The From Line

What’s the best way to get heavy foot traffic to your new cafe in New York City?

a) Rent a property right next to major tourist attractions and build your cafe there
b) Buy a property out of the way of tourist attractions and build your cafe there

(Yes, obviously buying a property next to major tourist attractions would be the best move, but you don’t have that kind of money.)

Here we face the dilemma of the “long short road” and the “short long road.”

Written for Publishing Executive by Elie Ashery, Gold Lasso CEO 

Melody Kramer’s recent piece, “When newsrooms don’t own their data, other companies profit” on Poynter should be a hard and fast wake-up call for publishers. Kramer, a former digital strategist at NPR and former visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, offers several insights from publishers about how newsrooms collect then give away data programmatically without fair compensation. Most of the examples she provides are related to behavioral data, however “data fleecing” publishers stretches way beyond link tracking and location check-ins.

The Publisher

Spanfeller Media Group (SMG) is a fast growth media company, headed up by Jim Spanfeller, former CEO of Forbes. The Daily Meal (TDM) was the first site launched by SMG in the early months of 2011. Since then it has proven to be one of the fastest growing content sites ever and the fastest growing site within the food sphere.

The Situation

As an online publisher that is constantly producing content for distribution, The Daily Meal was manually compiling newsletters several times per day to distribute to their subscribers. This was time-consuming, resource intensive, and the furthest thing from automated. There was also no monetization effort in place which left TDM feeling like they were leaving money on the table every single day. Jim Spanfeller created an in-house solution--he assembled two teams: one team to search for automation options for their daily email distribution, and another team to look into monetization opportunities. Little did he know that they could find solutions to both at Gold Lasso. 

According to to Litmus “Email Analytics”, 55% of all email is opened on mobile devices. It’s time for publishers to face the fact that information is being consumed more on the go, and email that is not designed for the mobile world first is doomed for failure.

User Experience
It’s all about the user experience. Understanding what is pleasing to the eye and attention-grabbing to subscribers is vital. There is a lot to be learned from the layout of the email design and how it is interpreted -- to ensure a second glance and not an immediate dump into the trash.

For starters, it’s imperative to create a responsive design that will optimize viewer traffic. We’re all familiar with responsive web design, and email is no stranger to this veneer. The methods to generate responsive email design are practically scientific. A effortless change of the font size, layout, adding padding, modifying color, navigation, scaling of images, hierarchy, and alteration of content can make all the difference. 

When I was in high school in the early 90’s I was tasked with selling advertising for the school newspaper.  With little understanding of what media and printing was all about, I was told our school newspaper sold ads by the column inch.  But the column inch wasn’t a real inch.  It was 11 picas or roughly 1.83 inches.  This confused me as I didn’t understand how I was going to convince an advertiser to place an ad in a measurement that really wasn’t what it was.  I soon figured out that the column inch was standardized across all newspapers and it wasn’t unique to my particular school.  After I mastered the column inch learning curve, needless to say I was much more successful at selling newspaper ads than trying to explain what it is.