“It’s all about the brand”. That was the message from the FIPP09 conference in London this week.
But what does that actually mean for magazine editors and content managers? Well the biggest thing is you need to become “platform agnostic”. While print is definitely not dead, it is now just part of your brand’s publishing mix alongside digital magazines, websites, newsletters and mobile content.
Like the perfect parent, you are no longer allowed to have any favourites – you never know which one will be best able to look after you in years to come. You do, however, need to care deeply about putting the right sort of content on to the right platform.
The most common example I can give of inappropriate content management is digital magazines that replicate print editions. I know there are a million reasons why people do this, mostly to do with money and resources. Unfortunately there is a better reason for not doing it – people just can’t read them.
Unless we want the magazine as a designed, curated format to disappear online, our industry needs to make digital magazines attractive to readers. This is partly about layout, partly about content. Double-page portrait layouts with tiny type don’t work; big type on landscape does. Lengthy articles don’t work; short reads do. Intelligent linking and rich media make the best of the format.
Just like there is an appropriate way to approach digtial magazine content and layout, there is an appropriate way to approach content on all the other platforms that we need to become agnostic about. What is appropriate? If the conversations at FIPP 09 are anything to go by, we’re all still trying to work it out. But one thing is for sure, firing analog content into digital recepticals and forgetting about it is just not good enough.
