards the new world of apps, with a kind of weird nostalgia for bygone days when the money and glamour flowed their way. Juniper projects that the app market will reach $25 billion by 2014. "They are crazy if they don't take advantage of it," says McPheters. In agreeing to free entry and the banner-ad economy of the Web, "publishers made a mistake with the online space," she says. "This is a chance for a do-over." Back to the future.