Adobe Digital Publishing
Complete solution to create, distribute, and monetize engaging content for tablet devices
Recognizing the impact of emerging touch-enabled tablets, my team sought to empower publishers to move off the flat page, embracing the power of interactive content to engage a wider audience. Partnering with key publishers, we identified opportunities to plug into their existing creative workflows to produce immersive versions of their publications. Ultimately, we redefined both the publisher's publishing and consumer’s reading experiences.
ROLE
Director of User Experience, Head of Product Incubation Lab, Product Strategist
SCOPE
Product Strategy, Product Design Direction, Innovation with Partners, Client Management
AUDIENCE
Consumers, Digital Storytellers, Content Publishers
PROBLEM
As the web was increasingly becoming the destination for new generations of content consumers, traditional magazine publishers were beginning to see their readership and revenues decline. Many had tried posting some (or all) of their content to their websites in hopes that it would attract readers to purchase their print products. This not only reduced their profitability, it also deluted their most valuable asset: their brand identities, as the content on their websites shared little resemblence to their highly designed print editions and associated advertisers that they had curated over decades. But hope seemed to be on the horizon with the likely release of tablet-sized portable devices that would closely mimic the size of a magazine, provide interactive capabilities to bring content to life, and an app store for monetizing their content with an integrated payment service.
STRATEGY / COLLABORATION
As was my approach to innovating with my product incubation lab at Adobe, I formed a close partnership with an industry leader (WIRED) and together we set out to define the future of magazines. We also selected two additional launch partners (New Yorker and Martha Stewart Living) to ensure that the solution we were creating would cover a broad spectrum of content publishers and readers. Over the course of nine months, we embedded ourselves with these publishers — attending their weekly editorial meetings, joining their teams on photo shoots, discussing how this new digital medium could enable new storytelling capabilities. My team worked on defining how consumers would purchase, navigate, and consume digital magazine content, and we prototyped all of these interactions on tablet laptops before the announcement of the iPad and Android tablets.
SOLUTION
I had the opportunity to debut our vision for digital magazines in a TED Talk in February 2010. Soon afterwards, with the official announcement of the iPad, WIRED became one of the first digital magazine apps available on the newly released iPad (and featured by Steve Jobs at Apple's WWDC conference). Adobe dominated the digital magazine market with the solution that we built out of these early engagements growing to $50+ million in ARR, making it one of the company's rare organic growth success stories.
Partners:
WIRED, New Yorker, Martha Stewart Living
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