"No need to succumb to fashion for bots"

QUARTZ marketing director - about how to make native advertising in mobile applications

On May 21, in Moscow, Medusa held the Storm conference about native advertising. One of the guests of the conference was the director of marketing and monetization of the products of Quartz (Qz.com) Mia Mabant. After the performance of the Mabanta, the participants of Storm asked her many questions. The most interesting ones are about the popularity of the home page and application, the effectiveness of bots in messengers and the need to mark sponsored content - Medusa publishes in the form of an interview.

- How do you explain to customers that the home page is no longer relevant, that it does not work anymore - and you do not need to wait for any transitions through it? You can, of course, show statistics, tables and graphs. But many advertisers, especially in the luxury class segment, think emotionally and at the same time conservatively.

-I think that in advertising, native advertising in particular, there will always be some kind of inertia. Evolution occurs constantly, but there will always be a certain number of very traditional, very conservative brands. You are about the future for them, and they say: "And where is I have a digital equivalent of what I had in print?"

On the one hand, of course, the brands themselves are experts in their market, but you are an expert on the future. Try to return the client to reality. We have a home page for our Lux advertisers and a fairly large advertising block is placed on this home page. But we constantly remind customers that there are other opportunities. We invite them to test other formats. That is, it is constant, mutual training and development of relations with the client.

- I have your application on the iPhone. It is cool, I really like it. In the first month, it was very popular and collected many good reviews in the App Store. And how are things going now, is there any growth in downloads?

- Behind the growth of the popularity of any application is its presence in the editorial choice of the App Store. Therefore, we want to thank Apple for posting our applications well. Yes, we saw great traffic, especially in the first few weeks. Now the growth rate, of course, has decreased. But we see that people are closely interacting with him. The average active user of our application opens it twice a day and spends 5-6 minutes. This is very good for us. As for attracting new users, the editorial choice of the App Store, of course, is the main source. But people are so inspired by this application that the “word of mouth” provides us with an additional large share of new users. Now all over the world many technological sites, sites write about this application, which also attracts attention to it.

- Many companies are now using bots in messengers. WeChat in China or Telegram-bots in Russia are quite popular. How do you think the bots will affect the delivery and distribution of news in the future and how will bots generally affect our entire industry?

-The bots really had some kind of breakthrough. Some brands are already coming and say: they say, make us bots. I think that here you need to clearly draw a border. Bots work well in the case of transaction services. Those. Online stores, ordering food on the Internet-here I see the use of bots. In other cases, I do not see it. Our application does not contain any bots. We have six editors in the world that support our application, that is, everything that is written in the application, this is the content written by people. I think it is felt. It is felt through intonation. And it does not seem to me that you need to succumb to fashion [on bots].

-You probably have a list of competencies that you need in your team. How many freelancers do you have, how many people do you have in the staff? In what proportion do you need full-time employees and freelancers-is there any right decision? And one more question. YouTube promoted the content approach, they did it for 2-3 years, probably. Do you act like this too or do you have a different model? How do you work with content?

- A few comments. Firstly, we have a clear border, a wall between business and advertising, respectively, and the editorship. Most of our journalists do not know what we are doing in the sense of advertising, with whom we conclude what contracts. Maybe two people know about this, just know that and that’s it.

Further. We always kept the product at the center of our work. For us, the product has always been a starting point of all solutions, so design is important for us, design is important for us. Therefore, we have enough specialists in the editorial office and in advertising with branded content that deal with the design of our product. Maybe more than the average in the industry.

And the last. We are experimenting, but carefully. What do I mean? There is always something new in the media. A new idea that you can always do, some bots, videos. “Now everyone is moving to the video, let's also invest a million dollars in the video.” We try to quickly not run for fashion. Especially when it is not clear how we can make money on this. Let's say video. We hired our video team about a year ago. We have 6 or 7 people now in this video general. And the first six months we told them this way: “Friends! Do not think about prerolls, do not think about advertising, just do your job. Go, experiment. Make different videos, video formats. " We removed this pressure from them. And from yourself too. We did not immediately hire some giant group, not yet understanding how we will use it. In the video, errors may be very expensive for you. We start with limited resources and small projects and develop them already depending on what results we get. You probably noticed that we are not in Snapchat. Because the video we have recently appeared and our team is only engaged in video for social networks. We limited them to such a platform. Although, perhaps, it would be useful for us that they still engage in messengers. Yes? But we tell them that no. We start by what we know how to do it. We do not run for formats, we know that they exist, and we evaluate our forces.

- Are you trying to force users of your application to read your site?

- No. There are a million other things that a person can do, except for reading our news. Each of us spends our own day in different ways, but one way or another we all can [on news] only a few minutes. Therefore, if each user spends 5-6 minutes with Quartz, we would like that these 5-6 minutes to fully satisfy him. That is, if the application is more convenient for someone, excellent. It is not necessary for us that a person goes to the site. And by the way, it doesn’t matter to us that the news is BBC or The New York Times or some other competitor of our other. And once again: it does not matter that people come to the site. Excellent if this happens, but this is not necessary. The same is with our newsletter - it can be 25 links, of which only 3 will be conducted on Quartz.

-Do you have your own analytics in the application, do you experiment with it, and how do you understand that the user is satisfied with these 5-6 minutes?

- As for users on different platforms, yes, we track their habits in the application. For example, we know how deeply you go to this application, we will be able to say how much a person reads the story to the end, how many people simply leafing through one story after another, without reading each of them. The same thing is on the site. I think that in this sense our business is very interesting, you can make a huge number of data based on data. But in the sense of content ... content is still a product of creativity, numbers will not save you in all situations. And when you need to make a serious decision, emotionally saturated, we do not rely too much on the data. The application is a good example. We did not have any accurate data about the fact that for the most part people love to receive notifications and receive news through notifications. We simply decided that this was so, and acted in accordance with this.

- When you make native advertising, you are always very clearly stipulated that it is Sponsored Content. In this regard, several questions at once. Firstly, does the reader always know that in front of him is advertising? Is it necessary? Does your partners have a wish that the advertising is integrated into content without such a note, that is, it was pretended to be editorial content?

- Yes, any sponsored content has an appropriate mark, yellow or white, depending on the color scheme that we use on the site and in the application. This is done for ethics. And it works very well. That is, we have a lot of business advertisers-Bank of America, Intel, who want to be leaders in their industries. And the vast majority of those who read us are businessmen. And our brand partners have expert knowledge useful for people who should make decisions in business. And they are proud, in fact, by the fact that their materials come out marked, that this material is from them. Sometimes, when they too much bend the stick towards advertising, this feeling is lost. As for advertisers who are asked to place advertising without appropriate marks, this was not the case.