Verso Survey: Room for an Indie eReader?

Verso

The buzz continues building for results from our 2012 Reader Survey. Today’s report comes from Publishers Weekly, which picks up on consumer interest in an indie-branded e-reader.

To read the Publishers Lunch take on the survey, click here.

To read the  Shelf Awareness take, click here.

For comparison, you can look at the first annual survey (as presented at the ABA’s Day of Education at the 2010 Book Expo America) and the second annual survey (as presented at the 2011 Digital Book World conference).

 

Verso Survey: Changing Dynamics of Reader Format Preferences

Verso

Today’s Publishers Lunch breaks the latest story from the most recent Verso Reader Survey. Michael Cader quotes Verso Digital’s Jack McKeown:

“While e-reader ownership rates have increased in a dramatic fashion since our first survey in December, 2009, so too has the level of resistance. The dynamic movement highlighted in this data suggests that over time, consumers have moved out of the ‘not sure’ category in one of two directions:  a.) toward actual ownership, or a high probability of near-term ownership of a dedicated e-reader; or b.) into the ranks of resistors for whom the devices do not yet offer a compelling ‘relative advantage’ to overcome their conservatism re: printed books.”

To read about Shelf Awareness’s take on the Survey results, click here.

For comparison, you can look at the first annual survey (as presented at the ABA’s Day of Education at the 2010 Book Expo America) and the second annual survey (as presented at the 2011 Digital Book World conference).

 

Verso Survey: The Borders Effect

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Shelf Awareness reports on our third annual survey of book readers, focusing on the effect of the Borders closing on booksellers. Verso Digital will be presenting the full results of this survey and its implications January 19, 2012 at the American Bookseller Association Winter Institute and January 25, 2012 at Digital Book World.

 

For reference, here are links to the first survey (version presented at the ABA’s Day of Education at the 2010 Book Expo America) and the second annual survey (version presented at the 2011 Digital Book World conference).

Our #1

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Reason #6 in New York magazine’s “Reasons to Love New York” is our #1: “Our Marlboro Man Is a Novelist.”

 

This is a case study in the right billboard in the right place at the right time. Congratulations to Verso’s media team for sniffing out the opportunity, Verso’s design team for a billboard that stood tall in the Times Square glare,  and Jeffrey Eugenides for writing the novel that inspires us all.

 

How do you sell a $60 dictionary in an online world?

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We are proud to be working with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on their blockbuster marketing campaign to launch the 5th edition of their American Heritage Dictionary. How beautiful, comprehensive, and connected does a print dictionary have to be in this day and age to pay $60 for it? Just walk into a bookstore and pick one up, you’ll see.

We think this edition provides a great example of how to create the kind of print experience readers crave while also providing the connectivity they require. In publishing, as in advertising, you have to know your medium and know your audience.

Here’s a link to the New York Times article about the campaign and Verso’s role in it.

 

 

“Surprising and delightful”*

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"The Marriage Plot" billboard in Times Square
"The Marriage Plot" Times Square billboard

As an advertising agency, part of our job is to keep our clients up-to-date on late-breaking availabilities, good deals, and what’s newly possible. Sometimes it’s a homepage takeover, sometimes it’s a full page print ad, and sometimes it’s a prominent billboard.

We are big fans of Jeffrey Eugenides’ work and his latest book in particular. So we were thrilled when Farrar, Straus and Giroux gave us the go-ahead for a Times Square billboard for his amazing new novel, “The Marriage Plot.” OK, maybe a little surprised, but FSG has always been good at keeping us on our toes. Our design and production team had a blast working on the creative.

The board has been up for 24 hours and already the notices are coming in:

WSJ.com/metropolis

The Atlantic wire

The Village Voice says it’s “Crazy… and kind of cool.”

*Peter Lattman, New York Times DealBook reporter calls it “Surprising and delightful.”

AdWeek says “FSG goes big.”

Shelf Awareness calls it “Impressive and dramatic.”

 

Check it out for yourself. And read the book. It really is THAT good.

The Marriage Plot billboard in Times Square
"The Marriage Plot" Times Square billboard

 

 

New Adventures in Contextual Marketing (and the Death of the Dancing Cowboy)

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The financial collapse of 2008 did this one good deed: it killed the dancing cowboy mortgage ads. The dancing cowboys and their variations seemed to rule the internet in the years before 2008. Their endless loops of rotating .gifs were infuriatingly impossible to avoid, running mercilessly, irrelevantly adjacent to whatever you were trying to read, watch or look at. The makers of the ads couldn’t care less whether they ran on a site devoted to politics, motherhood, or game development. After all, who didn’t need an enormous time-bomb of an adjustable rate mortgage on a house they couldn’t otherwise afford?

There are certainly brands that use blind mass reach effectively. High-volume low-cost reach makes sense for a company like Coca Cola, for example, that not only truly appeals across all demographics and interest levels but also has the budget to market accordingly. Book advertising, however, is a radically different kind of product with a radically different budget. Whether a reader is a fan of Daniel Silva’s thrillers or Suze Orman’s guides to personal finance and empowerment, the decision to buy a book is highly personal and nuanced. Often the greatest indicator of what you want to read next is what you have just read. And that is why we believe in context first marketing.

Context first means serving an ad for a book next to the most relevant news, blog or entertainment content. It means creating an ad for a parenting book within the Parenting magazine iPad app that provides the user with new insights into parenting. Dancing cowboys might get your visual attention, but they work to distract you from what you came to the site looking for in the first place. Context first advertising gives you information relevant to the site you’re on and provides an opportunity to go farther.  Our job is not to stop readers from finding what they want, it’s to help them find more of what they want.

This is not a new philosophy for Verso Advertising. It has governed our media planning and creative development from the day we opened our doors. What’s a book ad in the NYTBR, after all, other than a contextually relevant ad? But while the philosophy isn’t new, the toolkit is. Digitals products are creating proliferating opportunities for contextual marketing—from Verso’s own Reader Channels to integrated sponsored content on mobile apps to rich media opportunities on every device.

One of these new opportunities is a venture that connects social media, engagement advertising, and contextual relevance in interesting and affordable ways: Say Media. Rich media used to be beyond the budgets of many of our publishing clients. Between ad construction and serving, it simply cost too much—even though the content offering and engagement benefits were clear. Say Media, however, builds rich media creative development, social linkage, and premium ad serving into every campaign budget—making campaigns affordable for medium- to high-profile book publishing projects. While some rich media such as full-page takeovers can be intrusive and disruptive to user experience, Say Media ads respect users first: an in-ad countdown banner indicates that the cursor is hovering and about to expand the ad window, and helps users avoid accidental clicks. They sell on a CPE (cost per engagement) model, so they have a material interest in serving the ad only to the most interested audience. If your project has interesting peripheral content available—a quiz, a game, a video, a slideshow of photos—an ad with Say Media can show interested readers the way to your book.

Mobile Ads Outperform Standard Banners

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The indefatigable Jose Afonso Furtado pointed out an article on eMarketer today about mobile versus standard Web banners that cited a recent Media Mind study: “MediaMind found that the average CTR on mobile banners on their network was 0.61%. That was more than eight times as high as the CTR for standard online banners.” It’s worth noting that we have seen a similar range of performance in mobile versus Web banner campaigns for books. Does that mean every book should run mobile ads first and Web ads second? Not necessarily.

Because of format limitations, mobile ads work best for books that come with either a big name-brand author (“New from Patricia Cornwell!”) or a concept you can get in under eight words (“Could Hitler’s talking dogs have won the war?”). Mobile is not the platform to tout a host of stellar reviews or introduce a new author whose nuanced prose you’re hoping to develop over time. Mobile ads are also great team players: they perform very effectively as part of a larger campaign where they can reinforce a message that also appears in print, broadcast or online.

Beyond the click through — updated

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Two years ago I posted that advertisers need to move beyond the click through.

Things haven’t changed much it seems. MediaPost reported yesterday on new research by ad network and technology provider Collective that suggests that click through behavior does not closely track buyer behavior. Some highlights:

> Online gamers clicked 43% more often than non-gamers. But did they buy more?

> Users on mobile devices click 123% more often than users on laptops and desktops. But happens after the click?

> Here’s where you see the break between CTR and sales: “the highest-performing CTR campaigns examined (top 20%) had a 150% higher CTR but an 8% lower post-impression action rate.”

Of course CTR still matters. But it has to be looked at in conjunction with context, creative, impressions delivered, and sales.

 

Will Independent Bookstores Seize the Day?

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By Jack McKeown and Don Linn

“Borders ended up caught between the variety of the Internet and the intimacy of the independents. Its outlets could never stock as many books as Amazon. Nor could they duplicate the native flavor of the corner bookstores…As paper books become a niche product, niche retailers will be the best place to buy and sell them.” —Edward McClelland, “How Borders Lost its Soul,” Salon.com, February 19, 2011

Southbury is a town located in western Connecticut, part of a region known as the Central Naugatuck Valley. It is a town with both rural and suburban neighborhoods, and a charming historic district. With its four-largest neighboring towns, it comprises a book market of approximately 175,000 souls whose demographics skew to relatively affluent, highly educated and older, propelled by an influx of Baby Boomer empty-nesters and retirees over the last ten years. Two weeks ago, Southbury lost it sole surviving bookstore—a 22,000 square-foot Borders in Southbury Plaza, one of the two hundred superstores closed throughout the country as a part of the chain’s bankruptcy. The nearest Barnes & Noble is in Danbury, 22 miles away. The nearest independents are in Ridgefield and Washington, 20-to-25 miles distant—too far for a casual shopping trip. Without an enterprising independent stepping in to fill this vacuum, who could blame Southbury’s population for falling into the waiting arms of Amazon as the only viable alternative?

Towns like Southbury represent, in a nutshell, the challenge and opportunity confronting the independent bookselling community in the wake of Borders’ bankruptcy.Towns like Southbury represent, in a nutshell, the challenge and opportunity confronting the independent bookselling community in the wake of Borders’ bankruptcy. Suddenly there will be hundreds of sustainable, niche markets with no bookstore presence—a dramatic “supply gap” of physical bookstores of a scale that has not existed for forty years. A tectonic shift of the bricks-and-mortar retail landscape is upon us, whether we are ready for it or not. Not since the explosion of the mall stores in the 1970s, the chain superstores and big-box retail in the late 1980s, and the disruptive emergence of Amazon in the late 1990s, have we seen change of this magnitude and speed. Independent bookstores are about to face a critical test in the next couple of years, and how they respond to this emerging supply gap will determine not only their long-term future, but possibly the fate of the printed book as well.

The digi-catastrophists predict, now that we have reached 8-10% e-book penetration, that chain bookstores and independents alike are condemned to the same oblivion. That argument ignores a central truth: the chains and independents have evolved to present nearly antithetical shopping experiences. As Edward McClelland notes above, where do you locate the competitive advantage in a 150,000-volume superstore relative to the endless storefront of the internet? Independent bookstores, on the other hand, with their focus on finely curated inventory, hand-selling, and a robust program of local events and community outreach, offer a shopping experience that dramatically differentiates them from their chain competition. The independents could be well positioned to move into niche markets abandoned by the chains, while simultaneously upping their game on the Internet with programs such as Google eBooks and the American Bookseller Association’s IndieCommerce web-hosting engine.

What will it take for independent bookstores to seize the opportunity? Continue reading →