Adobe Digital Publishing

The release of the new iPad has created quite a stir in the publishing community, and designers are eager to learn best practices for delivering high quality content for all versions of the iPad. Colin Fleming and the designers at Adobe have provided several resources for publishing to the new iPad. Fleming wrote a white paper, Best practices for using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to publish to the new iPad, which was updated this week. In addition, he hosted an Ask a Pro session on Friday, April 6th. These recommendations are written with the intent of helping designers work most efficiently:  to build the highest quality display with minimal effort.

The Basics
Before you dive into our recording of Fleming’s Ask a Pro session or open up the white paper, it’s helpful to understand the three basic rules of publishing to the new iPad.

1. Create your articles in PDF format
Compared to raster formats like PNG, the PDF file type results in smaller folio file sizes.

2. Use renditions
Build folios with the same folio name at both 1024 and 2048 resolutions; these different sizes of the same folio are known as renditions. When renditions are used in multi-folio apps, Content Viewer will detect the correct folio size according to the device size, and only the correct folio size will be downloaded to the device.

3. Rebuild the branded app using Viewer Builder and publish
Rebuild your branded app in Viewer Builder using high-resolution app icons and UI assets so that your brand assets look crisp on the retina display. Also make sure you publish both renditions (1024 and 2048) before sending push notifications.

The white paper contains information on:

• Working with overlays to minimize file size
• Building renditions
• Managing metadata
• Creating assets for both resolutions in Viewer Builder

 Watch the Ask a Pro session here

For more information, read Bob Bringhurst’s Guidelines for Creating Folios for iPad3 and visit the Digital Publishing Suite Developer Center.

Today, SoDA (Society of Digital Agencies) released the SoDA Report on the iPad using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Formerly known as the Digital Marketing Outlook, The SoDA Report is released quarterly to an eager audience of tech-savvy digital strategists and marketers. SoDA is embracing the technology that its member agencies use in order to build the app. Creative and digital agencies are using Digital Publishing Suite to drive new client revenue at a higher margin, expand their skills, and provide innovative services to current clients.

Tony Quin, SoDA Board Chair and CEO of IQ, introduces the app in an embedded video, sharing the story of this thoughtfully crafted publication replete with insights for digital marketers. SoDA has a highly exclusive membership, and the content is written by some of the most influential thinkers in the industry.

SoDA’s mission is to provide education, advocacy, and best practices for digital agencies. Open up the app, and you’ll find a mix of consumer data, agency strategy, modern marketing trends, and tech talk.  Perusing the articles, I was intrigued by a case study on Occupy Wall Street’s viral communication strategy. I also loved the article on marketing technologies that, contrary to popular belief, aren’t dead. Learn more by reading SoDA’s press release, and then download The SoDA Report from the iTunes Store today!

ASOS, an online fashion and beauty retailer based in the UK, recently launched a digital edition of its popular ASOS Magazine to help expand its reach internationally. Using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Professional Edition, ASOS was able to leverage its existing print workflow based on Adobe InDesign to create a feature-rich, interactive digital edition.

Editorial and Design Director Duncan Edwards commented on how easy using Adobe software to bring its iconic ASOS Magazine to tablets saying, “We selected Adobe Digital Publishing Suite because it let us get into digital publishing quickly, without having to create our own app from the ground up.”

The free app features celebrities modeling the latest fashions, editorial content with a modern flair, and the ability to browse and add products to online shopping carts. ASOS is seeing positive results from its digital edition, with the average basket size for online orders placed through the app ringing in at approximately 30% higher than orders placed directly through the website.

ASOS also appreciates the ability to localize text for various audiences. But most important is the ability to build brand awareness and gain exposure among affluent consumers. In the coming year, ASOS hopes to double—or even triple—the number of app downloads. To learn more about ASOS and its use of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Professional Edition, click here: http://adobe.ly/HerBaT

To show off the value of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Adobe recently worked with Hybrid Design to create the internal DPS Sales Tool iPad app. The experience benefitted both Adobe and the agency. According to Dora Drimalas, principal at Hybrid Design, “Digital Publishing Suite opens the door to create all kinds of apps and services for our clients that drive merchandising, brand loyalty, customer acquisition, and more.”

Hybrid Design easily created the feature-rich app for Adobe in just four weeks using Adobe InDesign software. Apps developed with Digital Publishing Suite can increase merchandising, brand affinity, and boost conversions. Instead of passing around tablets to showcase apps that customers have created, Adobe can simply use its own app to demonstrate the interactive feature set.

The DPS Sales Tool app gives Adobe global sales teams immediate access to content that can be updated with ease. The app lets account managers engage with customers using Adobe’s own app as an example of a direct sales use case. It also enables sales professionals to showcase customer implementations, white papers, slideshows, and videos—which makes the presentations even more visually compelling. Using the app, Adobe can illustrate to customers how app content can be distributed behind a firewall for internal groups.

Integrated analytics within the DPS Sales Tool app also provide Adobe with a way to track usage and decided on future enhancements to the app. The company can see what salespeople are showing most, and determine which interactive features and sections are gaining the most traction. For example, analytics show that up to 80% of the account managers or solution consultants who downloaded the application spent up to 30 minutes per application visit and, 55% of monthly visitors leveraged the Digital Publishing Suite Pitch folio included in the application.

Lynly-Schambers-Lenox, group product marketing manager of Digital Publishing Suite at Adobe says, “We’ve experienced it ourselves: Adobe Digital Publishing Suite can empower enterprises and publishers in a vast number of useful and productive ways.”

• Learn more about the Adobe DPS Sales Tool app.

The medical manufacturing, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries have a real opportunity for improved patient and healthcare provider engagement through tablet applications. Apps can help life science organizations in myriad ways – including establishing positive, ongoing brand relationships between health care professionals and patients, accelerating the sales cycle and delivering higher recall rates to drive revenue and build market share, leveraging mobile marketing channels to expand reach of brand and content, and maximizing organizational efficiencies. The following types of apps are showcased in the App of the Week video, which features medical and dental apps.

• Sales apps can quickly deliver product information to busy healthcare professionals and increase the effectiveness of the sales process
• Medical journal apps using interactivity can provide more comprehensive professional development for health care providers
• Patient education apps can drive brand awareness and deepen patients’ health care knowledge, allowing them to take better control of their health care

The Digital Landscape

• Everyone’s Going Mobile

Today’s environment is rapidly evolving, driven by the proliferation of devices people use to consume content -  both at home, at work and on the go. Not too long ago, healthcare professionals and consumers depended solely on their desktop computer or laptop to access online information. Now, a growing number of healthcare providers and consumers are likely to seek out content across a multitude of devices on a daily basis.

• Patients are Researching on Devices

Patients want to be in full charge of their medical and health care decisions and are researching and learning about disease, disease management and therapies on their own.  Tablet applications offer the opportunity to more effectively inform patients and establish product preferences.

• Health Care Providers Rely on Mobile Technologies

We know that healthcare providers are using devices while at work. Surveys conducted for the pharmaceutical industry in mid-year 2011 found that 64 percent of doctors have a smartphone, while 27 percent of primary care providers and specialists say they have a tablet.

In the past year, pharma investments in smartphone apps, social media platforms, and wireless devices have grown 78 percent, according to Ernst & Young’s Annual Global Pharmaceutical Report.

Ownership of devices by pharma/health sciences industry is 5X general population.  1 in 5 physicians plans to purchase a device in next year (Epocrates, survey, 2010)

Sales Apps
Today, sales reps are under increasing pressure to represent more products in less time. Historically, reps had seven to ten minutes with a physician, and now they only have two to four minutes. In addition, they are responsible for a broader array of products. Essentially, they need to entice the physician with more compelling information in less time.

Roche has armed their 31,000 sales reps with iPads in the last year. As tablets make their way into the enterprise as sales tools, sales teams can integrate all customer-facing information into one tablet app, such as white papers, product information, and surgery videos, reducing the cumbersome materials associated with the sales cycle. At the end of the sales meeting, the salesperson can also order patient brochures and other ancillary materials for the doctor without leaving the app, streamlining the sales process.

Product Detailing
Tablet apps can quickly and cost effectively deliver product information to busy health care professionals. In a survey conducted with 100 physicians, two-thirds had viewed details on a tablet device, and 68% reported being very satisfied with the format.

In this week’s app of the week video, we show a product detailing app for dental implants, which includes video tutorials and product specs. Product detailing is richer when Digital Publishing Suite features are applied to the app. For example, 360 degree rotation allows the dentist to see devices from all angles. After the sales rep shares information with the customer, the dentist or oral surgeon can download the app from the app store and refer to the tutorials as needed.

Medical Journal Apps
More than 30% of physicians have an iPad, which far exceeds the national average. This shouldn’t be a surprise — health care professionals are constantly on the go and need access to up-to-date information. Journals from medical associations and companies keep medical professionals on top on the latest advancements.

The high resolution iPad (both the earlier and the new version) allow health care providers to see a high level of detail. In the medical field, microscopy is instrumental in understanding disease formation and therapeutic mechanisms. In addition, videos are the most effective way to model interactions on the cellular level. Therefore, not only do tablet apps engage health professionals on their preferred devices, but they allow journals to more clearly communicate technical, peer reviewed information – especially for people who are constantly in motion.

Patient Education Apps
When patients have health care questions, they often seek it out on their own. In fact, approximately 80% of patients seek out health information on the web. The tablet is a great way to connect with and educate patients, especially since people tend to spend more time consuming content on tablet devices than they do on the web.

In this week’s app of the week video, we show the Mayo Clinic’s app designed to educate the general public about research being performed at the clinic. The articles use videos, pinch and zoom photos, and interactive quizzes to show how diseases progress, and how the therapies designed at the Mary Clinic help slow or stop disease progression.

Tablets are the perfect medium to distribute and communicate accurate medical information – for sales teams, medical professionals, and patients. Check out the app of the week video to see this in action!

By Debra Bates-Schrott, President
Bates Creative Group

Publishing today means your audience must be at the center of everything you do. This may present a paradigm shift in your thinking as a publication (or maybe it’s old news, if so, good for you!), prompting the question – “Wait, isn’t my content the center of my universe?” Yes and no. Your audience has changed, their media habits have changed, and the way they engage with your content has changed. For instance, a report from the Pew Research Center (“State of the News Media 2012“) shows that “27% of the U.S. adult population now gets their news on smartphones and tablets.” The report also lists that “70% of desktop/laptop owners report getting news on their computers, half of smartphone owners (51%) use their phones for news, and a majority of tablet owners (56%) use their devices for news.”

What does this mean?
Change your thinking and start your strategy with:

1. Defining whom you’re talking to.
2. Meeting them where they are.
3. Giving them the content they want.
4. Designing it so they can’t put it down.

How can you put this perspective into practice? As creative people we always want to start with the fun part, “design so they can’t put it down.”  But design only gets better if we do the other parts first and embrace a strategic approach. The right strategy starts with questions – Who is the audience? Are they using tablets? What do they want from your content?

The tablet question is THE question now, because the tablet market is undeniably exploding, reaching more and more consumers every day. In fact, Rick Levine, Condé Nast’s director of editorial operations, stated at this year’s South by Southwest Conference that all of the Condé Nast titles from Vogue and Arch Digest to Vanity Fair will have a tablet version by the end of 2012. “We like this technology so much that by the end of the year every magazine will have a digital edition,” he said.

It’s more important than ever to get up to speed on designing your publication for the tablet. At Bates Creative Group, we’ve refined our expertise in transforming publications from a print magazine to various other media platforms, and mastered the process of making a magazine’s tablet app its flagship media piece – all while using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.

Taken from our experience, here are the top eight considerations (you get the top ten when you hire us) to get your tablet vision and strategy headed in the right direction:

1. If there is no difference between a PDF and the functionality of your tablet app, you’ve missed the mark.
2. Your tablet app is not a “small version of your website.”
3. Whenever possible “show don’t tell.” The tablet is perfect to tell your story through the use of video and interactive graphics. Be considerate of article length. For instance, a story that seems an average read in a printed magazine may be overwhelming on the tablet.
4. It’s about “user experience” not reader experience. You cannot design apps without considering the tablet user.
5. Consider the dynamics of the horizontal and vertical formats.
6. Designing for tablets is a new way of thinking compared to print design.
7. Let your users make you proud by sharing your work. Social media has the power to grow businesses. Make it cool and get your tablet users talking about it.
8. During the planning stage, brainstorm how you can add interactivity to your content. Overlays and HTML 5 can make an app come alive.

Getting back to your audience – let’s say you build your tablet app and send it out into the world. How do you know if your design is a success? Measurement. Learn how the analytics work. It’s like a window into your audience. Learn from the data and interpret it so you can design better apps with user preferences as your first consideration. Learn what will drive the user from screen to screen and what drives engagement. This is a huge advantage of the app – real-time feedback on performance of your content, design and user experience. Now you can think of your publication as if it were in continual beta testing. This data should also drive everything from your editorial strategy to your photo selects. If you use this feedback effectively as a tool, you will undoubtedly keep improving your product and see your numbers climb.

This is very exciting time for publishers and designers. The world is open to us to explore and use new tools to deliver our stories as real experiences in amazing, memorable ways. I encourage all publishers and designers out there to keep pushing the envelope and to get your audience talking about your work.

Debbie Bates-Schrott, President, Bates Creative Group
Debbie is the founder and chief communications strategist of Bates Creative Group. For more than 20 years, she has led award-winning teams in creative art direction, branding, magazine design and marketing collateral development. Debbie’s more than 70 design awards recognize her exceptional work for organizations as diverse as Cisco Systems, the American Marketing Association, the Land Trust Alliance, the Pentagon Memorial Fund and the U.S. Marine Corps.

Debbie has a strong understanding of marketing communications and design issues, and is intimately involved with every client project. She has a proven ability to anticipate changing business situations, make a rapid and accurate assessment of the opportunity, and respond with creative communications solutions. Debbie thrives in high-pressure, dynamic situations. http://batescreativegroup.com/

By Craig Morrow & Will Steuber, MEI

As a magazine publisher, you know that gaining new readers and keeping your existing ones are two important aspects of running a profitable business. One of the greatest benefits of publishing to tablet devices is that this growing medium can play a significant role in increasing both of those success metrics. Having exciting, highly interactive content that remains fresh is important, and being able to sustain it is just as critical. But with those basic building blocks in place, tablet devices can absolutely help you grow and retain your subscriber base.

Recently, Adobe released data that shows “tablet magazine readership is engaged and willing to pay for high value content. In the last year, readers have downloaded 16 million publications built with Digital Publishing Suite.”

Additionally, Adobe released the following analysis:

•     68% of tablet consumers worldwide pay for digital magazines built with Digital Publishing Suite
•     15% of purchases are single issues
•     26% are subscriptions through the tablet app store
•     27% are through direct entitlement (bundling digital with print subscriptions)

I think it’s fair to say that consumers are ready, willing and able to pay for tablet content.

Here are the top reasons why we think these devices can help you gain a larger audience that interacts with your publication in a much deeper way:

1. A wider demographic net  – Tablet devices are attracting new potential readers that go beyond most publishers’ target markets. As a result, a wider net can be cast to attract new readership.
2. Direct Entitlement– By bundling subscription packages and providing bi-directional incentives (print to digital and digital to print), you’ll make it easier for readers to purchase and consume your content.
3. Cross-sell and upsell opportunities – Providing readers with a convenient, intuitive means to discover and buy related products is very important to publishers. This is the “Holy Grail” in many ways, and tablets are making it much easier.
4. E-commerce made simple – Marketers will tell you that too many clicks is never a good thing when it comes to electronic purchasing. Highly integrated purchasing methods through Adobe Digital Publishing Suite keep your potential buyers where you want them: in front of your content with very little distraction.  

As we’ve dug into the market analysis and data over the past year, we’ve learned that readers truly value the level of interactivity and subsequent engagement offered by their iPads and other tablets. Readers are spending more time with apps, and new consumers are able to find the content they like or never knew existed. Best of all, they are willing to pay for it.

To be clear, great content is at the root of all of this and without it, there’s no magic button. But when you have it, these devices open up a very wide spectrum of options for you to reach new readers and reinvigorate your existing audience with a new, more engaging medium.

Craig Morrow is Director of Strategic Accounts and Will Steuber is Director of Creative Services at MEI. MEI was founded in 1990 as Managing Editor Inc., with the goal of providing innovative software solutions to the rapidly evolving publishing industry. Today the company delivers a comprehensive package of digital publishing, editorial workflow and automated ad layout systems for magazines, newspapers and other print and electronic publishers and communicators. Visit the MEI website to learn more about their services.

Distimo, an app analytics firm, released data today that illustrate increasing consumer demand for Newsstand publications on the iPad. Over 7% of the top 200 apps in the app store are sold via Newsstand. Of those, Distrimo estimates that the top 100 grossing apps available in Newsstand are bringing in $70K in revenue per day. Included in February’s top five are The New Yorker and National Geographic, built with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Not surprisingly, most of the revenue comes from in-app purchases, where publishers can take advantage of upsell and cross sell opportunities.

Interested in more information about tablet consumer behavior? Last month, we released data aggregated from Digital Publishing Suite apps, showing that 68% of consumers pay for digital magazines built with Digital Publishing Suite and almost half of those are purchases are subscriptions bought on the device. Magazine readers are buying, and they’re coming back for more.

This week’s Digital Publishing Suite app of the week is PC Magazine, designed in partnership with Joe Zeff Design. PC Magazine has consistently evolved its digital strategy to meet its users on their preferred media. It released its first issue yesterday on the iPad, and has fully embraced interactive overlays in order to clearly illustrate device features for its tech-savvy readership.

Here are some highlights of PC Magazine on the iPad:

-        High definition photographs of featured devices, utilizing 360° rotation and slideshows
-        Up-to-the-moment twitter feeds from industry experts alongside long form informative content
-        Clean navigation and usability

Watch the video here:

For more information:

-       Read the Adobe case study on PC Magazine
-       Check out PC Magazine in the app gallery

Today is a great day for technology fans. PC Magazine is back, and it’s better than ever. After discontinuing the print edition of PC Magazine in favor of an all-digital platform, the publisher has now redesigned its tech icon and modernized the experience for the iPad using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Professional edition.

The digital edition features lush, high-resolution photography; 360-degree product rotations; live Twitter streams from authoritative columnists commenting on products; and product reviews that readers expect from the established brand. It is also completely ad-free, and designed to be lightweight for fast, easy downloading and low memory consumption.

Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis says the company partnered with Joe Zeff Design to create the rich, interactive digital edition of the well-liked magazine for the iPad. Shah explained the move to an interactive digital edition: “Our research shows that there is an audience that very much craves the permanence and visual artistry of the print magazine format and wants to read and re-read our journalistic-style, long-form stories. With Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, we’ve curated a digital edition of PC Magazine that offers technology enthusiasts a lean-back experience that is genuinely fun, useful, and immersive.”

Ziff Davis plans to use the analytics built into Digital Publishing Suite to gain insight into open rates, popular articles, and statistics on where time is spent within the digital magazine. This information will help the publisher continue improving editorial based on what subscribers want. To learn more about Ziff Davis/PC Magazine and its use of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Professional edition, click here: http://www.adobe.com/products/digital-publishing-suite-pro/showcase.edu.html.