• Newspapers: Seventy two percent of worldwide professionals polled by IDG Connect say they are buying fewer since owning an iPad.
• Books: 70 percent are buying fewer.
• DVDs: 49 percent are buying fewer.

Asia and the Middle East lead the way with, respectively, 90 percent and 80 percent of respondents saying they now purchase fewer printed papers.

“These markets for physical media are already in decline,” the iPad For Business Survey 2012 concludes. “On this evidence, tablet computing will hasten their demise.

“For advertising- funded media (newspapers and magazines), the challenges are particularly substantial. Readers who can afford iPads tend to be more demographically desirable than those who cannot.”

In North America, 15 percent of respondents said they would consider buying an alternative tablet to iPad next time.

That need for advertising accountability resulted in magazine publisher Meredith Corp. launching its Engagement Dividend  program, which guarantees that the advertisements in its print magazines will boost the advertiser's sales. The program will compare the buying behavior of a group of panelists who read the magazines with a complementary group that didn't to prove that sales increased as a result of the ads. Kimberly-Clark Corp. said this week that it will be the first “premier advertising partner.”

Meanwhile, Affinity, a marketing and media research company specializing in advertising effectiveness and audience measurement, has been polling reader response to print and digital ads and comparing the effectiveness of tablet advertising vs. print.

"We've measured close to 4,000 digital ads, so we're at the point where we're beginning to develop a normative database: what is the average recall score or action score. We can put them side by side with our print numbers," said Tom Robinson, managing director at Affinity.

The company concluded that compared head to head, the net action scores, which measure effectiveness in terms of response to the ad, are much higher in iPad magazines than in the printed versions.

Tablet ads outpacing traditional print versions

"The ads that appear in iPads and digital tablets seem to be outpacing and outperforming the traditional printed versions of the ads," said Robinson. "The recall is higher but the action scores--to make a purchase, go to a link, click to download an app--are much higher due to the interactivity of the tablet environment," he said. "Digital obviously offers more opportunities to respond with the interactivity, the links built in, the videos, and that is directly reflected in the fact that we're getting higher reader ad effectiveness scores on the digital side," Robinson said.

Affinity also tracks the performance of different types of ads. "It always comes back to the creative," Robinson said. "Ads with 360-degree views (where the reader rotates the tablet to get different views of a car, for example) seem to be pacing at a higher rate of recall for all digital ads, which is also outpacing all print ads. Videos and photo galleries also do well on the action questions we ask," he said.

"The question is, is this a honeymoon effect or is this a trend over time. As tablets become mainstream, will those recall and action scores continue to skew higher?" he said.

Tablets are still far from mainstream, but their influence is growing quickly. Affinity's Fall American Magazine Study reported that the number of Americans accessing magazine-branded content and advertising through smartphones, ereaders, tablets and other mobile devices was up 6.2% from the spring report, to 35 million consumers. Robinson said tablets account for most of that growth.

 

 IPads, and tablet devices in general, continue to look like a big opportunity for newspapers and magazines. From Marketing Charts. Full story here

 

Bigger Screens Promote Print, Video
Resulting from what Nielsen analysis identifies as the iPad’s larger screen, iPad users show substantially higher download rates for print and video content than iPhone users.

Most notably, 39% of iPad users regularly access book content, more than three times the 13% of iPhone users who do so. In addition, 33% iPad users regularly access TV shows, three times the 11% of iPhone users who do so. And the 32% of iPad users who regularly access movies is virtually three times the 12% of iPhone users who regularly access movies.

A smaller percentage of iPad users regularly access magazines (25%), but this figure is still three times the 8% of iPhone users reading magazines on their devices.

The two groups display virtually identical rates of regularly accessing mobile radio (21% of iPad users and 22% of iPhone users). iPhone users are more likely to regularly access news (53% to 44%) and music (51% to 41%). In all of these cases, screen size is less important or irrelevant to the content experience.

6 in 10 iPad Users Pay for Apps
Application providers who do not offer paid iPad apps may want to start. Six in 10 (63%) iPad users have paid to download an app. In addition, only 5% say they only download free apps, suggesting a high willingness in this group to pay for applications.

Again likely reflecting the iPad’s larger screen size, the two most popular paid iPad apps are games (62% of paid iPad app downloaders have downloaded a game app) and books (54%). Other popular paid iPad apps include music (50%), and shopping and news/headlines (45% each).

Nielsen also notes that 4% of US households currently own tablet computers (a category including, but not limited to, the iPad).

iPad Users Skew Younger, Male
iPad owners skew younger and more male than owners of many other portable computing devices, according to other recent Nielsen data. Sixty-five percent of them are male and 63% of them are younger than the age of 35.

In terms of likelihood to be male, the only device researched by Nielsen that even approaches the iPad is the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP), with 62% male ownership. In terms of age, iPad owners skew slightly older than iPod Touch owners (66% younger than 35) and PSP owners (68% younger than 35).

About the Data: The Nielsen Company recently surveyed more than 5,000 consumers who already own a tablet computer, eReader, netbook, media/games player, or smartphone.

 

From MIN. Full story here

PopSci Breaks Onto Android Tablet
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Steve Smith

While the iPad gets all of the press love lately, Samsung has had success with its rival 7-inch Android Galaxy Tab. The new tablet ably runs all of the existing smartphone apps in the Android Marketplace, so the device came to market with over 100,000 programs supporting it. Nevertheless,  there are very few apps designed specifically for the format, which is twice the size of most Android phones but half the size of the iPad. Bonnier Corp. is the first major magazine company we have seen venture into the Android tablet field with its newly launched special issue, Popular Science+ Top Tech 2010. Designed specifically for the 7-inch screen, Bonnier's new app reorients the Mag+ engine it used on iPad magazine and special issue apps for the smaller sca.

The special issue includes 100 innovative products from the year in 11 easily-browsed categories. Winning items get full-screen animations that show off the tech innovation. Bonnier says that it employed the Android’s pop-up menu function to house the table of contents. The Android app uses the same display conventions as the iPad version of Mag+ titles: tapping the screen removes the text to allow the background image to show unimpeded and full screen. According to Bonnier deputy director of R&D Mike Haney, the app for Galaxy Tab was an opportunity for the publisher to test new layouts on the 7-inch screen.

A number of Android, Windows 7 and Blackberry-powered tablets will be coming to market in the next few months in this smaller format. Says Haney: “Although the smaller space requires more simplified layouts, we found that the horizontal orientation of the widescreen display gave us the best canvas for easy-to-read, flowing text and big, beautiful images without the screen ever feeling cluttered—preserving that immersive, relaxing magazine experience.”

As magazines try to capitalize on the digital tablet craze, they will be chasing a fragmenting market as multiple operating systems and screen dimensions compete for consumers' market share. A key challenge for publishers will be creating technology platforms and work flows that can support multiple devices at reasonable cost.

The app sells for $1.99.

Apple’s iAd advertising platform hit the iPad today with an ad that perfectly matches up with the pluses and minuses of the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) system. The ad is promoting the Disney’s Tron Legacy, a big budget science fiction flick that has expectations of blockbuster written all over it, but still might disappoint diehard fans. Just like iAds.

As AdAge, which first reported the launch of iAds on the iPad, noted, the graphics are stunning, and it includes all the usual touch navigation and video that have become common on iAds for the iPhone and iPod touch. The ad starts with a full screen takeover of the app—TV Guide’s app was mentioned as one of the apps that will run the Tron ad. Along with the movie images, there’s also 10 minutes of video, a list of nearby showtimes and the ability to preview and purchase songs from the soundtrack via iTunes, all within the app itself. Users can share the details with friends via e-mail, a first for iAds, though it doesn’t appear to have any other sharing functions.

That kind of limit is small—how many people tend to share an ad anyway?—but in this case, it could make a small difference. It also highlights the closed nature of the iAds system, which could hinder Apple’s otherwise competitive advantages against the more open Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android system.

For one thing, Apple iAds is set up to be exclusive. Marketers have pay at least $1 million to be allowed into Apple’s iAd system in the first place. Secondly, they have to cede a good deal of creative control to Apple. In that sense, iAds is perfect for something like Tron, as opposed to a packaged goods product. iAds is meant to be an event, something special, at least for now.

Overtime, as these kinds of in-app ads become as plain vanilla as any TV commercial, Apple will probably have to lower the bar for entry. And it will probably loosen its grip a bit on creative control. If it doesn’t, that will mean that Apple has decided that it only views iAds as a supplement to its business of selling iPhones and iPads—much like it’s iTunes music store was primarily viewed as a way to drive sales of iPods, not become the next Sam Goody.

As it stands now, Google has quickly pulled ahead of Apple when it comes to the share of the mobile ad market. Google previously said that it should end the year with $1 billion in mobile ad dollars. According to IDC, Google accounts for 59 percent of all mobile ad revenue in the U.S., Apple, although it’s number two, is distantly far behind with just an 8.4 percent share of the market, worth $877 million overall (the difference due to the fact that people actually user their mobile web browser to search—it’s not an all-app world by any means).

So both the Tron and iAds probably deserve the fanfare for their respective debut sequels. It’s not clear if Tron will get a third try for the box office after this one, but Apple is already planning for its third and fourth big openings of iAds, in Europe and Japan. After successive sequels, movie franchises tend to get a major reboot. By this time next year, depending on whether or not this current iAds program is a hit with advertisers, we could be seeing a very different iAds product, one that’s more like Google’s Android system.

 

From MIN:

Flipboard Offering Publishers Magazine-Like iPad Feed Experience
Monday, December 6, 2010
Steve Smith

How ironic that a start-up that aggregates and formats simple social media and RSS feeds onto the iPad is helping magazines look more magazine-like on the tablet platform. But the buzz-fueled aggregation app Flipboard is doing exactly that with inaugural partners Bon Appétit, Washington Post Magazine and Lonely Planet. In an effort to ‘iPadify’ shared content from major media partners, Flipboard is creating a more sophisticated layout framework for articles that are fed into its app. Flipboard offers a unique system that it calls a ‘social magazine,’ which turns RSS, Twitter and Facebook feeds into neatly laid out illustrated pages that literally flip to advance and pop-up fuller article excerpts in a window with accompanying image. The new partnership wit media companies takes that elegance to the next level. When a user double taps on an article from a partner like Bon Appétit or ABC News, the reader gets a multi-page rendition of the article in a magazine-like layout, including full page ads.

“We believe the timeless principles of print can enhance the social media experience, not only to make content more discoverable but also to make it easier to read,” says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. Flipboard had been rumored to be in conversations with media companies about ways to help them monetize the feeds that Flipboard uses to populate its product. Flipboard is working with ad agency OMD to test the full page ads that occupy these enhanced articles. Initial sponsors include Pepsi, Gatorade, Infiniti, Showtime and Levi’s.

In our use of the featured Flipboard pages, the system did produce very readable and engaging page designs. The excerpts click through to a richer environment that is closer to the typical magazine app than it is to a Web site, to which Flipbook pages often link. The full-page ads generally have been well-tuned to the touch and feel strengths of the platform. Best of all, Flipboard does all of this while retaining its signature snappiness. The app has always done a very good job of caching the most likely next pages a user will tap and so creating a more seamless flipping experience.

Overall, Flipboard appears to be making good on its earlier promise to give something back to the media partners on whose content its app relies. This is an interesting new way to syndicate content into a touch-based tablet ecosystem that lets publishers keep a handle on the ways in which their content is presented, and keep their fingers in the revenue stream it might produce.