Okay fine, I’ll admit I have been a bit curmudgeonly about the iPad to date. I even went as far as saying on TWiST that I thought it was going to have a great come out then sort of languish in new device category limbo. This week I finally actually played with an iPad care of Matt Cutler (@mcutler), one of my best friends and CMO at VisibleMeasures. Once I got past all the normal reactions (it’s smaller than I thought it would be, the touch interface is finicky and even a power user like Matt had to try 3-4 times on just about anything he did to get it right, great for media stuff – bad for business apps) I had an epiphany. This epiphany came from playing with the Wired Magazine iPad app .
Epiphany number one was that magazines are now dead. Whoa – not the epiphany you expected? Well the problem is that magazine formats are really just a combination of content curation and bundling strategies. If the only way you could get them was in print form in your post-box, there was nothing really to challenge them. But much like the CD, once you can unbundle the pieces and give access to them on the web, the value of the bundled format goes away. While the Wired app is extremely cool (oh you can embed video in an article) it seems to me that this is now just a web page. The fact that no one thought to embed video or voice or whatnot right into the article before seems more like an uncreative use of the Web than a creative use of the iPad. It would be incredibly easy to replicate the page flipping mechanism of the magazine format on the web if this is what people really want to do on an iPad. People are already doing this and it works much the same way. So should TechCrunch build an iPad app or just include a flipping rebundle of their website? Seems like the later would be a lot simpler for most people. Some people I am sure will argue here that when content sites were faced with the incredible growth in 3g handsets, very few successfully rewired their websites to handle the new device format (and I agree – browsing the web on my Blackberry is like sucking air through a straw). The key difference though is that the design challenge was the screen size (not in the end bandwidth or browser functionality or pointing devices or whatnot). As a content site, you had no choice but to rethink how you delivered the whole experience on a mobile phone. You don’t have that problem on an iPad. It will be interesting to see if some web-only content sites actually start to create “virtual” editions to deliver in the flipbook format. From a user’s perspective, this curation is actually valuable. When I get my copy of Wired, I do flip through it all because there is some coherency to what’s in one copy of the magazine.
Epiphany number two, which to me is much more important is that I found myself playing with the interactive ads as much as the Wired-related content. There are 3 dimension models in ads, video in ads, and all sorts of other little ideas that Wired and ad crew were clearly experimenting with. So why not do this on the web? Well the answer I think is that a) people are (e.g. interactive games) and b) when you’re “reading a magazine” you’re in a much different mindset. The ability to put someone into a mindset that is not predicated on attention-deficit is an important thing. I was focused on the magazine: that’s what I was doing. And so I actually stopped and played with the ads.
I think this is a powerful lesson and evolution to watch. What becomes interesting is how people think about content adjacency in the future of advertisements. Many of the interactive ads in Wired actually had something to do with the content they were embedded in. Much like playing with an infographic from Wired, the ad content added value to my immersive experience in the magazine.
Now let’s keep in mind that these ads are produced by people like GE and American Express. They have the budget and staff to create dedicated content for one specific edition of Wired. I spend my days working with SMBs, and they clearly don’t have the same ability. It’s hard enough to get some banner ads together to try display advertising, let alone build a 3d model as your ad content. I think all of this is changing. There are great pools of creative expertise out there (now being organized and made accessible to the masses through companies like 99designs, AdHack, AdFactory, and GenuisRocket). I encourage this evolution, and I have some ideas I will be sharing about it. For now, just contemplate the idea that ads are content. Worry about how to produce it next.
