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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
How Sporting News Baseball Scores on iPhone  finalist in the CTIA Wireless 2009 show’s “Best of CTIA Wireless” competition in Las Vegas. Magazine brands don’t usually float to the top of such competitions, but this app does stand out from the rest in one key aspect: It doesn’t aspire to be a magazine on the phone. The new app is focused in its ambitions. Rather than make the entire contents of the famously well-stocked Web site available to users on the iPhone, SNB teases from its content only major league baseball information to deliver a stats-driven, visually pared-down experience aimed specifically at the needs of fans and fantasy sports junkies. Mobile technology and ad network provider Zumobi power this free application with an attractive widget-like engine. The main page gives the fan windows into league stats, news, scores, fantasy baseball data, standings and individual teams. The user can customize a top pane with his or her favorite teams for easy access into their current scores and news. The Sporting News app stays true to its brand image as a news and analysis provider for the hard-core fan. There is nothing especially pretty about this app. There are small images for individual players if the user drills into the data that deeply. The main panes of information telescope in and out of the foreground pleasantly enough. But this is no-nonsense baseball. No lush images. No video clips. The essentials are all here but also drill deeply into Sporting News’ well of online information. The SNB application is of interest to magazine publishers on two levels. First, it is among the only iPhone apps that seem clearly designed with the most likely competition in mind. The king of the sporting application kingdom in the iPhone iTunes library is the rich multimedia MLB at Bat 2009 app, a $9.99 multimedia treasure that recreates current games in real time in mobile animations. It delivers video clips as well. This year, the app even streams to phones live audio of every game in progress. With its own exclusive access to licensed MLB content, this app is pretty much impervious to direct competition. Even at a relatively high price, the popular app has been sitting deservedly atop the bestseller list in the iTunes Store since its premiere more than a week ago. Zumobi and Sporting News pretty much cede the multimedia field to MLB at Bat and go for the free, ad-supported offering that focuses instead on quick delivery of scores, stats and news. The application works by not competing with the main competition and by counter-programming for the fantasy player. This is an app that even an MLB at Bat user might download because it serves a different aspect of their fandom. The app also works because it doesn’t try to be a magazine. Instead, the app provides a service. The data is focused on a specific sport and seems to understand in its structure the core needs of its audience: fast access to at-a-glance news, customized team views and fantasy sports information. This kind of well-targeted content shapes editorial to the needs of the audience and the limitations of the device. The SNB app itself is the seventh most downloaded free sports app in iTunes. The only weakness in this app are the consequences of ad inserts. The banner ads dynamically served into bottom of the screen are tolerable, but clicking on them forces the user out of the mobile app itself and into the iPhone’s Safari browser to the advertiser’s landing page. This is an unnecessary disruption that is bad for the advertiser and for the publisher. The user cannot easily return to their current place back in the application. The best design for advertising in an application is to use an embedded browser that lets the user see the landing page without leaving the application. Otherwise, Sporting News Baseball gets it right by keeping its ambitions tightly focused and its feature set clearly differentiated from an unbeatable competitor. The strategy speaks to the ways in which mobile deployments can work for large content brands. Mobile allows a brand to nano-target audiences and tastes. It is conceivable that a media brand could deploy several mobile applications that serve various pieces of its audience with content that is more tightly targeted to specific tastes. Mobile is not just about portability. It is also about focus. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com |
 Sr. Marketing Manager, Confidential
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