Vanity Fair and engaging advertising

How is the changing face of publishing affecting the core business goals of magazines like Vanity Fair as they produce digital editions alongside their printed publications? Can the engaging new tablet-based issues continue their company's publishing tradition of telling and illustrating great stories while at the same time pleasing all-important advertisers? These are the questions facing many companies, big and small, as they wrangle with new ways of publishing and doing business.    

This video shows how the team at Vanity Fair uses Adobe® InDesign® software and Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to produce the fine editorial content that the publication is famous for both in print and on tablet. Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter says, "We tell stories here with great photography and great writers, and we do it in better ways than just about anybody else. My experience in the magazine business has changed dramatically in terms of the technology but not in what you actually do — telling stories."

With print and digital publications sharing the same content, the challenge for the production team is to provide a consistent experience across all versions of the magazine. Using the same key creative and production tools — InDesign and Digital Publishing Suite — the team builds both print and iPad app versions. Jamie Pallot, executive director of multimedia projects, says that using the Adobe publishing tools means you get to spend more time on the creative part and less time worrying about the publishing part. By publishing an iPad edition, Vanity Fair engages a broad new audience with its storytelling content, many of whom have never purchased a print version of the magazine.

But what about the flip side of the business? Does digital publishing provide an equally compelling platform for advertisers? Can ads featured in a digital magazine be just as engaging and, more importantly for the advertisers, be more effective than the static print versions of the same messaging? A recent study titled "Digital Ad Engagement: Perceived Interactivity as a Driver of Advertising Effectiveness," by Alex Wang, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, Stamford, answers these questions.

The study looked at how participants interacted with two versions of the same advertising content — one static, in print, and one interactive, viewed on the iPad. They were then surveyed about their overall impression of the advertisements.

Wang was looking to answer the following key questions:

• Can interactive ads in a digital magazine generate stronger engagement, message involvement, attitude, and overall brand awareness than static ads in a print magazine?
• Can higher interactivity initiated by an interactive ad generate stronger brand recall, engagement, message involvement, attitude, and purchase intention than a static ad?
• What are the relationships among interactivity, engagement, message involvement, attitude, and purchase intention?

The results were encouraging for advertisers: The digital magazine format showed promise because of its interactive nature. The participants' overall engagement, involvement, and attitude toward advertising were higher with the interactive content versus the static. And their stated intention to buy was higher as well.

Such results should encourage publishers and advertisers to work to enhance the engagement of their audience by building creative and interactive content for digital publications. Download a copy of the study.