How will you get your message out? How will you communicate with your market? SPI Global recently published a white paper titled Print to Digital, Digital First, Simultaneous Publishing – What’s Your Strategy? The paper states that 90% of all media interactions are through smart phones, laptops /PCs, tablets, and television. They indicate that smartphone users will total 1.75 billion this year.
This is a radical change for anyone publishing and trying to respond to current demands and the multi-platform consumption of people demanding information. Legacy publishers are having the greatest amount problems. Trying to overlay old outdated systems of producing a publication over the current trends in digital interfaces video embeds, responsive reply and discussion technologies, is causing massive coordination problems.
Traditional publishers are seeing no other method to adapt then to provide simultaneous publishing. This causes, at best a hybrid. And most hybrids aren’t as efficient in either of their components. They are currently being implemented to project a unified approach – print and digital. This continues to appeal to legacy audiences and promises to bring in the digitals, but, parallel systems in two different technologies are never as advantageous and as nimble as a new innovative market changing approach.
While traditional companies are looking at how to integrate print and digital workflows, marketing departments and advertising agencies quickly started to adapt by providing small business units that were dedicated to this new concept of digital media. In almost all areas, those are starting to surpass the workflows and information output of the legacy systems.
As a publisher of over 15 years, and being a part of the publishing industry for over 25, I have experienced transitions from legacy to digital at every stage of publishing. Those who have held on to legacy systems can remember as far back as when there was typesetting and filmmaking. As access to information has changed, the delivery of interactive information has taken a phenomenal leap.
In providing information about your products and services, it really pays to look down the road and strategically plan for how you’re going to get there in the next two to three years. A five-year vision of the digital marketplace is almost unheard of due to the rapid changes in systems technology, and creativity, but some firms are looking that far ahead.
Understand your part of the market while you plan your strategy. Before you make a rapid jump from printed materials to digital materials and distribution, have your digital information strategies planned and launched.
by Dan Charobee
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