HIGHLIGHTS FROM DAY ONE: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27

Click here to read the full transcript of her remarks.

Chris Johnson, VP, Content and Business Development, Hearst Magazines Digital Media

In his opening address as this year’s Conference Chairman, Chris Johnson of Hearst Digital illustrated not only the highly digital world we now live in, but also how “branded” this world is.  “This is the moment that magazines must leverage their branded content on the one thruway traveled by 71.1% of North American adults: the Internet,” he declared.

KEYNOTE
Jordan Hoffner, Head of Premium Content Partnerships, YouTube

YouTube’s Jordan Hoffner encouraged magazine publishers to join the revolution that YouTube began three years ago.

“Our platform can help build brands,” said Hoffner, whose first job was a media-planning intern at BBDO. Currently YouTube has hundreds of millions of visits daily, he says, and 70% of those are from international visitors. Ten hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

YouTube has a partnership program that some magazine publishers such as Hearst Magazines and Condé Nast are already taking advantage of, and Hoffner hopes more will join in because the site has a very engaged audience that would benefit from the “intriguing, original, informative, trusted” content of magazines.

That engagement manifests itself in users rating videos, writing responses to videos, and emailing videos to friends. “Comments are very important to our users,” he noted. “If you turn that off, it resonates with them.”

According to Hoffner, the keys to being successful in this genre is to know the lingo, understand the community, follow the money, and create not just content but talent. He suggested using correspondents so that users have a face to relate with in the video experience.

“Having good talent behind it is important,” he said, “and you need to put stuff up on a regular basis. That really helps build audience.”

DIGITAL DRIVERS ON THE ROAD AHEAD

Moderator:
John Byrne, Editor-in-Chief, BusinessWeek.com

Panelists:
Sarah Chubb, President, CondéNet
Vivek Shah, President, Fortune|Money Group
Lauren Wiener, SVP, Meredith Interactive Media

Vivek Shah, Lauren Wiener, Sarah Chubb and John Byrne

Session moderator John Byrne of BusinessWeek.com began with the sobering fact that 85% of all wholesale ad revenue spent last year online went to the big four—Yahoo!, AOL, MSN and Google—leaving magazine publishers virtual crumbs to fight over. CondéNet’s Sarah Chubb didn’t quite see it that way, however, saying that her organization had had its best year yet in 2007. “The big four sell something very different than what we sell,” she stated. “We’re focused on what we’re really good at. We look for selling packages to advertisers that trade on the relationship that users have with our sites.”

While she does spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways to broaden the appeal of Condé brands online, her focus remains on selling advertisers on that special relationship magazines have with readers, not in trying to beat out the big four at their own game.

Vivek Shah from Fortune|Money Group at Time Inc. pointed out that the web is actually deportalizing—that visitors are spending much more time elsewhere than on large portal sites. “The advertising side hasn’t fully shifted there yet,” he said. “We need to do a better job at selling that. We need to focus on engagement and time spent.” He also noted that Yahoo! doesn’t have a magazine and that publishers have far more touchpoints to reach a consumer than a web portal does.

Meredith’s Lauren Wiener agreed. “What we’re trying to do is show that we have engagement at scale with a targeted audience,” she said. “We know our consumers better than anyone else.”

The panel agreed that reader engagement, home-page entry and time spent are some of the most important metrics today.

WWW (WHAT WORKED WELL)

Rob Covey, Managing Editor/Creative Director, National Geographic Magazine Online

Rob Covey shared details on an innovative program that the National Geographic Magazine site has had much success with.

Called “Your Shot,” the effort was launched a few years ago to get readers to send in photos that might appear in the publication. It has since turned into a juggernaut thanks to forward thinking at the company.

The program now generates 14 million page views per month. Each day, National Geographic picks a dozen of the thousands of photographs it receives each month to run on the site. Visitors can then vote on their favorites.

A popular feature turns the pictures into puzzles that can be emailed to friends. As a result of the popularity of this feature, National Geographic has started “My Shot,” in which readers can keep track of the pictures they submit and make puzzles out of their own photos. Covey predicts that this will be even more popular than the Your Shot pages.

Elyse Thibault, Senior Manager of Marketing & Audience Development, Hearst Magazines Digital Media

Want to drive traffic to your website? Elyse Thibault from Hearst Magazines Digital Media related how Good Housekeeping did just that using a contest that offered $250,000 to pay off a winner’s mortgage. The organization took an integrated approach to the contest and drove readers online to register for the prize.

The objectives were to drive traffic, increase subscriptions and build up the email database. The program featured in-book support and calls to action interwoven in the August 2007 issue as well as prominent promotion on the cover and a mention in the editor’s letter. October’s issue came with a cover wrap reminding subscribers of the contest.

Online, there were various banner ads, mentions in email newsletters, search-marketing efforts and other tactics.

The results? A 35% increase in average monthly unique visitors in the second half of 2007, doubled online subscription revenues in 2007 over the previous year with the largest single source coming from the sweepstakes, and a 34% growth in email addresses.

MUST-SEE MAGAZINE TV

Moderator:
Matt Roush, Senior Television Critic, TV Guide and TVGuide.com

Panelists:
Tammy Haddad, President and Founder, Haddad Media
Bob Huseby, SVP, Publisher, IDG Entertainment
Lesley Pinckney, Director, Digital Development, Essence Communications Inc.
Ann Shoket, Editor-in-Chief, Seventeen

Ann Shoket, Bub Huseby, Leslie Pinckney and Tammy Haddad

Seventeen’s Ann Shoket chronicled her website’s partnership with MySpace to create “Freshman 15,” in which 15 college freshman girls blog, video blog and write for the magazine about their intimate experiences going through their first year of higher education. The idea was initially generated because statistics showed that a high number of teens weren’t making it through their first year of college and Shoket wanted to find a way to help them understand what lay ahead.

“Girls want to hear from each other,” Shoket shared. “They don’t want to hear from a lady in an office tower in Manhattan.” Shoket views this as leveraging the access her readers can give her into such situations, which builds on the trust that girls have with the Seventeen brand. “We’re unifying the magazine and the website and using them to our advantage.”

Meanwhile, IDG Entertainment’s Bob Huseby is going after a very different market: young men. IDG boasts a whole video production staff, creating shows that sometimes parody popular television programs, such as “America’s Next Top Modder,” chronicling a group of young men who compete to design video games.

Essence Communications is very dedicated to providing multiplatform programming for African-American women because the organization doesn’t think any other place is providing fully for that market. As a result, Lesley Pinckney, is very busy producing a number of interactive web television shows for the site. This allows for audience engagement on a daily basis, instead of having them wait for the magazine once a month. She stressed, “You need to use that connection that you have. We see video as one part of our strategy to engage African-American women.”

Tammy Haddad showed off her “Tam Cam”

Moderator:
Adam Sherk, Search/PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies

Panelists:
Chris Cunningham, CEO, Appssavvy
Tariq Krim, Founder and CEO, Netvibes
Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder, reddit

Three web innovators shared their thoughts about the future of the Internet with magazine publishers at this session.

Alexis Ohanian described reddit as a site that allows users to rate what stories are worth keeping around and what stories should be sent to the lower parts of the list. Ohanian stressed that online, “great, fresh content is king.” It’s a world where a story from the Baltimore Sun could be the more important story to read than the one in The New York Times.

Readers are fickle,” he said, which can be a bad thing since users are only one click away from leaving a site. But it can also be a good thing if the site is providing good, fresh content—people won’t leave right away and a connection could be born. “Once it gets online, brand is less important. It’s still important but content is king.”

Ohanian encouraged magazine publishers to build up their online content in order to take advantage of those readers who are fanatics about the publication. They can read the print edition every day for the month and net the publisher nothing, or they can visit the site every day and net the publisher some gain.

He also encouraged publishers to get involved with user-generated content. “They’ll do a lot of work for you and for free,” he said. One example he used was an editor posting a question and readers posting their thoughts alongside other content. “It feeds itself for relatively little work,” he noted. Letting that kind of conversation occur will help build a loyal community.

Paris-based Tariq Krim represented Netvibes, which aggregates content from different sources for overburdened readers. His company creates widgets for content and he highly recommends publishers create these for their sites in order to allow for constant information dissemination. This also allows for users to take your information and personalize it, a continuing trend within the Internet.

Chris Cunningham of Appssavvy, also encouraged publishers to get involved with distributing widgets and applications in which users can find ways to communicate with one another. “The marketplace is massive,” he said. “The days of looking at just the Big Four (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL) are over. The opportunity to extend content is a great idea.” One way to make money from widgets is to get them sponsored, Cunningham said.

 MOBILE KEYNOTE

Gunnar Garfors, Director of Development, NRK

There is a mobile revolution happening in Norway, a country of 4.7 million people. More than two million of them have mobile broadband devices and 82% of 10 year-olds there have mobile phones.

“You find almost everything on mobile,” said Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s Gunnar Garfors. “We have to teach the people how the new services work.”

He demonstrated examples in which competitive cross-country skiers were filming themselves for a national television audience via a mobile phone velcroed to their skis, where a newspaper featured a mobile number on its front page so that readers could watch a news story on their mobiles while it unfolded, and an interactive TV show had text messages running on its screen along side user-submitted photos.

And this isn’t just a phenomenon for the young. People older than 50 make up a good part of the mobile user base.

The keys to making mobile work, he said, are fivefold: Make it easy to use (adapt the content to the platform); understand your users (let them discuss, interact and criticize); provide winning content (news and comedy work best, he says); have understandable, no-surprise business models; and be ready to partner with others if need be.

KEYNOTE

Owen Van Natta, Chief Revenue Officer, Facebook, interviewed by David Kirkpatrick, Senior Editor, Internet & Technology, Fortune

Social networking has been touted in the past year as being one of the most important tools for magazine publishers to watch as Web 2.0 continues to evolve. Facebook’s Owen Van Natta sat down with David Kirkpatrick of Fortune to discuss the issue during this afternoon keynote session.

David Kirkpatrick and Owen Van Natta

Van Natta, who started his career with a job at Ziff Davis, sees the evolution of Facebook as part of a larger movement that has to do with the socialization of the web. “The content that you find on the web, you want to put it in front of those that are closest to you,” he said, pointing out that Facebook is one of the few places that doesn’t allow for anonymity. “Your friends wouldn’t let you be someone you’re not.”

Van Natta also noted that there is significance in knowing that the people on Facebook are the real thing. “Look at what happened on eBay. It’s considered the largest marketplace on the planet and what really made it happen is the reliability of the sellers,” he said.

He said the value of social networking to magazine publishers is in spreading their brand, in finding ways to insert the brand into the cultural conversation on the web, and in finding people who are reading the magazine so that others can see that that person is reading the magazine.

He suggested publishers create widgets so that visitors to Facebook could share information about what each read in a particular magazine. “I think it’s a huge opportunity,” he stated. “Movie studios are taking advantage of it. They’re using it for promotions but also getting people who have a lot of friends to influence their friends.”

THE GAMES THEY PLAY

Moderator:
Robert Nashak, former VP and General Manager, Yahoo! Games

Panelists:
Nicola Bridges, Online Editorial Director, Prevention.com
Nicole Stagg, Director, Web Content Strategy, GoodHousekeeping.com
Jessica Rovello, Chairman, Arkadium

Last year, 88 million people, about half of the people who go online in America annually, played online games. It’s a huge marketplace that is growing in surprising demographics. Women and Americans at retirement age are a large potion of the users of online games.

Prevention.com has had great success with in this area, said Nicola Bridges. “It’s healthy and engaged.It’s not the magic solution, but it’s important.”

Good Housekeeping is also finding great success with games: visitors spend 22 minutes at a time in the games area, about quadruple the amount of time they spend elsewhere on the site, Nicole Stagg revealed. “We don’t have to do much work with these,” she said. “We don’t really promote them. They kind of run themselves; people keep coming back and coming back.”

Good Housekeeping features simple games that the players already know how to play such as mah jong or crossword puzzles. “These are busy women who don’t have time to figure out new rules,” Stagg said.

Selling advertising on the games is not the key expectation for Stagg. “We use the games to extend our brands,” she added. “We digitize things such as Good Housekeeping covers and make them puzzles, and then they send it to their friends.”

Moderator Robert Nashak said that Yahoo! used to run a small Flash game on its site every day. The traffic went up when it started to be sponsored by Crest.

Jessica Rovello from Arkadium, a company that creates games for both Prevention.com and GoodHousekeeping.com, said this is a trend: “Advergaming is up; everybody is adding advergames. They’ll get seven to 17 minutes of playtime. You can’t beat all that time focusing on a brand.”

AD SALES:  ARE YOU STRUCTURED FOR DIGITAL GROWTH?

Moderator:
Mark Dacey, Senior Client Partner, Korn/Ferry International

Panelists:
Philippe Guelton , EVP, Chief Operating Officer, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.
Jacki Kelley, EVP of Media Sales, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

Mark Dacey, Jacki Kelley and Philippe Guelton

A recent visitor to Mark Dacey of Korn/Ferry International told him that digital integration was like sex: “Everybody is talking about it, but nobody is doing it.” Dacey kicked off the discussion by noting that digital integration is the topic that keeps most magazine executives up at night.

Jacki Kelley from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia said that when integrated sales is done well, it is a matter of every person playing their base effectively. “Everybody gains,” she stated. “The agency is totally involved and transparent. Everyone is totally involved.”

Hachette’s Philippe Guelton shared that his company had a recent integrated success. The program will have content and video provided to the client site as well as a presence at retail and mobile.

Kelley noted that when hiring for new staffers, she looks for someone who has a real ability to do critical thinking as well as someone who is already integrated into the digital world, using such things as Second Life and Facebook. “I want them to be curious,” she said. “You need to understand these things intimately.”

MAGAZINES AND SOCIAL MEDIA:  WHAT MAKES SENSE FOR YOUR BRAND

Moderator:
Michael Silberman, General Manager, nymag.com

Panelists:
Cynthia Farrar, Founder and Producer, Purple States TV
Geoff Reiss, CEO, Associated Content

Citizen journalism is a growing area in all forms of media. Michael Silberman from nymag.com moderated a discussion between two online executives who were coming at citizen journalism from two different perspectives.

Cynthia Farrar of Purple States TV runs a project that can be seen on NYTimes.com that takes five random Americans each year and inserts them deeply into the American political process. This year she has five people from all walks of life chronicling their experiences covering the presidential election. Purple States took them into different states to meet a wide variety of characters involved in the political landscape. “Everybody visiting thinks ‘that could be me,’” she said. Visitors can engage with the five reporters as well.

Meanwhile, Geoff Reiss from Associated Content has 1,000 people providing content to his site, with two-thirds of that content paid for upfront. “Consumers are expecting fragmented, granular content with them in mind,” he said.

Associated Content has more than 400,000 pieces of content up on its site that cover a wide variety of topics. Those who submit can either have someone read it before it is posted and tell them whether it’s accepted or not (a third gets tossed), and then receive payment. Or a person can take their chances and just post a story on his or her own and then wait to see what a content manager says later. “Magazine people are big control freaks,” Reiss said. “So it’s a big departure.”

MPA DIGITAL AWARDS

The second annual MPA Digital Awards were presented at this Magazines 24/7 Conference by superstar podcaster Mignon Fogarty, creator and host of “Grammar Girl.” 

WEBSITE OF THE YEAR: News & Social Topics / Business & Finance TIME.com  Catherine Sharick, Executive Producer, Time.com, and Fogarty	WEBSITE OF THE YEAR: Fashion / Beauty Style.com Dirk Standen, Editor-in-Chief, Style.com and Men.Style.com
WEBSITE OF THE YEAR: Service / Lifestyle nymag.com MAGAZINE BLOG OF THE YEAR nymag.com “Daily Intelligencer” Fogarty and Michael Silberman, General Manager, nymag.com	WEBSITE OF THE YEAR: Sports SI.com BEST ONLINE COMMUNITY FanNation.com from SI.com Terry McDonnell, Editor, Sports Illustrated Group, and Fogarty
WEBSITE OF THE YEAR: Entertainment / Celebrity PEOPLE.com Mark Golin, Editor, People.com, and Fogarty	BEST ONLINE VIDEO – STANDALONE Slate V “Justice Scalia Joins 24” Bill Smee, Executive Producer, Slate V, and Fogarty
BEST ONLINE VIDEO – SERIES Newsweek.com “Voices of the Fallen” Mark Walters , Associate Publisher, Newsweek.com, and Fogarty	BEST PODCAST SERIES NewYorker.com Fiction Podcast Blake Eskin, Editor, New Yorker.com, and Fogarty
BEST MOBILE STRATEGY Bicycling “GPS Rides Tool” Steve Madden, VP/Editor-in-Chief, Bicycling, and Fogarty	BEST WEB-ONLY TOOL National Geographic “Your Shot Jigsaw Puzzles” Fogarty and Rob Covey, Managing Editor/Creative Director, National Geographic Magazine Online