Let readers decide what they want to pay for

Carlo Campos, Director of Innovation Media Consulting in Spain was a guest speaker during the INMA’s Oxford Tablet Summit. Read his advice to publishers about how they should develop their iPad strategies.

As million iPads have been sold so far, the first question to ask by the Innovation was where Ipad is mostly used? The answers in the research were obvious:

• more home than office
• for travelling
• sofa
• bed
• toilet

Here are the reasons for using the iPad:

• consume media
• mail
• web surfing
• (nobody said gaming, but it sure is also the reason)
• cooking

The 3 early takeaways from this speech were thad iPad is a lean back device, mad for consumption (not production) and dedicated to online and offline usage.
Carlo Campos dedicated part of his speech to the economics of scarcity. People will not pay for useful relevant valuable. They will consume it but not necessarily pay for it. They will pay for something that is scarce. Publishers should think about their scarcity.

Google has found scarcity in the internet: proprietory algorithms, opportune context, limited search terms.

Where is scarcity for publishers? Their scarce resources are:

• unique content,
• unique utility,
• unique convenience,
• unique packaging,
• unique experience.

Those should become the core of the publishers’ paid models on iPads. Hard question comes right away:
how to set the price? No matter which model publishers choose, whether it is free, paid, mixed or freemium, publishers should make it flexible. They should allow customers decide what they want to pay for. A coherent pricing strategy across all platforms is definitely needed. If one’s content is free on the web he shouldn’t expect success in paid model on iPad.

iPad is not the only horse in town. There are 12-14 competitors. Does this mean publishers will be forced to develop different platforms for each tablet? Not necessarily, the good news is that Apple is setting high standards. iPad will only be the fraction of the audience. And it will not be a monopoly.

After the readers, publishers should spend a while to think what will advertisers be paying for? Again, they will pay for what is scarce:

• message richness
• context
• knowing the audience really well
• location
• intention
• fulfillment

Ads on iPad will be premium. Again, publishers should:

• be completely flexible,
• worry more about what they can do for their advertisers,
• start preparing their salesforce for yet another platform,
• start working on new digital commercial narratives.,
• team to develop new digital narratives – commercial and editorial – that must include sales and marketing people.

On iPad everyone is a competitor to the publishers, even their own clients. Take a look on iPhone application prepared by Kraft Foods. Don’t you think that kind of app should be developed by a magazine covering the topics of kitchen or food?

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