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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Vanity Fair Gets Social With Oscar Race iPhone AppMonday, February 8, 2010 The Oscar race is on, and so is the scramble to leverage the iPhone for the upcoming  awards super-event for magazines and women’s fashion. Condé Nast’s handsome new Vanity Fair Hollywood application gets a good head start. The application lets iPhone/iPod Touch owners vote on their favorites among the nominees, track the overall voting totals and even watch who among them was most accurate in their predictions during the awards themselves. Vanity Fair Hollywood has a strong social media component. By using Facebook Connect, the app will broadcast your picks to friends on the social network and even monitor how friends are voting if they too have the app. A group-maker function will create a custom group of voters who can compare favorites and recruit more users. There is also a news feed that draws content from the VanityFair.com site, including video and images from last year’s VF post-awards party. There are several sharp ideas in the VFH app that publishers might want to mimic. The VF developers have been smart enough to meet the new user with pop-up instructions that explain each section of the app the first time she encounters them. This feature is not trivial. One of the strengths of the mobile app format is that it allows a publisher great flexibility in designing custom interfaces. The downside is that no two apps are alike, and the new user needs to orient herself to the functionality. Unlike Web sites, there is no nomenclature of mobile apps just yet. These instructive pop-ups are especially helpful when users have to form new groups  or access a feature like Facebook Connect, which is still unfamiliar to many.VFH also runs the latest content updates as a headline crawl on the bottom of some sections, so the user is made aware of editorial refreshes. Some recent magazine apps suffer from editorial complacency, resulting in a dearth of updates. This headline ticker communicates to the user that the app is dynamic. And VFH is among the more socially aware magazine apps we have seen. The integration with Facebook and the tools for viral distribution are quite good. The app is designed to pull friends into the experience and for the groups to provide much of the real fun of the app. Finally, the integration of sole sponsor L’Oréal is notable here. As many magazine brands have told us lately, clients have been asking for prominent sponsorship opportunities with established content brands in the apps universe. Initially, many brands saw the app ecosystem as an opportunity to create their own “branded apps” and speak directly to consumers through tools and buying guides in the iPhone store. As it turns out, the branded app approach has worked for only a handful of advertisers like Kraft (iFood Assistant) and retail and film advertisers that can make truly useful shopping tools and games for their promotional campaigns. It is hard to build an audience for a consumer product brand in the cluttered app store. And so clients are hoping to create more integrated sponsorship opportunities by riding along with content brands that have built-in constituencies. In the VFH app, L’Oréal has ads woven into the news section feed of articles and a dedicated “Gift Bag” section where 10 products each get a full-page promotion and links to the L’Oréal site and Facebook pages. This kind of tight integration of sponsor and content in an app that gives the user real value is the kind of model we expect to see throughout the year. According to Condé Nast, this is the 10th iPhone/iPod Touch app it has published. The Style.com app was among the first applications from a magazine publisher, and most recently GQ magazine began publishing every issue in its entirety in an app.  Nominations are being accepted for min's In-Box Awards, which will honor achievements in email publishing. Winners will be announced at min’s "How-To" Email Marketing and Monetization Conference on April 29 in New York. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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