IN-DEPTH CASE STUDIES
TIM EWINGTON, CO-FOUNDER & STRATEGY DIRECTOR AT SHORTLIST MEDIA
“When you think about a modern
audience you need to think about what state they’re in,” he says. “You need to think about what’s going to get to them quickly, but you need to be clever and amuse them too.”
THE POWER OF (M)EMAIL Given the responsive and interactive nature of ShortList’s relationship with its community, you’d be forgiven for assuming that social media would be the focus. So why the decision to launch the dailies on email? “Email is simply where our target
audience spends more time,” says Ewington. “It sits at the centre of our readers’ lives. Yes, you can do lots of wonderful things with social media, but it tends to be very short form. We had this idea about coffee breaks in people’s day. Particularly readers of Stylist. We wanted to create that moment when you sit down with a coffee or a sandwich and have a moment to yourself. We wanted our communications to go directly into our audience’s lives. Social media is a pull medium. It’s something people choose to engage with. We wanted to do it the other way and push into people’s lives. Email is the best way of doing that. At 11 or 11.30 every morning Emerald Street will arrive in your inbox. Social
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: BUILD DEEPER RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR AUDIENCE
‘Old’ digital channels like email still work very well. Behaviour patterns in these channels are well established. Study your subscribers in detail. Find out what they like and give them more of it.
React to people’s passions, but not just digitally. Think about live events. Keep evolving. People get bored quickly.
media can go so far but it can’t recreate the daily habit you used to get with print newspapers or magazines. We wanted to interact in people’s lives and learn about them on a daily basis.” The inbox, then, is a less competitive,
more intimate environment than social media.
“Email is bigger than Facebook,” says Ewington. “Obviously our audience is on Facebook and Twitter as well. But they’re spending several hours a day looking at emails. It fi ts into their working life much more easily. Let’s be honest, it’s easier to open Emerald Street in the middle of the day without being noticed by the boss than it is to get Facebook up or to go through Twitter. Working life is hard so if you can provide people with fi ve minutes in which they can have some light relief, they’ll really enjoy that.”
LISTEN FOR LOYALTY The key, says Ewington, is to make content easy to engage with and to forge a habit. “After that it’s about
James to Granta’s Best Young Novelists. In fact, says, Ewington, this was something the editorial team stumbled across accidentally. “We saw that people were really
looking at book-related content for a long time and that it got very high open and click-through rates. We learn fast and we react: we do more of what works. Remember, we make money through advertising, and the book trade has followed us because when readers click on Emerald Street, they’re likely to go on and buy.” Data, of course, has a vital
TAP INTO THINGS
PEOPLE ARE REALLY
CUL TURE AND
FILM STYLE
P L ACES TO E A T ME A T FROM
Tweet us at @Mr_Hyde: Best steak experience is definitely the 35oz Porterhouse from the Hoxton Grill (via @njinewman) TECH
A SELECTION OF THE FINEST OVER-EAR HEADPHONES
Comfortable, stylish, good sound – not all over-ear headphones boast these qualities. So we made it our mission to discover which do. The research involved numerous models, a darkened room and 50 Cent’s In Da Club on endless loop. Just like every day. Here’s what we found…
BEST DESIGN It’s almost cheating, but when Parrot enlisted designer Philippe Starck to create its new headphones, enviable looks were guaranteed. That they have active noise cancellation, on-board controls and Bluetooth, reveals the true genius – fitting in that functionality, but still getting them to look like this. Parrot Zik by Starck, £349.99
BEST SOUND A conversation to illustrate the sound quality of most headphones: “These sound great!” “Turn the volume up.” “Oh.” But Sennheiser’s latest do a fine job – we couldn’t hear any distortion as we cranked the sound higher and, refreshingly, the bass sounds don’t overpower the mix. Sennheiser Momentum, £259.99
BEST BUDGET MODEL Skullcandy poached Bose’s top sound engineer, Dr Tetsuro Oishi, to revolutionise its products’ sound quality. The Hesh 2 headphones are the result. Much better sound quality than the original Hesh-branded pairs – but the clincher is that the cartoon skull logo on both sides is far subtler.
generating loyalty. People can unsubscribe anytime. It’s a constant battle because you have to make it interesting all the time. You may not be able to manage that for every person every day, but if three days go by and people haven’t found anything interesting to them, they’re likely to unsubscribe. You have to react. Otherwise you’re just letting them down. We constantly listen to what people are saying – every email, text, Tweet, post - and we react to those very quickly.” Stylist in particular is notable
INCREDIBLY RAPID AND POWERFUL RESPONSE”
INTERESTED IN - YOU’LL GET AN
role to play in this equation and ShortList have studied their audience in precise detail. Even simple address information can tell you something about consumers’ habits. But underpinning both Emerald Street and Mr Hyde, says Ewington, is a very simple idea: to provide users with permission to spend fi ve minutes of the working day doing something they actually enjoy. “Our audiences are young,
professional, busy people. A lot of marketers who want to keep people engaged on a daily basis use email and social media, but my perception of a lot of the marketing material I get is that it tends to be quite
boring. What’s interesting when you do things on a daily basis with email is how much you learn about people and how quirky they really are. If you do things that are intelligent but a little offbeat, if you get under your audience’s skin and tap into things they’re really interested in, you’ll get an incredibly rapid and powerful response.”
shortlistmedia.com
for the depth of coverage it gives to books and writers, from Tolstoy to Fifty Shades of Grey author E L
53 MR HYDE REQUESTS issue 21 july 2014 KNOW A GOOD
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