2008 Best of Web Winner Profiles
Tuesday, May 6, 2008

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Winner

TV Guide Online

Few major media brands have galvanized their readership into an interactive community as effectively as TVGuide.com. By weaving the blogs and commentary of their staff editors and columnists with tens of thousands of personal reader blogs, the site creates a village of active critics and enthusiasts. From news to DVD releases, actors to cult TV shows, every niche of the entertainment universe seems to have a haven here for intense, informed debate that blurs the traditional line between expert and amateur.

Online community by its nature challenges traditional distinctions between professional editorial and audience expertise, and the TV Guide brand has embraced this new world. Marquee franchises of critical pronouncements like “Cheers and Jeers” have become real-time interactive conversations with readers online where readers post over 125 comments a day. The brand has not ceded its editorial voice or role so much as woven it into the skein of digital community. Editors’ blogs like the Ausiello Report and Rousch Dispatch seed and inspire the community with commentary. Within hours of a TV episode airing, editors have posted thorough synopses on show pages where readers respond to the latest twists and turns. TVGuide.com is not only hosting a community but actively cultivating a culture of criticism.

Fast Facts

• In its first month online, TVGuide.com’s Strike News Blog generated 200,000 page views.

• TVGuide.com has 29,000 user-generated blogs.

• The TVGuide.com community has over 120,000 members.

Winner

Penton Media, Inc. for Reel-Exchange.com

With Reel-Exchange, Penton Media has built from the basic conventions of online community a genuine professional cooperative that advances careers. More than an exchange of ideas, Reel-Exchange is a marketplace of talents where movie and video content creators can post their demo reels, find project collaborators, get inspired or just land a gig. The resource came on the scene last year after a six-month development period that shows in the polish and professionalism of the final product. Unlike other social networking sites, Reel-Exchange had special technical hurdles, like finding ways for members to upload and view video, which comes to the service in a range of formats.

Reel-Exchange’s 2,000 members in 60 countries can build a profile and upload up to four demo reels – effectively building an interactive video resume. Site visitors can survey the professional field via hotlinks and gather in one place all available professionals with expertise in specific software or skill sets. Reel-Exchange takes community and career sites to the next level by letting professionals exchange assets and “Request a Reel” from any other member and seal the deal for creative partnerships. Before Reel-Exchange’s arrival on the scene in April 2007, video professionals relied on self-made YouTube pages or CraigsList posts to find one another. Reel-Exchange demonstrates how a powerful trade brand like Penton can elevate, not just mimic, an emerging Web platform-like community.

Honorable Mentions

BusinessWeek for B-School Channel/Phil Mintz and team:

In 2007, BusinessWeek’s celebrated business school community enjoyed a redesign that now attracts 475,000 monthly uniques. Videos with school deans and an MBA Toolkit help prospective students evaluate their options more effectively and efficiently.

With the introduction of “My Epi” in 2007, Epicurious turned a destination for recipes into a Facebook-like collective of cooks who marry their tastes and talents more effectively to their personalities.

Among the most ambitious social media launches of 2007, Flip.com puts the rich publishing and design tools of a magazine publisher in the hands of teen girls. It shows a generation of digerati that self-expression can go far beyond a social network profile page. 

Sales Producer of the Year

Christine deMaio » CondéNet

Whether it is bringing a Web ad virgin like Newman’s Own online for the first time, helping Häagen-Dazs create a user-generated flavor or advertise Starbucks by not seeming to advertise Starbucks, Christine deMaio, VP, publisher, Epicurious and Concierge has made CondéNet one of the Web entryways for premium brands. Leveraging the unique prestige of Epicurious content and audience, she brought the elusive Newman’s brand onto the Web and now has been instrumental in shaping that brand’s own online site. The food site also became the exclusive online partner for Häagen-Dazs, where a contest for developing a new flavor culminated in finalists telling their stories in Epicurious videos. Under her leadership, site revenues rose 53% in 2007, with 190 new advertisers and average deal size increasing 32%. But beyond the bottom line, deMaio has been integral to CondéNet’s enduring reputation as a unique set of online properties that help create great marketing ideas, not just sell space.  After four years of working with deMaio, Sub-Zero/Wolf consumer marketing manager Christopher Parr calls her a “visionary that also thinks of her client’s best interest…able to juggle customer service, innovation and ROI…a rare find.”

Advertiser Program

Winner

ShopVogue.TV

Beyond its legendary editorial, Vogue readers expect from the fashion brand each month some of the most innovative and interesting ad creative in the world. The ShopVogue TV experience satisfies that expectation online with a video channel of marketing messages that inform and entertain. The site launched in August 2007 with an ambitious schedule of four channels that included over four hours of video: 60 Seconds to Chic, Behind the Lens, Trend Watch and The Collections. The production values and creative ambitions for the branded original content was appropriate to the Vogue style, with custom shoots in the major fashion capitals of the world in hi-def formats. Sponsors had entire fashion collections integrated into some of the most lush online video ever produced, an experience that extended to an advertising gallery of products advertised in Vogue. The magazine created a perfect storm of promotion to bring readers in: 125 million impressions delivered in print, online, outdoor and even on a Manhattan bus fleet. Over 275 advertisers participated in the project. The project engaged the fashion blog universe with an exclusive preview that drove grassroots publicity. The end-result was among the most sophisticated marriages we have seen of an editorial brand and marketing creativity to elevate the online shopping experience into a fun day at the most chic shops in the world. ShopVogue TV makes every visitor feel like an exclusive customer enjoying a private fashion showing. 

Fast Facts

• ShopVogue video episodes were shot over the course of three months in New York, Milan, Tuscany, Los Angeles, Dallas, Las Vegas, Chicago, Pebble Beach and Boston.

• The site attracted over 400,000 unique visitors for over 35,000 hours of viewing. Another 50,000 views streamed through YouTube.

• Average session time per visitor was 5:20, higher than most of the top 100 most trafficked sites.

Honorable Mentions

J.D. Byrider Open House Sponsorship: Automotive News gave readers real value, and gave advertiser J.D. Byrider an enormous halo by offering open house access to the subscription content for three weeks last year, all in the sponsor’s name.

Nike Team Challenge/Trip of a Lifetime: Flip and Nike brought participatory media to a new, sophisticated plane by encouraging young ladies to create Flipbooks that illustrated how their own team spirit aligned with the Nike brand values. More than user-generated advertising, it was sponsored self-expression.

24 Hours With the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet: By crafting three ideal Nokia N800 users and then creating a microsite around their fictional day with the device, PC Magazine anchored a highly integrated promotion that helped consumers imagine the product working in their everyday lives.

Fix the Fray, Sponsored by Cisco: It is hard to envision a more perfect alignment of a brand’s core marketing message (Cisco’s “The Human Network”) and an editorial project, Slate’s user-directed overhaul of its own online community of readers. The “human network” was both advertised and demonstrated.

American Express/Starwood: The Knot married sponsors AMEX and Starwood with a bride’s most pressing need: to track the countless details of a wedding planner. Anchored in a custom-sponsored sticky note tool for these anxious ladies, the program got them to the church on time.

Blogs

Winner

Foreign Policy for Passport

Foreign Policy’s editors have evolved the blog format into a whole new level of online publishing. A bimonthly print publication becomes a real-time go-to destination for any serious news hound, policy wonk or concerned world citizen. The Morning Brief, available daily by 9 am, is a staple for many readers in the media and government, as it runs down the major stories on the day’s docket. Tuesday is map day (yes, map day) when editors find a curious graphic or cartographic curiosity that unearths a trend. Friday is picture day, where several thousand readers gather each week to see the staff pick the most interesting image from somewhere around the world. And on all the days in all the hours in between, FP brings the weight of its expertise and connection into a format that elsewhere is known for drive-by opinion. For instance, a spokesperson for Benazir Bhutto sends a message rebutting a critical news story; foreign service officers, regular Passport readers, weighed in on the proposal to draft diplomats to Iraq. 

By pulling together a thoughtful encounter with breaking news, using the context and expertise of its editors, Passport feels like an executive briefing. Here we have a magazine brand not only transforming a new digital platform but also using that platform to transform its own brand. 

Fast Facts

• In 2007, average monthly visits to Passport have grown 83%.

• In the past six months, Passport has received over 8,000 “blog reactions” (Technorati) from over 1,200 blogs.

• A recent Tuesday Map of the Week charted tooth decay and missing teeth in the EU, demonstrating that, counter to Austin Powers mythology, Brits have among the healthiest teeth in the Union and even surpass American choppers.

honorable mentions

Bravo TV Blogs: Whether it is the “Housewives of Orange County”, Tim Gunn riffing on the models of “Project Runway” or Top Chefs dishing and dissing one another, Bravo has used blogs as a way to keep media brands alive between seasons.

More than links and a mention, EW’s witty PopWatch actually makes us think harder about the movie trailers, ads and new TV episodes that otherwise whiz past us each day.

The wonderfully democratic mosh pit of high/low/middle cultural events pours out 20 daily posts that surround every novel, every TV season ender, every graphic novel with the same irreverent scrutiny and love.

High tech goes green with a vengeance, as editors hold tech companies’ feet to the fire about their products’ real impact on the environment and whether they are making good on their eco-promises.

Launched two days after the Writer’s Guild Strike started, “Scribe Vibe” Variety used the credibility of its brand to become a resource for media, industry and consumers about an event that touched and changed our media habits.

Design

Winner

Condé Nast Publications

for Portfolio.com

n April 2007, Portfolio magazine helped refresh the business information space with a new lush look and feel in print, and that design sense is just as evident at Portfolio.com. The deft layout balances white space, text and multimedia so that a newcomer quickly becomes oriented and understands the resources at hand. The three-column structures move the eye left to right naturally from breaking news to columnist and blogger reflections and into deeper engagement with video and long-form magazine assets. At every point, the clean lines demarcate content categories from one another with the precision and clarity of a CEO’s desk, kept Spartan and neat by a dedicated, persnickety assistant.

The underlying technology at Portfolio.com is effective in surrounding a main story with related materials so the reader can move directly into deeper background. Interactive features like “How to Cook the Books” let users literally mouse over a suspicious ledger to see how the big boys cheat on balance sheets. Creative features like “Watch Out Below” put a little fun into business journalism by animating falling losers and letting the winners’ bubbles float. The site has also given sponsors a polite but highly visible platform for presenting their brands in a range of rich media formats that work with, not against, the editorial design. In all, Portfolio has used the full palette interactivity offers to expand, not just extend, a magazine’s visual impact online. 

Fast Facts

• Portfolio won the 2007 Web Marketing Association’s Web Award.

• In addition to its own homegrown online video clips, Portfolio.com aggregates business video from Associated Press, Fifty Lessons, Plum TV and Reuters.

Winner

Penton Media Inc.

for Reel-Exchange.com

Unlike other online communities, Reel-Exchange had the daunting task of creating a usable exchange market for a community of creative professionals who know high production values. The readers of Millimeter and Digital Content Magazines and thousands of other video professionals online needed a place where they could show themselves and their video demo reels off to better effect than YouTube or CraigsList. Every user-generated page is a clean profile that emphasizes the video assets. Text is well-parsed by gray blocks that contain descriptors and hyperlinks.

A visitor looking for new hires or participants in a project can click on any skill set or affiliation and jump immediately to a full list of everyone in the database with those attributes. The large thumbnails give browsers a quick sense of the member’s work. Clicking into the frame brings up one of up to four demo reels. Reel-Exchange uses the latest Web 2.0 techniques to make search results a model of efficiency. In the results,  a user can click on individual tabs to pop up more detailed information without leaving the current page. The site demonstrates a deep understanding of how professionals look for project partners, and it bakes this knowledge into the beams of the information architecture. This is design following function.

honorable mentions

The new magazine for 60-somethings brings a new sense of vigor, color and action to the senior segment. Its saturated palette and sense of movement follow the magazine’s own principles of defying the stereotypes of aging.

Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.

Beautiful and seamless, Elle.com bought a new dress in 2007. The redesign emphasized oversized images married to bold uses of type, and the result stands out like a flowing red gown, a unique visual identity in a huge ballroom of fashion brands.

Hanley Wood Business Media for

The kid stays out of the picture. Like a fashionable new “space,” ArchitectureMagazine.com offers a strikingly spare black-and-white motif throughout the site to serve as an elegant frame. The site dramatizes its beautiful images of architectural innovation without upstaging them.

Jobson Medical Information LLC for

If you are a trade site for the optical industry, you better look good. VisionMonday.com effectively redesigned its site last year in ways that lead the eye towards the most important daily features and always keep the publisher’s brand message in focus.     

CDW redesigned its small business site with its busy audience in mind. A grab bag of quick takeaways, interactive opportunities and the latest features invites coffee-addled entrepreneurs to do more than just drive by every day. 

Email Newsletters

Winner

InStyle.com

for Newsletters

It has taken a decade of promises and false starts but interactivity and traditional content finally are coming together in true personalized publishing in innovative products like InStyle.com’s “Shop It To Me” newsletters. InStyle.com is already renowned for its online shopping experience, lush with to-go shopping lists, mobile extensions and links to buy. It is the place InStyle readers come literally to buy into the magazine’s style.  E-letter subscribers don’t just click a “sign me up” button that spits back generic sale notices. The user tells this concierge service her preferred brands, clothing sizes and types. Like a clever valet, the system creates customized e-letters that alert a reader to new items that fit their taste and even their body.

“Shop It To Me” joins four other newsletters (the daily “Look of the Day and Parties” and weekly “Hot Finds and Deals & Steals”) to round out a suite that has more than doubled its readership in 2007. InStyle has developed a newsletter strategy that surrounds loyal readers with the breadth of the magazine’s coverage while letting the audience cherry-pick and now even personalize the features they like best. One size does not fit all.  

Fast Facts

• InStyle email newsletter subscriptions grew 127% in 2007.

• The “Shop It To Me” e-letter lets recipients forward to a friend specific items from the incoming message. 

• “Shop It To Me” subscribers can customize delivery of their personalized catalog (weekly or daily).

Winner

Penton Media Inc.

for Broadcast Engineering’s E-Newsletter Family

While other trade email newsletters rehash print material or merely aggregate Web content, the Broadcast Engineering line of 14 publications go out at a rate of one a day and do more than simply “extend” a brand. Titles like the biweekly “News Technology Update” and “Digital Signage Update” serves over 1 million impressions a year with fresh and exclusive content produced by category experts. The design of the newsletters serves a true news function, keeping the audience up to date when they aren’t visiting the main site. The Broadcast Engineering brand serves a diverse range of production niches, from audio engineers and robotics experts to telecom and sports technicians. The newsletters let the main site parse its coverage to target each interest group and ensure that new ones get served.

Consistently selling out their ad inventory, the Broadcast Engineering e-letters were redesigned last year to allow advertisers more visibility with larger graphical formats and increased frequency. Designers lightened the load on readers’ in-boxes with smaller, lower-res graphics that increased readability without sacrificing quality. Broadcast Engineering demonstrates how the user’s in-box can become a customized window into the industry’s trusted brand. 

Fast Facts

• Broadcast Engineering newsletters help the core brand extend its reach to an additional 15 million user impressions a year.

• Newsletter advertising now accounts for a substantial share of the Broadcast Engineering brand’s online revenue.  

• To ensure the broadest reach across all devices, all the newsletters in the line continue to publish in both HTML and text versions.

Honorable Mentions

EW.com  for What to

Like an old friend emailing you a reminder about a favorite show, EW.com’s extension of its popular print franchise “What to Watch” is like a message from a trusted buddy. Readers responded with a 260% increase in subscribers last year.

The IEEE Tech Alert successfully rewired itself last year into a rich marketing vehicle for advertisers and a new power line that has amped up Web traffic, retention and awareness of the IEEE digital offerings.

Along with a major site redesign, VisionMonday revamped its e-letter last year to deliver more timely news headlines in a new format that is easy on the eyes and streamlined to accommodate readers’ busy professional lives. It gives a clear view of the industry from a stylish frame.

New York magazine serves its local readership with the new daily Agenda of six top-line cultural opportunities in the city that never sleeps. From Broadway previews to concert-ticket alerts or just the hot new novel at Barnes & Noble, this is a true news-you-can-use letter.

E-commerce/Merchandising

Winner

WIRED Media, Condé Nast

for The WIRED Store Interactive Website

For holiday 2007, the WIRED brand threw its geek muscle (is that an oxymoron?) behind an old-fashioned brick and mortar SoHo NYC gift shop. The online WIRED Store brought this concept online in a Flash-driven extravaganza that turned a product catalog into an animated fun house of gadgetry. Pop-up item descriptions and mouseover menus let the WIRED Store maintain the sleek, spare design sense of the magazine brand and still give shoppers a rich, informative retail experience. Gift guides filtered hundreds of items into gifting ideas for everyone on your list, from “GeekDad” to “WIRED Women” to your cubicle mate.  The design seemed to meet shoppers at the front door with the understanding of a good concierge about the central conundrum of holiday shopping.

The WIRED Store was not a passive storefront waiting for return visits. Its content-rich downloadable widget offered a countdown to Christmas, a calendar of events at the live WIRED Store, special offers from sponsor W Hotels and links into more WIRED content. The project used social media to serve consumers, sponsors and the brand. With its holiday store, WIRED leveraged all the tools of cutting-edge media to bring simple pleasure to the holiday buying experience. 

Fast Facts

• In addition to its live SoHo location, the WIRED Store online also linked to “WIRED Store Annexes” in W Hotels.

• The WIRED Store enjoyed a 2.4% clickthrough rate on its “Buy Now” button.

• As a “Splurge” item, the store offers a $13,450 Seabob Cayago VX2” water bobsleigh.

Honorable Mentions

Instyle.com for In Style Shopping: 

With its new InStyle Shopping area, the magazine has increased shopping time 20% on-site by letting visitors be picky – applying sophisticated filters to a deep catalog of major brands to help visitors find just the right black dress.

Meredith applied its mighty database to laser-target its own customers base by demographics, psychographics and a long history of interaction with the brands in the major one-to-one customer relationship project. It netted Better Homes and Gardens a 30% increased in gross orders and Family Circle a whopping 400% increase.

Integration with Print

Winner

Newsweek

for “Voices of the Fallen”

Some integrated programs merely “extend” an editorial project online and others dutifully amend and enhance print features. Newsweek’s brilliant “Voices of the Fallen” marriage of magazine and online multimedia was a monument to sacrifice. In a special issue on the war in Iraq, Newsweek turned the editorial voice over to 100 U.S. troops who had died in the war, printing emails, journal entries and letters they had sent home. In print, the words were profoundly effective. “Sorry this isn’t funny or upbeat,” one soldier writes, “there is nothing funny or upbeat to talk about right now. People are dying like flies here and I am sick of it.”

Online, the words became flesh as Newsweek staff created four video documentaries around a Marine captain, an Army major, a Marine captain and an Army corporal, including many of their families reading letters, voice recordings of them from the front and an array of family photos that dramatized the loss. Wisely, Newsweek let these families and the fallen soldiers tell their own stories, exclusively in their own words and without interference. In this case, it was the simplicity of the online component that made the integration work so well. It followed through seamlessly on the promise made in the magazine to showcase voices not reporting. 

Fast Facts

• The online videos received 48,489 plays and thousands of podcast downloads.

• In the online video of Army Major General Michael Mundell, who left for Iraq on Father’s Day, his children read aloud his letters home.

• Army Col. Theodore Westhusing wrote home that life in Baghdad seemed worthless. “So many people don’t care and have appeared to have given up. But I won’t. I need to be here to help them.” A month later–a month away from his scheduled – return to the States, Westhusing died in an apparent suicide.

honorable mentions

A magazine article on the Web’s video revolution was extended superbly online with click-to-play embedded video examples as well as original interviews with a new generation of online video stars. NYMag.com became an interactive field guide to a media revolution.

Parade.com for

With video, slide shows and even salary calculators, Parade.com turned its popular What People Earn franchise into a personal interactive tool set that generated over 600,000 contest entries.

The PopSci Predictions Exchange turns print stories and news topics into a stock exchange of ideas where readers buy shares in the future of technology. The device helps the audience think differently and more deeply about the content, and that is what engagement really means.

WIRED Media Condé Nast for

In a truly innovative marriage of sponsorship, print and online interactivity, Condé Nast gave users the absolute editorial power: the ability to create their own versions of a WIRED magazine cover online. The project generated over 40,000 submissions.

Women’s Health magazine

– 100 Best Packaged Foods

The magazine turned a popular print feature into an online shopping tool that gave visitors a personalized list of healthy items they could bring to the store. It gave WomensHealth.com its biggest traffic week ever.

Marketing Campaign

Winner

The Knot Inc.

for The Nest Marriage
Invader Game

Marriage isn’t a game…or is it? In the hands of The Knot’s marketing team, the creative print and online feature “Marriage: The Video Game” got promotion in the only possible way – via a video game. Part of the “TheNest.com”, which is aimed at newlywed, double-income couples, “Marriage: the Video Game” illustrated a couple’s bad habits with a set of “buttons.” The promotional “Marriage: The Video Game” took the concept to the next level by actually giving couples his and her online games with which to do battle. Men were challenged to “stop the precious princess,” while their wives could “eliminate those man crimes.” This was one case where the marketing creative was as informative and editorially astute as it was fun and enticing enough to draw people into TheNest.com. Supported by a “Second Honeymoon” sweepstakes and wrapped in a banner and email campaign, the marketing plan was well-rounded in pressing its target audience’s many buttons about early marriage. It embodied the whimsy of the original editorial feature and still communicated some of the substance and promise of the site itself. The marketing plan invited newlyweds to do what they do best – vent, then make up. 

Fast Facts

• One clever respondent to “Marriage: The Video Game” snarked that if she had a fantasy game controller for her husband, she would include ACTION and MOVE commands. “He talks a good game, but he very rarely actually follows through,” she said.

• The Nest users have an average household income of $67,500, and 71% are college educated.

• The average time spent with Marriage Invaders was over 3 minutes per session.

Winner

Everything Channel

for Channelweb Launch

When CRN and VARBusiness online properties came together last year as ChannelWeb.com, the United Business Media team, then CMP Channel, had to raise awareness of a new brand for solution providers that contained their old favorites. Understanding that the target audience relied on many Web-based touchpoints to research the channel, the campaign aimed to address the need for a more centralized resource. Knowing that the live Xchange event was among the most highly rated for the audience, CMP chose the March conference as the launch point for the campaign. The campaign materials addressed the key selling point of ChannelWeb – that it brought together necessary trade information in one place – and so the prelaunch and on-site materials all emphasized practical walkthroughs of features, not loud, generic branding. The medium relayed the message of usefulness. The marketing team successfully pulled all of the many levers on the UBM control panel to get the word out: editorial columns, print and PDF downloads, video walkthroughs and even a countdown clock to launch. From two-phase banner tease campaigns to branded stress balls, front page stickers on the VAR and CRN print product to hand-out guides to the new site, the team created a surround-sound marketing campaign. It communicated to readers that ChannelWeb represented a new way of gathering trade news in their industry, and it communicated to sponsors that the publisher was fully behind the effort. 

Fast Facts

• ChannelWeb.com now receives over 1.5 million page views a month, up from 650,000 a month.

• The site was named among the “10 Great Media Web Sites” by Media Business.

honorable mentions

CSTV, Sirius, All-State,

CSTV’s downloadable real-time sports score tracker puts participating brands onto users’ desktops, giving them full share of voice and a persistent association with a service that matters to fans.

Jobson

Medical

Information LLC for VisionMonday.com

To promote its own VisionMonday.com relaunch, marketers brought the new site into the print magazine, showing, not just telling, what made the online property different across an eight-page spread that extended into an email campaign.

Unilever for ViveMejor.com

To bring its line of products to the Hispanic community, Unilever brought the ViveMejor service brand seamlessly across platforms, in a print magazine, a deep Web site of information and tools, Univision TV segments and in-store promotions. The bilingual surround-sound messaging has lifted coupon redemption rates and awareness as well as magazine distribution, now up to 750,000.

Microsite/Custom Website

Winner

Rodale

for Nissan: Master the Shift

Introducing another car brand to a target audience of stylish GenX performance-seekers takes a real shift in the usual microsite strategy and marketing methods. Rodale helped Nissan sell an experience, rather than just a brand, at MastertheShift.com. Three athletic masters – an Olympian, a triathlete record-holder and ultramarathoner– hosted this remarkably ambitious multimedia dramatization of up-shifting one’s life. Scores of video Webisodes, Q&A sessions and even downloadable training plans and city guides spoke directly to the audience’s aspirations for achievement. What do you do when you “hit the performance wall,” get sidelined with injury and play for a team, not just for yourself? Rather than simply sell cars, the site sold a core branding value, and it gave users tangible maps for their own personal success. The SHIFT theme courses throughout the site, amplifying and connecting these athletes to the Nissan Rogue product without ever intruding on the content-driven experience. The site demonstrates how valuable content aligned with a brand and product confer a halo effect that only gets larger as the content runs deeper. The real SHIFT represented by MastertheShift.com is a next step in marketing philosophy, where even custom editorial serves sponsors best when it also serves readers first.  

Fast Facts

• Ultramarathoner Dean Karmazes, one of the MastertheShift “Masters,” recently ran the Endurance 50 (50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days).

• Microsite visitors registered a 48% lift in regarding Nissan as a “performance brand.”

• The microsite sweepstakes gathered over 100,000 entrants, about half of the 200,000 unique visitors.

honorable mentions

NED revives the dying art of the in-person product demo by creating animated tutorials around products that walk through their features, specs and testimonials, and even blow them out into 3D models that can spin and zoom.

Will a computer defeat a pro poker player at Texas Hold ‘Em by July 31, 2008? Place your bets at this wholly engaging stock market that makes science into a thoughtful game.

New Site

Winner

Hearst Digital Media

TheDailyGreen.com

In developing a new Web-only brand devoted to eco-friendly living, Hearst is riding one trend by pioneering a new model in publishing. TheDailyGreen.com pulls together a staff of five professional editors, a large virtual staff of bloggers and citizen journalists to demonstrate how a major media company can embrace and enhance Web 2.0. Grassroots activism, user-generated content and traditional editorial values add up to a sum greater than the parts. The site leads with a revolving marquee of polished features, and the usual magazine fare of tips and recipes are ever-present. At the same time, a tabbed box lets readers cycle through news items, blog highlights and more features. The community is front and center, in a members area that features reader comments. And the irresistible WeirdWeatherWatch offers a photoblog of global warming effects worldwide. The mash-up structure comes together visually on the home page, which is dense with information and options, yet never cluttered. By pulling together all of the available feeds of Internet content, powering it with Web 2.0 technology and wrapping the package with classic magazine design finesse, Hearst has a new site that embodies its own message – resource efficiency. 

Fast Facts

• Since its April 2007 launch, TheDailyGreen.com grew to 418,000 unique visitors by Nov. 2007.

• The site has tapped into the sharing channel effectively, with 22% of its site traffic coming from social media sites like StumbleUpon, dig and reddit.

• The site enjoys 2,600 inward-facing blog links.

Honorable Mentions

Maine’s premiere lifestyle magazine transforms its site into something as picturesque, rugged and quirky as the state itself, featuring gorgeous images, video profiles of Down Easters and all the online shopping a tourist could crave.

Meredith Corporation for

Meredith serves its vast female audience with a travel site well targeted to romance, family togetherness, girlfriends and personal renewal. TravelMeredith.com demonstrates how a familiar vertical becomes more accessible and inspirational when its sponsors and content understand its audience.

SmartMoney for

Responding to visitor interest, SmartMoney spins off and greatly enhances its robust SMB coverage. By partnering with other major media brands and giving business owners a one-stop brainstorming session, it helps readers with their bottom-line profit and top-line satisfaction.

Mobile Application

Winner

InStyle Mobile

In a realm of me-too branded mobile Web sites, InStyle Mobile demonstrates the power of a feature-rich downloadable application to put the magazine experience in a pocket. Every day, mobile users get freshly baked, deep dishes of photos from last night’s parties, new looks and hot shopping finds. The application respects the user’s time and the device’s form factor by serving up large images that work best on the small screen and optimizing performance for quick snacking. Brand loyalists get to taste all of the InStyle content franchises, from Hollywood Hair Makeovers to Celebrity Transformations. Throughout, InStyle Mobile rigorously maintains the design rigors of print, keeping the user in a familiar, visually coherent brand space.

InStyle Mobile goes beyond “extending” a magazine brand into handsets by knitting the mobile experience to the Web site and connecting users to one another. Users can save mobile photos, send products from the site to their mobile app for in-store reference and email images and posts to friends in their contact list. InStyle Mobile shows an extraordinary understanding that the phone is not just another publishing platform; it is a communications tool. Magazines need to become trusted contacts, not just content providers.  

Fast Facts

• In the “Star Hair” feature of Hollywood Hair Makeover, mobile users can apply celebrity hairdos to their own face type.

• The Web site InStyle Product Finder now has 14,000 items that users can save to wish lists or photo albums on their phones to consult during shopping trips.

onorable mentions

The Playboy brand gets naked, stripping down its Web site content to a compelling mobile destination with daily tips, babes, jokes and eye candy that is perfect for snacking.

Cramer, Most Read Stories and the latest pulse reading of the market – TheStreet.com Mobile lets its own readers’ online habits tell the brand what content they must have as they move between the other screens in their daily lives.

Podcasts

Winner

The New Yorker

for Fiction Podcast

Putting some of the world’s best short fiction into a spoken word podcast seems like a no-brainer. But The New Yorker put their minds to converting the magazine’s own legendary short story content into a special editorial product that is as fresh as the podcast medium itself. The monthly fiction program has a current writer choose a favorite tale from the New Yorker’s vast archive. Often read by the contemporary author, the story is followed by a discussion of the work with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. The project brings classic fiction to a modern audience and also enriches readers’ understanding of their own current favorites. James Thurber, John O’Hara and Tobias Wolff are treasures in their own right, but when Jonathan Lethem, E. L. Doctorow and T. Coraghessan Boyle read and discuss them, something new emerges. A conversation among talents, a bridge between generations and deeper understanding of the craft of fiction and reading are among the real treasures this series opens for us.    

Fast Facts

• New Yorker Fiction Podcasts can be timely, such as Nell Freudenberger’s
discussion of Grace Paley’s “Somewhere Else,” shortly after Paley’s passing.

• The fiction podcast has ranked as high as #3 on iTunes Top Podcasts list.

Honorable Mentions

Ziff Davis’ long-running video series has dramatized video game reviewing as an active argument among its own magazine writers, inviting readers into the cubicles to engage the fray.

Podcast host Jim Ellis creates a weekend digest of the online and print stories that most impact listeners, and at the same time gives a preview of the news that will affect them the following week.

Last year, ELLE blew the red carpet off the usual runway coverage by strutting out 380 videos from Fashion Weeks worldwide and then syndicating them to scores of international markets.

Parents magazine joins its on-the-go, time-challenged audience of 75,000 parents with a portable format of advice and information they can squeeze among soccer matches, play dates and accordion lessons. 

Premium site

Winner

Meredith New Media

for Decorating Inspiration

True decorating fans know the value of inspiration. One person’s room design sparks a notion, which ignites an idea, which in turn launches a new project. Meredith understands the inherently shared nature of creativity, and executes it well as a premium product for its service magazine customers at DecoratingInspiration.com. From attics to laundry rooms, great rooms to mud rooms, the gallery of 20,000 images fills 25 categories. Users can zoom into images and explore specific design elements. They can assemble personal catalogs of favorites, rate and comment on images for others, email them to others and print them to bring to their own designer. DecoratingInspiration.com adds value by turning the habit of thumbing through magazines into a well-honed tool aimed at the needs of amateur and professional decorators. In the last year, Meredith has added creative offer options like one-day passes and subscription bundling with the print magazines. A late 2007 site redesign dovetails more effectively with the flagship BHG.com site. Images now come in high resolution for better zoom detail. At a time when the fee-based model is challenged on all fronts, DecoratingInspiration.com inspires us to believe that consumers and publishers still understand the added value of crafted, targeted content that fills a unique need. 

Fast Facts

• The average DecoratingInspiration.com visitor views 35 pages per visit.

• The one-day pass model has increased the conversion rate of preview visitors into paid subscribers by 30%.

• The site’s article rating and comments are powered by Pluck Social Media.

Winner

Institutional Investor News

for Total Securitization

In a sea of financial news and information, finding just the right drops for one’s own investment needs has become a rare commodity in a thoroughly commoditized segment. Institutional Investor News’ Total Securitization targets busy financial executives only with the news they need. Whether it is in email, RSS feed or a dedicated mobile site, this is investor news that is contoured to the specific interests of the subscribers and fed into the media platforms, especially Blackberrys, where they live and breathe. Subscribers are surrounded with value. They get access to the main site where they can drill into specific areas of specialization and preference. A weekly print magazine includes the best stories of the past week, and a downloadable PDF of the issue is available every Friday afternoon for weekend perusal. But the real value for users is the in-your-hand delivery mechanisms IIN has built into the product. The Total Securitization reader can access the information by Web, email, PDF, RSS, mobile and print. Email alerts tell us when new stories arrive based on user preferences. The service uses a deep understanding of its subscriber base to turn the old New York Times tagline on its head: This is only the news that is fit for you. 

Fast Facts

• Base pricing for Total Securitization is $5,000 for a one-year subscription.

• In its first six months of operation the average page views per session grew 119% and the average length of the each user session grew 297%. 

• 6.5 editorial staff are assigned to work on Total Securitization, with two reporters based in London and two in New York.

Honorable Mentions

WardsAuto continues to turn the traditional print and Web integration on its head. The bible of the auto industry publishes all of its content first online and then culls the best for its line of print publications.

TheStreet.com for

By targeting individual investors with sector-specific advice by the real-time players in the market, TheStreet has created a valuable and unique product: a marketplace of ideas, not just more news.

Redesign/Relaunch

Winner

Meredith Interactive

for BHG.com

One of the most popular women’s service sites gets a major and magnificent redesign in March 2007 in concert with a redo of the Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Trying to embrace the next generation of home and hearth mavens and maintain their hold on baby boomer women, BHG.com changed its look and its tone. The new site is visually brighter and more inviting, with a light, gentle palette that never overwhelms the user with information or detail. Leveraging its legendary database of users, Meredith segmented its readership into the three key demographic targets: new homemakers, parents and empty nesters. From the basic of learning to cook, to learning to cook very quickly and to creating a loving environment for grandchildren, BHG had a clear sense of the range of needs its users brought to the site.  The company served three masters (or mistresses) well by keeping its eye on the BHG core brand values that transcend demographic particulars. All of the site’s visual and editorial elements communicate a down-to-earth experience, a lively sensibility and a joy of home making. Like a warm neighbor, the site brings a smile and a helping hand to women.  

Fast Facts

• Since the redesign, time spent on BHG.com has improved 12% to an all-time high.

• Monthly page views per visit have increased from 11 to 13.

• BHG.com now streams 700,000 videos a month.

Winner

Penton Media

for Remix Hotel Site Integration

For the relaunch of its Remix site serving the electronic music industry, Penton “remixed” the main magazine brand with its spin-off Remix Hotel site. The Remix Hotel site serviced the live event segment of the business and so received spikes and drops around specific events. Penton integrated RemixHotel.com into Remixmag.com by defining traffic levels to the former and mapping the most popular areas into Remixmag.com. Rich media from both sites were combined into a more robust multimedia library. The home page is dynamically structured to accommodate more prominent placement of the RemixHotel brand around concert events. By maintaining the RemixHotel brand as a subsite that had prominent placement on the home page, Penton kept the information and events brands linked but distinct. 

Fast Facts

• Unique visitors grew 27% year-over-year at Remixmag.com during RemixHotel events, and page views grew 12%.

• The top four referral domains for Remix Hotel (March 2007) were Google, Remixmag.com, Yahoo and MixOnline.com.

• Almost 24% of searches coming to Remix Hotel are off of the “remix hotel” keywords.

Honorable Mentions

Everything Channel for

In one of its major launches of last year, United Business Media pulled together channel information and tools into a single destination. It was a perfect marriage of redesign and 360-degree marketing push.

Epicurious cooked up a whole new way of serving its legendary database of recipes with dynamic page generation, more efficient contextual searching and interactive tools that helped surface the community ingredient that always powered the site. 

In moving from a companion site to a destination last year, Dwell blended a casual blog format for delivering information with polished multimedia for immersing visitors in walking tours, slide shows and dinner party video. They created a warm and insightful place for design-lovers to dwell.

Entertainment Weekly spiked its own traffic 60% by creating a visually lush engagement with popular culture. Its visual clarity and clean interfaces make the brand a haven of order and professionalism in a Web of slapdash entertainment blogs.  

Hearst Digital Media for

The new Esquire.com restores the art and joy of browsing, giving its visitors an ever-changing concoction of news, print articles, archives and galleries that it brings to the surface like a valet who knows what the cultured male cares to know.

MSP takes a page from the consumer side by creating an executive news source that has the airy and inviting feel of an entertaining service magazine.

The always beautiful visual extension of the great magazine brand started to move and talk in 2007. Dynamically served cartoons on every page, animated cartoons and a full range of videos and audio presentations gave both loyalists and newcomers a fresh image of the old favorite.

With its Daily Dose of beautifully illustrated blog content, and generous spillovers of Web-exclusive cover shoot outtakes, galleries and how-tos, the new domino site deftly blends the values of print with the value adds of digital. The airy design organizes a wealth of information at a glance.

Special Online Coverage

Winner

Bicycling magazine

for Online Coverage of the Tour de France

Bicycling.com continues to own the Tour de France online and bolt the field’s largest event with the Rodale brand. Weeks before the contest, the site warmed users up with highlights of past Tour de France matchups, previews of what the teams will be riding, the up-and-comers, top seeds, etc.  During the event itself, the site added this year a real-time dialogue with blogger Joe Lindsay, who reported insights about the race from France while interacting with reader comments live. A rider diary from a previously banned biker added a layer of frank reporting about the current controversies within the sport and how some competitors are fighting for both a win and restored credibility. The new features complemented Bicycling’s tried and true 360 coverage: GPS tracking of racers, daily video roundups, commentary from trainers and a daily podcast. Once again, Bicycling.com not only maintained its comfortable lead in Tour de France but demonstrated how an enthusiast brand effectively breaks out of its niche online to serve much broader audiences.  

Fast Facts

• After Tour de France coverage, Bicycling.com retained many of the new visitors the event generated and doubled its typical Sept. – Nov. traffic in 2007.

• Interest in this year’s Tour de France at Bicycling.com increased this year despite doping scandals and negative press, up 12% in page views over same period in 2006.

• Over 250,000 Tour videos streamed in July.

honorable mentions

BusinessWeek for Credit Cards