Most marketing managers view the breathless excitement when some publishers talk about digital magazines with cynicism: “They just want to cut their cost of distribution,” is a common response. I’m more enthusiastic – of course publishers are being driven towards digital publication, but if digital publication is the only way to save the magazine format then I’m very grateful to the new format.

Recently I saw an article on the Folio website about a new survey called "The Case of Advertising in Interactive Digital Magazines," by Josh Gordon, founder of Smarter Media Sales. The research, which had a respectable sample of more than 5000 respondents suggests that digital magazines may be a better vehicle for advertising than websites. Some of the key findings include:

• 70% were less likely to ignore display ads in digital editions than on Web sites
• 71% said ads on digital editions were “less intrusive” than Web sites
• 79% said ads in digital editions were “more credible” than on Web sites
• 82% believed that digital magazines were "more engaging" than Web sites with similar content
• 71% said that digital titles were “more trustworthy” than websites
• 85% said digital magazines were more easy to read than websites

Although I don’t see any publishers throwing away their website to concentrate on digital magazines. Although digital magazines typically hold the readers attention for 3 to 4 x the average time spent on a single website, in most markets websites generate more impressions. It will also be interesting to see if the results are due to a honeymoon effect, with readers excited about the new format. Despite these reservations, I believe that the results are a real endorsement of digital magazines and hope that it encourages publishes to sell digital titles with confidence.

Tags: Digital Magazines, Misc Marketing, Research

Congratulations to Outram Research, whose PM7000 power analyser was ‘Highly Commended’ in the Electrical Industry Awards Test & Measurement category. Outram is a fairly new client for Napier, and we’re delighted that they have done so well in such a prestigious award. Many congratulations from all of us at Napier to Outram on their well-deserved success!

Tags: Awards, Clients, ESE, News About Napier, Research, UK

Future Horizons has announced that their Industry Forecast Seminar for 2010 will be held at two different locations: London on 26th January 2010 and Geneva, Switzerland on 27th January 2010.

Tags: Future Horizons, Research, Shows and Events, Switzerland

Inware is promoting a new way to create an immediate electronic link between readers of print titles and advertisers. The publisher is encouraging advertisers to include an electronic tag that can be snapped by a camera on a smart phone and used to jump immediately to relevant online content.

This is a great move, and with the increasing use of internet enabled phones from blackberries to iPhones, is likely to be something that will grow and grow. Our research has shown that when reading magazines engineers are often not close to a PC, and don’t like to type in long URLs into their phones to get information. This approach bridges the gap, and unlike other Microsoft technologies is available for smart phones running a wide range of different OSs.

I’d bet on adoption of this technology growing pretty quickly across all markets, although in industries such as ours, where the delivery of detailed technical information is important, the technology looks particularly applicable. Kudos to Inware for being an early adopter!

Tags: Digital Magazines and Print Publications, EiN, ESE, Inware, Italy, Misc Marketing, Online, Research

Future Horizons, organiser of the International Electronics Forum (IEF) has announced that the 2010 event will be held from 5th to 7th May 2010 in Dresden, Germany. With so much changing happening in the industry, and hopefully some solid signs of recovery, the 2010 event should be a great success.

Tags: DATE, Electronics, Future Horizons, Germany, Research, Shows and Events

Semi has announced the programme for ISS 2010. The theme of the event will be “Building on Sustainability”.

Tags: Analysts, Research, Shows and Events

We recently conducted a survey in collaboration with the University of Chichester to understand the impact of social media on engineers. The report abstract states:

This joint project between Napier and the University of Chichester aims to understand whether engineers make use of social media, and if so whether social media provides an effective marketing channel to electronics design engineers in Europe. The research reveals that whilst engineers are making use of online tools to communicate and collaborate – particularly forums and LinkedIn – there appears to be a significant resistance to social media and viral marketing amongst a large section of the engineering audience.

I’m really excited to have completed this project, which shows that although there is some reluctance amongst engineers to adopt social media, the technology is being used to source information about companies and products as well as to collaborate with colleagues. The summary report is available online as a downloadable PDF. A full set of results is also available in Excel format, and are available on request – simply send me an email.

Tags: Misc Marketing, News About Napier, Research

Congratulations to Mr. Anthony T. Jones of EMTEQ – Europe, who was the lucky winner of the iPod Touch in the draw for people who completed our social media survey. The results are very interesting – please contact me for a copy of the report.

Tags: News About Napier, Research

Hot on the heels of the launch of electronicsBOM.com, MMG has announced that Electronics Sourcing North America will be launched in April 2010. The title will launch with a circulation of over 40,000 electronics purchasing professionals, a new list that the publishers say has been 100% telephone researched from orginal SIC codes.

The launch pad for ESNA will be at the “Electronics Distribution Show” in Las Vegas and the circulation, editorial and design will take the same approach as Electronics Sourcing UK & Electronics Sourcing Europe.

It’s great to see the MMG continue to show confidence in our industry, and have the courage to continue to launch new products despite the economic situation. I hope that their confidence proves well-founded and that they show the US that magazine publishing is really not dead!

Tags: Electronics, Electronics Sourcing, ESE, Europe, MMG, Research, UK

I started work on a project to look at the use of social media by engineers some months ago, which has produced some interesting results. We’re sponsoring research that is being conducted by Chichester University and although the fuill analysis won’t be available until the end of July, I wanted to share some of the initial results with you.

To date we have received almost 300 responses to the survey, providing a sample size that is more than sufficient to draw clear conclusions. Some of the provisional results are:
61% believed social media was a useful business tool, although 28% were blocked from using these tools at work
30% currently use social media for work, 44% for personal reasons, but a surprising 46% don’t use social media at all
Only 5% use Twitter more than once a week, whereas 28% are frequent users of Facebook
Linkedin is the clear choice for business use, with 24% using the site more than once a week
The most popular form of social media for business use are forums, with 45% of the respondents using forums for business purposes.

The results will be available in a month’s time, so if you want to make sure your get a copy of the report when it is available, please email me.

Tags: Misc Marketing, News About Napier, Research

A long time ago, when print still ruled the roost and online advertising brought in a pretty small proportion of a publisher’s revenue, Napier started looking at the page counts of magazines. With the current economic downturn and the move to online I thought it would be worth sharing some of the findings of this ongoing research.
We didn’t have time to track the total page count of every magazine, so created our own magazine page stock market – the Napier Page Index (NPI). This index includes 18 electronics magazines published across Europe, and we simply track the page count per issue of those magazines, with the page count of January 2001 providing an index base of 100. This was set when times were still pretty good: the last recession didn’t really hit page counts until January 2002. If a magazine closes, we replace it with the nearest equivalent.
Given the general feeling of gloom perhaps surprisingly the page count index is still at 53 – only 47% down on 2001 and only 22% down on March 2004. Of course there have been some closures and some titles have cut frequency, but I think this is a surprisingly good result. Having said that half the pages means [roughly] half the print revenue: with the increase in printing and postage costs, this is a very significant fall in income.
Perhaps surprisingly design books have performed the worst, now delivering less than half the number of pages they were eight years ago. News-orientated titles don’t do much better, and some of these have cut frequency significantly. The most surprising result was that product books are delivering more pages per issue than 2001: I can only think that this is influenced by a smaller sample size and the fact that they face little competition from other product books.
Not surprisingly the pan-European titles have suffered the least damage, presumably as smaller budgets drive advertisers to pull out of local-language titles. Germany has seen the biggest fall in page counts, dropping a scary 61%, and no longer has the highest average page count – an accolade that now goes to Italy. This has to be due to the overcrowded market: there are more titles in Germany than any other country.
Overall, however, I was surprised that the page counts of magazines hasn’t collapsed further – most people seem to believe that page counts are one third or one quarter of what they were in 2001. Despite the advent of the Internet, page counts are only 25 to 30% down on 2002 – the last downturn in the electronics market.
Clearly in the long term magazines must do something different to survive. We’ve seen EE Times use digital distribution for a significant proportion of the circulation and other magazines – such as Electronics appear to be doing the same. If digital versions can woo back advertisers who made cuts in the recession then magazines have a future, although I’m sure that this will require more accountability, tracking and measurable ROI: all things that digital magazines have the potential to provide.
For more information on the research, send me an email.

Tags: Misc Marketing, Research

I recently emailed a number of publishers asking for information on open rates for their digital versions. Typically this information is kept pretty quiet, with the notable exception of TechInsights, who publish their data monthly – well done guys! With open rates much more accurately measurable than for print titles, I’m guessing some publishers are worried that the number of unopened copies will be viewed as “bad”.

So I asked several publishers about unique open rates, and got responses from ED Europe, EPN, EPN France, and all of TechInsight’s European publications. I didn’t get a response from some titles, with ICC Media and Reed UK (Electronics Weekly) the two big publishers that offered no stats. To be fair I only sent one email, so don’t read too much into their lack of response.

The results were very interesting:

• four titles had open rates of 11-12%
• one title had an open rate of 16%
• one title had an open rate of 19%

I tried to find some cause of the difference in open rate, but there was no link between circulation, publication frequency or publisher and the open rate.

So what does this mean? Certainly it suggests that digital magazines are less likely to be opened than their paper sisters (if you believe the readership surveys). I’m not surprised that today print is still the favoured medium. But with the huge cost advantage of digital, I think the figures are pretty respectable. They’ll also be slighly under-reported as pass-on readership will not register as another unique reader.

There are other more important questions: what is the quality of the reader (who is opening them), how is the circulation managed (requested or unrequested circulation) and would these readers read print magazines or is digital the only way to reach them? Frankly there is a big question over whether publishers should be doing more to promote readership of each copy than just sending a single email. In fact digital titles have many uses – Marcus Grimm of NXTBook sent me a great link to a story about how the BBC used digital to drive an increase in print readers.

Digital magazines will also change the behaviour of readers, forcing a more linear approach than print (do you remember the Adams survey some years ago that said the cheap back third of a magazine was almost as well read as the expensive front third?). How many pages do readers view of the digital editions? Is this different from print titles?

Personally I believe that digital magazines are going to be really important in the future. Opening and browsing a digital magazine is a much bigger commitment on the part of the reader than visiting a web page. Digital magazines also deliver news in a push format, highlighting new products and technologies to readers who would be unlikely to learn about them through search engines.

What does the emergence of digital titles mean? Please feel free to post comments and let me know your opinions.

Footnote: please do not imagine this was – in any way – a scientific study. Typically I got just one issue’s stats and I had to completely trust the publishers’ figures.

Tags: Online, Research