Condé Nast details ‘test and learn’ plan to shake ‘lack of commercial progress from mobile ads’

Publishers like Time Inc and Hearst spotted the shift earlier than most and reacted accordingly and Condé Nast is hopeful its own fledgling fail fast, learn fast mindset nurtures the cross-title approach that is increasingly key to securing big budget campaigns. Audiences not platforms are what advertisers now want, spurred by expectations of branding KPIs from their mobile efforts rather than just performance.

How to monetise rising mobile traffic?

Wil Harris, head of digital at Condé Nast Britain told The Drum, that the business is “still trying to figure out” what “mobile is really going to present commercially. “I think the industry is in agreement that mobile banners look slightly janky and just putting MPUs on a mobile feed is fine and is quite exciting but doesn’t seem to generate that excitement [from advertisers], he continued. “Content companies need to work out what it is people are willing to pay for.”

To achieve this, Condé Nast has turned to the unlikeliest of sources in Facebook, which is fast emerging as a credible rival to publishers in the content game. The social network’s instream ads, which are presented in a way that feels friendly to the format that they are in, is informing how the publisher revamps the way website content is presented on mobile. Initial developments from Condé Nast's plan will start to roll out from the middle of the year with much of its current focus on testing different formats and strategies likely to spark the mobile-first culture it craves.

The publisher will launch iPhone and Android editions for all its magazines throughout the course of the year to accelerate its mobile charge. Vogue’s smartphone version debuted in January and now sits alongside Wired, GQ, Glamour and Vanity Fair as Condé Nast’s first brands built for mobile.

“Facebook’s [ads] are cross platform, in-feed and feel native and it’s clearly the most lucrative mobile advertising product in the world right now,” said Harris. “That’s not a bad place to start if you’re trying to make mobile work and so whatever we do needs to tread a similar path.”

The approach will steer upcoming investments on video, creative campaigns and automated advertising that the publisher is pinning its advertising hopes on in 2015. Like its rivals, Condé Nast is trying to incite bigger advertising deals from campaigns on smaller screens at a time when apathy toward traditional banners and MPUs is wavering.

The scale versus quality debate in content marketing

Video is one of the most lucrative ways to secure advertising premiums due to better engagement metrics and larger rates. Conde Nast will launch full video channels later this year with the first for Vogue. The channels will sit within the sites for each brand and the content will also be spread across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in order to lift traffic from social media. The plan is led by director of video content Danielle Dennison-Brown who joined from Vice Media at the start of the year.

It dovetails with Conde Nast’s renewed emphasis on creative campaigns, driven by the surge in demand for native content, particularly on mobile where performances are better than standard ads. While the publisher, along with its peers, has been pushing integrated content in print for years, the arrival of the term “native” in the marketer’s repertoire gives it the handle on which to pin the digital equivalent onto. Much of the work here will flow from the insights uncovered by Conde Nast’s editorially-led audience development group, which sifts through data to understand how readers are working through its titles on different devices.

Harris said: “We dipped our toe into native at the end of last year with campaigns for Diesel and Shell in GQ and Wired respectively. What we found is that it definitely outperforms what we expected in terms of reader interactions.

“We’re finding that mobile native is performing better than standard ads because it feels more natural to the reader.”

The conclusion comes from the publisher’s efforts to seek out new engagement metrics. Tests are currently underway to uncover the best proxy for engagement in a market where click through rates are fast becoming redundant. Viewability and time-based metrics are among of flurry of alternatives Conde Nast is considering in a bid to prove the value of its audience, which it prides itself on being luxury rather than mass media.

“I’m really interested in how comparing the click-throughs on native ads to traditional piece of content and how it performs against a regular banner. We’re looking at all sorts of different types of measurement to try and work out what we can sell advertisers on.”

The scale versus quality debate is also fuelling developments in the programmatic arena where Conde Nast already employs a more conservative approach to trading inventory through private deals. For the business to grow, its automated trading needs to boost the value of inventory across the site rather than cheapen it, an issue that was clearly key to its decision to agree to Group M’s demand to pay only for online ads that are entirely viewable by customers - a tougher standard than the industry has been using.

Harris said: “An open marketplace for programmatic [inventory] doesn’t work for us spectacularly. You need enormous scale to make those ad rates really add up to anything meaningful. Conde Nast isn’t a company that’s about enormous scale. If you have 50 million people reading Vogue then that isn’t Vogue anymore.

“We’ve found that programmatic is a great enabler for our clients who want to either buy [inventory] more efficiently, buy in a certain way or across different platforms in multiple territories but still at the premium rates that Conde Nast charges. We don’t release the actual figures but [programmatic is growing really quickly and outperforming our expectations to the point where it will be one of the three main drivers of the business this year.”

Advertising revenues alone won't drive growth

Conde Nast’s coordinated charge on video, native content and programmatic advertising budgets is the result of a two year restructure to foster a cross-platform and cross-title approach.

Meanwhile, in the US the publisher has also been shaken up with the promotion of its entertainment boss Fred Santarpia to the newly created role of chief digital officer last October, an appointment that rendered its chief technology officer role redundant. Conde Nast made the changes to purge a lingering print culture from the publisher that had allowed its digital strategy to splinter with no overarching plan.

The plan now includes a global ecommerce project that is shrouded in secrecy for now as well as more concerted push into the events space.

Demand for premium digital content has never been greater and Conde Nast will be hoping its shifting mobile strategy can exploit the trend and create a premium mobile offering.

For more about changing publishing models and monetisation check out The Drum’s Media Slap