Hi there.

I am still reflecting on our CEO off-site Roundtable at Vail, particularly as I build some of the big questions into meetings at our upcoming Los Angeles executive study tour (which you should really come to because the line-up is epic and it’s important for us to look outside of news for best practices).  

The two things that keep coming back are:

• Changes to the Big Tech ecosystems that will impact media.
• How we build and maintain true audiences — not just traffic — through brand. 

If you are thinking about these things too, have big questions — or better yet actual answers! — drop me a line. I’m at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org 

Best, Jodie

Apple Intelligence summarises app alerts, but it’s not all bad for news

As expected, Apple is now summarising app alerts. I’ll admit that I was concerned for news publishers, but it may not be as bad as I feared. 

In the screenshots below, you’ll see how alerts are handled on the lock screen. Alerts are gathered together in segments with the header “Your next summary” and “Your afternoon summary.” Note that these alerts are summarised by app, not by content.  

What we are also seeing here is that an app with multiple updates — in this example The New York Times — has its own summarised alert (I don’t think we know whether this is based on volume or user interest). The summary alert manages to summarise the top three alerts on the lock screen (on the left above). When a user then taps on the summary, a list of the alerts show (on the right above).

So what is the upshot for news?  

On the downside, your alerts could be grouped into that first category, somewhat getting hidden in the noise of app alerts. On the upside, having multiple alerts show up at once, as The New York Times example, may lead to greater click-throughs as there are more subjects to choose from on both the lock screen and the ungrouped alerts. 

Once Apple Intelligence comes out of beta, we’ll get more data to know what the outcomes are likely to be and some best practices around how to manage this change. But one thing we can be sure of now: App traffic as we know it is about to change and we should prepare accordingly.

Date for the diary: See you in Helsinki next week?

Don’t forget to drop me a line if you’ll be at INMA’s Media Innovation Week in Helsinki. It’s not often that we get to meet face to face, and I’ll be happy to help you make connections to other product and tech folk. You can reach me at  jodie.hopperton@inma.org.

Product is the core of a media brand 

At our CEO summit in Vail last month, we talked a lot about building direct traffic and the importance of brand within that. I’ve been thinking a lot about this and how product is such a central element to our brand strategy. 

In some ways your brand is your logo, your look and feel. It’s your personality, how recognisable it is. One CEO in Vail told me they are trying to wean off search and social, and were surprised to find that the majority of traffic coming through search is actually people searching for their brand. 

It seems it’s easier to type the name in Google than the url box. Now that’s brand. (It’s also fascinating how consumer habits that are totally out of our control drive so much of the behaviour around our actual products, but that’s a whole other post). 

Your brand is what differentiates you from others. Yes, content too, but brand is that first look. The same content can be packaged in different ways that give the user a totally different brand experience. How easy it is to find what they are looking for? Ease of navigation and content packaging are vitally important to the overall brand experience. 

As Riske Betten, B2C/product director at Mediahuis Netherlands, told us at a recent summit: Your brand is whatever consumers experience it as.

I would add engagement to that. How does your audience engage with your brand and content? Is it purely a lean-back experience? Or do we actually want people to lean forward and interact? If the latter, how? What is the feedback loop? 

We need to think about these experiences on and off platform. Der Speigel spent a long time thinking about how they could foster civil online debate on their own platforms. And we should think about brand off platform such as social media: What is being placed around our content? Are the comments reflective of what we want our community to look like? How can we shape that to protect our brands? 

Brand is habit, as I have talked about before. 

And for all of this, you need consistency. You need to be clear on your brand personality, on your style, and have every member of your teams living and breathing it. Because if you aren’t clear, how can your consumers be? 

Who leads brand at your organisation? Design, messaging, and experience sit with — or adjacent to — product. So while brand as a specific function may not be a written product job, it should be high on everyone’s list of considerations for every iteration and new product and feature. 

About this newsletter 

Today’s newsletter is written by Jodie Hopperton, based in Los Angeles and lead for the INMA Product and Tech Initiative. Jodie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global news media product.

This newsletter is a public face of the Product and Tech Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Jodie at jodie.hopperton@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Sign up to our Slack channel.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .