May 14th, 2013 at Calgary, AB
The
makings of a mobile strategy
When the folks at Robots and Pencils reached out and asked me
to deliver a keynote about our mobile strategy, a couple of things ran through
my mind.
First was a reminder of the very first mobile app I ever got
involved with, back in 2007/2008. The iPhone had not yet arrived in Canada, so
this was an app for Blackberry called BBTV (or Blackberry TV). It allowed users
to watch short news and entertainment clips on their Blackberry devices from
Global News and ET Canada. The app was distributed via the Rogers’ WAP portal,
and the service was only available to Rogers subscribers for $5 dollars a month.
I wish I could say my involvement had anything to do with
designing or developing this product; which, by the way, was truly ahead of its
time… Unfortunately my role was a bit more dramatic than that… I had to kill BBTV.
The reason it had to die was because BBTV was flawed at
conception and failed to deliver a sustainable business model that would make
it a viable product for Canwest.
Experiences like this one have allowed us to create in the
past four years a rich portfolio of mobile apps that have garnered very
positive consumer reaction. Our Global Television app has received over 1 MM
downloads, taking the top spot at the App Store for several consecutive weeks
and being recently named one of the top 25 all-time free apps for iPad in
Canada; and we have released other amazing products like our Shaw Go line of
products including the Movie Central app for iPhone and iPad, the NFL Sunday
Ticket app for iPad, and the NBA League Pass app for iOS and Android devices.
So today I am here to share with you some of what we’ve
learned around mobile at Shaw; and while we may not have a “mobile strategy”
per se (which was my second thought when I first heard about this event), we’ve
certainly formed some opinions and gained some experiences that may be
worthwhile sharing with you.
By now, everyone would agree that the Apple iPhone (and later
the iPad) radically transformed the digital world. Whereas companies were
caught up in discussing the value of doing any work on mobile, due to the high
costs of data, the iPhone single handedly drove data costs down and allowed a
revolution in innovation; not just for already established incumbents trying to
figure out how to get apps and iPhone friendly sites, but also for new players in
the software development world that were possible only thanks to this
revolution.
In the advertising world, we went from SMS campaigns to a
world of possibilities around apps, companion devices, and fully-fledged ad
supported video playback.
These were exciting times, but also confusing ones for large
companies, who were anxious to take advantage of this new platform and show
themselves as innovators. Many companies ran off to hire “mobile experts” and
build “mobile teams” and develop “mobile strategies”, only to discover that
“mobile budgets” were richer than they thought (to borrow a line from
Scotiabank…)
One of our first findings at Shaw (after a couple of years attempting
to put some mobile products in market to mild success) was that mobile, as a
discipline, should not be isolated from the rest of the business. This is not
necessarily the norm for every company out there, but in an environment like
ours, where there are dependencies with internal systems managed by multiple
teams, an isolated mobile strategy is bound to fail.
This is what we found:
1)
An
isolated mobile team is typically focused on moving their own agenda without
major regard for other initiatives that may have an impact on a product
portfolio.
For example, when Canwest Broadcast
and Canwest Publishing split into two companies, the now Shaw Media had to move
off the now Postmedia infrastructure in record time. In the midst of this
transition, there was tension from some of the teams because the mobile agenda
was falling behind. However, what was at risk in the interim was the viability
of the entire Shaw Media network.
2)
Product
decisions that are platform exclusive tend to be shortsighted and misaligned
with the overall business objectives.
Some products we’ve put in market for
the purpose of satisfying the mobile agenda lacked a long-term vision because
they were developed in a silo.
3)
Isolation
does not mean independence; and mobile projects (or any other digital project
for that matter) are taxing on resources, whether built in-house or outsourced.
We’ve worked with amazing developers
-including the organizer of this event- and regardless of their proficiency,
our technical teams have always had to handhold part of the process to
integrate with our content management systems, identity management systems,
subscriber data management systems, billing systems, you name it. Assuming that
outsourcing means you will have to do nothing is an expensive mistake that will
likely lead to failure or have a negative impact on your timelines.
Imagine for a second that you are a homebuilder… You’ve been
building homes for quite a while and have a thorough understanding of the
process; but home security has become the new trend –you can’t build a home
without it– so you hire this ‘home security expert’ to help you devise a plan
to add sophisticated security systems to the houses you build. The expert is
amazing. He puts together a Power Point that blows away all your executive team,
with moving graphics and all that Jazz. So, you tell him: ‘do it’.
He goes on to buy all the hardware from the top security
systems manufacturers, hires the most renowned installer of security systems,
and then finds himself at odds with the rest of the project. The wires are
incompatible, the cameras can’t be placed where they had planned; it is a
disaster. The installation company has now to tap into the Engineers to figure
this whole thing out. Architects have to redo the blueprints. Electricians and
carpenters are called back in to redo some of the work they had done, the
project is late, the mood is somber, and the outcome is less than desirable.
This example describes how many companies have adopted
mobile…
And it took us a while to realize we were one of them, but
when we did, it was like an awakening. We didn’t have a ‘mobile expert’ anymore
trying to divert resources to satisfy personal agendas and show contributions
to the business when year-end review came. Instead, we established a centralized
product development team, tasked with overall product strategy for our digital
assets… inclusive of mobile.
And the thing is, once you stop talking about technology platforms
you realize that your product decisions must be influenced by one thing, and one
thing only; and that is you users.
I don’t want you to leave here thinking we don’t believe in platform
experts. We see tremendous value in the subject matter expertise they bring to our
business. I am simply advocating against operating in silos, and diverting
attention from products to platforms.
If you look at our product portfolio you will notice we favor
Web and iOS and are currently very light on other platforms. You probably
wonder, what drives platform decisions at Shaw?
While at times it seems a disparate exercise, platform
decisions are influenced by internal and external factors.
1)
Internal
change agents are the forces breaking corporate inertia and making things
happen. This includes people like my team who are poised to demonstrate the
value of new platforms, create new ways to add value for customers, and surface
new revenue opportunities for the business. The knowledge to these groups comes
from personal experiences, exposure to trade events and seminars, as well as
staying updated with industry publications and being actively engaged with
professional associations. At Shaw, for example, we are active members of the
IAB Canada, the Television Bureau of Canada, and the Canadian Marketing
Association, just to name a few. Our employees regularly attend CES, NAB, NCTA,
among other international events that open their eyes to the latest in
technology innovation. Internal change agents are the main source of
groundbreaking innovations at Shaw.
2)
External
forces on the other hand include:
a. The environment: Where we look at
factors like technology adoption rate and overall forecast.
b. The vendors: Where we receive a
tremendous amount of information from external innovators that open our eyes to
the potential of new technologies
c. The partners themselves: Where companies
like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Blackberry spend a great deal of time
sharing their product roadmaps with us and trying to convince us to build products
for their platforms.
We love Apple. The products they develop are extraordinary
and we share their passion for an exceptional user experience. As I said
before, they revolutionized the world, and we see not only great adoption rate
in their products, but also high app downloads and usage rates when compared to
other platforms like Android and Windows 8.
With that said, we acknowledge the growth in market share for
Android devices and have laid ahead of us an aggressive roadmap of apps to
begin satisfying users on the Android platform. But to reach this point we’ve
had to wait for some developments that made Android apps feasible and viable.
For once, our business at Shaw Media is all about video
distribution that requires monetization primarily via ad insertion. Optimally,
ads served around video content should be dynamically injected into video streams,
allowing us to sell ad inventory in a CPM model. If you are not familiar with
CPM models, I won’t bore you with an explanation; just believe me… we need to
be able to dynamically serve ads for every video that is being watched.
In addition to monetization, we also need to be able to
protect the content by encrypting the video files delivered to the device, and
then decrypting the content using unique keys that are sent over a secure
connection. Again, if you are not familiar with content protection I won’t bore
you with the details. Believe me, it is complex, it is expensive, and we have
no choice but to protect the content.
Lastly, we need to deliver streaming content –not
downloadable–; preferably using a streaming protocol and content format that
we are already using for other platforms to reduce content processing and
storage costs.
It was not until Android 4.0 that all of these technologies
converged finally allowing us to entertain a feasible solution for video delivery.
And if you know anything about Android, you will know that even though Android
4 was released almost a year and a half ago, its adoption rate has been a slow
one, with Gingerbread still taking over 44% of all Android devices in market.
Yet today we are optimistically seeing the rise of Ice Cream
Sandwich and Jelly Bean, and we are committed to our customers on those
platforms, and to deliver video streaming apps for Android devices within the
next six months.
Selecting a platform and developing a product is truly just
our first step. While that process is moving, we pay a lot of attention to
developing a go-to-market strategy as well as ensuring overall support for the product
during its planned lifecycle. This is not to do with product enhancements –we’ll
discuss those in a couple of minutes– but specifically related to customer care
and support once we’ve launched a product to market.
Launching a new product successfully is an art the likes of
Apple have masterfully managed to execute very well. There are many different marketing
approaches to launching a product (big bang, shock and awe, informational
cascades, etc.), but the key thing we’ve learned is that launching a product has
to be more than just submitting it to an app store.
Our go-to-market checklist includes:
-
Coordinating
a marketing campaign for the launch to create awareness for the product
-
Using
press releases if the release is press worthy
-
Developing
all possible collateral to support the product launch. Press kits, large-scale
images, etc.
-
Updating
all our external communications materials, including our website. Apple,
Google, and Microsoft all offer creative guidelines that help promoting the apps
sold through their stores, and we pay close attention to using these.
-
And
most importantly: making sure our internal communications team has successfully
shared details about the product with employees across the organization. Our
employees are our number one customer and we try and keep them abreast of new
product initiatives we plan on bringing to market.
The extra effort to accelerate adoption rate for an app at
launch can have a significant impact on its long-term success. Our Global App,
for example, was featured on the App Store and made it to the top downloaded
apps for both iPhone and iPad. Getting to that number one spot boosted
downloads further, helping us retain the number one position for weeks.
We have seen spikes in the adoption rate resulting from app
updates, but never significant enough to get us back to number one (even though
they have put us back in the top ten most downloaded apps). While app updates have
certainly generate a renewed interest in the product, they have never pushed
the adoption rate beyond what the initial launch campaign was able to achieve. Getting
that top ten spot exponentially increased our download rate due to the
heightened exposure resulting from being in the list.
While a launch campaign is certainly a key driver for
success, we make an effort to maintain continuous marketing support for our products.
We have also begun learning to recognize when to shift our attention from
trying to increase adoption rate to focus our marketing efforts on increasing
usage.
Customer support is something that we plan from conception. All
of our upcoming apps pay lots of attention to consistently communicating with
our customers and helping them figure out the product.
We’ve found that app users are way more demanding than web
users. The Internet has historically given us a great deal of consumer
tolerance. It’s been almost like “oh, what a pity, the site is down”, or “oh,
it’s a shame I can’t watch NCIS right now, the video player seems to be
broken”. With an app, we get loud negative comments and ratings posted directly
to the App Store, with zero ability for us to remove them and limited
opportunity to respond.
Before we push an app to market (or any new product or
service for that matter) we have to put together extensive documentation for
our CSRs to help them support and troubleshoot any issues our customers may
encounter. Documentation that includes everything from frequently asked
questions to escalation path for technical problems with the product.
Now, we haven’t always had the luxury of a 24/7-customer
support center. Before Shaw acquired Canwest we had to do our best to foresee
issues customers may encounter with our products. FAQs, message boards,
feedback forms; we did whatever was necessary to help our customers when in
need.
But no matter how well we handle support, negative feedback
for new products always manages to trickle in. When we launched the redesigned
network of Canwest newspapers a few years ago, seconds after we hit the go live
button a flurry of comments was posted in response to the “Welcome to the
reinvented [please insert newspaper name here]” article we published.
The vast majority of those messages were negative, from
people who resisted the change and couldn’t find the link to the Obituaries
section… This was obviously quite disappointing. Some went off to claim
Canwest’s executives had pulled this redesign out of thin air. I promise to you
we didn’t. The redesign involved one of Canada’s most renowned interface
architecture firms at the moment, and was run by numerous groups of testers,
influencing the end results dramatically.
I am not suggesting we ignore consumer feedback. All I am
saying is that sometimes the users who are giving negative reviews don’t know
what they are talking about and are simply resisting innovation. These are the
same people who crowd the social streams whenever Facebook changes the
background color of the “F” in their logo.
The lesson we learned was how to intelligently monitor
feedback in a way so we can make meaningful product decisions from it. What
features are we missing? How do we prioritize them based on what people want?
Let’s go back to the point I was making before about the
lifecycle of a product. If the digital age has taught us something is that we
are never done building something. I call it “Pervasive Beta”; which means our
products are in a constant state of reinvention.
There are several reasons behind that:
-
First,
technology continues to evolve, making new capabilities possible and
challenging us to play catch up.
-
Second,
user interfaces also continue to rapidly evolve; with new paradigms being
invented in short cycles that change the interactivity with digital products.
-
And
third, consumers expect products to evolve. Not only they expect it; they
demand it. An app that doesn’t receive regular updates risks being considered
abandoned, even when it is a fully functioning app.
When we plan to develop a new product we try and allocate a
regular amount of resources to work on iterations for its expected lifetime.
There is a fourth point that I failed to mention, and that is
that operating systems also evolve, sometimes requiring us to update our
products for the mere purpose of compatibility.
When the inevitable task of killing a product needs to be
undertaken, we’ve learnt this is no simple task. It is a complex process that
requires understanding product adoption and usage rates, potential impact to our
brand, and communications and support plans for active and passive users.
We took a look at BBTV after a year in market and concluded
that the adoption rate had peaked and declined very fast, showing clear signs
of churn. Because this was a paid product, though, we needed to take a look at
active subscribers and understand whether it was due to inertia or if there was
any usage at all. We had to work with Rogers to figure out how to notify these
users that the service would be interrupted. We had to develop a communications
plan so our executives were equipped with the right information if they were
ever asked about the product. We had to setup a web page explaining what had
happened to the service and why.
The action of “pulling the plug” was the last step in a
series of efforts to ensure a proper product discontinuation decision, and in
the app world –where the product has left our servers and lives in our
customers’ hardware– if we don’t build a mechanism to “kill” the apps we stand
to suffer from consumer backlash resulting from a poor product removal
approach.
If I can summarize the five key things we have learned, they
would include:
1)
Always
make sure new products are viable and profitable
2)
Never
put platform in silos. Instead, develop a holistic product strategy where
platforms are simply the means to achieve profitability and increase market
share
3)
Launching
a product is step ZERO… Always commit for the long haul or we stand to lose
credibility with our audiences
4)
Have
a solid go-to-market plan that includes as much marketing as it does customer
support
5)
Don’t
fuss about negative reviews… While it is important to listen to customer
feedback, it is WE need to be in the driver’s seat of OUR product roadmap.
There is no magic bullet to being successful when launching a
mobile product. It just takes a mix of not fearing failure and being willing to
break inertia without having all our ducks in a row.
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and
enjoy the rest of the conference.
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