How’s That Newspaper Phone Doing?

Philip Stone June 4, 2008

Newspapers are being urged to create marketing excitement with new ways of delivering their news and one of the great new ideas -- a newspaper phone that has a special button that takes the user directly to the newspaper’s mobile web site — launched in December in Sweden. After some six months it’s attracting about 50,000 unique users a month

Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s leading morning newspaper, is making available via its web site a special Nokia mobile phone (note not a Swedish Sony-Ericsson)  that has a special button that when pressed takes the user directly to the newspaper’s mobile web site. When the project was launched in December Thorbjoern Larsson, the editor-in-chief and publisher, summed it up simply, “This is yet another way of distributing the news.”

The newspaper says the phone is a world first, designed so people can follow the news of the day even if they’re not at home or in the office. Accessing the web site costs a set 199 kroner (€21, $31) a month, (the phone itself is free on a 12-month contract but if bought commercially would cost around 1200 kroner (€126, $185)) but it will only be available to those who subscribe to the newspaper’s print edition. Larsson said that on the first day of launch the newspaper’s switchboard couldn’t handle all the calls asking more details.

Johan Brandt, head of Dagens Nyheter Mobile Services, told the World Association of Newspapers annual conference meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden, that the newspaper launched the phone because it was facing three challenges from mobile. First was getting people to recognize that the newspaper had “a pretty good mobile site. Many people just didn’t know that they could find news from the mobile Internet; not enough people were aware of it as a channel.

“Secondly, one of the big barriers was that it’s difficult to browse the Internet with a mobile, there are too many clicks.” The third problem, he said was cost. “Mobile providers charge users by megabyte. But what is a megabyte? Is it an article or a mobile TV episode? People don’t know what it’s going to cost them.

(As an aside, time and time again marketing people fail to come to grips with that third point. This writer, when he was a media executive with Reuters in the 90s, launched the Reuters News Graphics Service and it became an instant success, primarily because of a marketing strategy competitors were not using. In those days accessing the graphics was by international dial-up with the newspapers paying for each call, and fear of what that call would cost restricted the number of downloads they made.

So this project manager made a deal with a database provider to host the news graphics and that for a set monthly fee the database could be accessed from client countries via a local number using the database’s private communication network. The project manager had to make some assumptions on how many news graphics would be downloaded during the month and then he offered an all-in price.

If the assumptions were right the project was profitable. If the assumptions were wrong then probably out the door would go the project manager. It turned out the assumptions were overly generous and profit was higher than planned, so everyone was happy – the vendor selling the service and the recipients. Morale: people want to know the cost of what they are getting into. They don’t like getting shocking communication bills at the end of the month. It was true then; it is true now).

Back to  Brandt. He told newspaper executives it was important that the phone allowed users to access the newspaper’s mobile service with a single click – it’s down with a pre-set bookmark in the Nokia N82 -- and that users could surf those web pages without charges for downloading data.

The service now has 50,000 users. Brandt says there are some real issues preventing significant mobile growth for sites that don’t offer special plans and phones.

“There are no standards on the mobile market, it’s unnecessarily difficult and hard for the developers to create model services. I want to see growth from the walled garden model to a more open environment,” he said.

“Secondly, there is a lack of standards when it comes to advertising and measurement. There are different ad formats for different mobile sites. The market is fragmented and this makes advertisers frustrated and it also dwarves the mobile market’s potential in the short term. As a result of this there is a lack of strategic integration of marketing across mobile and other platforms for advertisers. There are too many pricing models for our advertisers to learn and in Sweden there are no valid or integrated tools for measurement, there are just no standards.”

And there is that deterrent that people don’t know how much a download costs and are they are afraid of “sticker shock”  when the phone bill comes. “In Sweden there are several hundred mobile phone subscriptions, with different prices for surfing. How can the user really know which subscription to get and what it costs to surf when it’s paid for by megabyte?  “I think there should be flat fees for time spent, that would make cost more predictable. 

Brandt strongly believes that a newspaper’s mobile site should not be a replica of its web site. "We should not take the web and squeeze it into the mobile. That's very important I think."

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