CORNER OFFICE By Denis Wilson The Power of Digital & Data ALM Chief Digital Officer Jeff Litvack explains how combining the right digital products and smart data can enhance user experience, drive subscription revenue, and lead to new content verticals. ALM Media’s Jeff Litvack is bullish on digital magazines. If paired with a smart web strategy, useful mobile apps, and the data that connects all the pieces, the chief digital officer expects digital magazines will in the future serve much the same role printed magazines have in the past. “We look at digital editions as being a huge value proposition to our readers,” says Litvack. “The print version delivers something that we haven’t really succeeded in delivering in the digital world in general. In the digital world and online world, it’s about the ‘linked economy.’ You go online and you go from one link to the next link and you never end. The beautiful thing about the print version that we’ve always had is that when you start you have a beginning and you have an end and there’s a sense of completeness.” Litvack is confident that a digital strategy that connects all of ALM’s products—printed and digital magazines and newspapers, apps, websites, and more— from a user experience and data standpoint, will yield plenty of opportunities to grow the business. Litvack says it has already proven to drive audience retention and engagement, convert more casual readers to members or subscribers, and spur the launch of new, scalable content verticals. Crucial to this strategy has been bringing the digital publishing process into the in-house workflow, powered by Adobe’s Digital Publishing System. It’s helping ALM gain the control and connectedness needed to make the products truly their own and understand how individual are using all their different platforms. More sophisticated knowledge of how readers behave and what their interests are has led to more personalized content experiences, more robust advertiser offerings, greater subscriber conversions, and new revenue streams. What do you see for the future of your digital magazines? We’ve been an early adopter of digital editions, although I don’t think we really succeeded with it up until now. I see us really ac-celerating the growth by switching over to Adobe DPS. The main reason for that is because we’re going to change it from [an out-sourced] relationship to making it part of our internal workflow. The really beautiful thing about Adobe DPS is how it connects with the current workflow programs, whether that’s InCopy or InDesign or K4, basically allowing our full production team to get their hands on it and produce an edition that’s really our style, our look, our feel, and even including the Omniture piece of it. You need to connect all the information about pageviews and time-spent and really wrap it together. The interesting thing in the early days of apps and digital editions and the like is a lot of publishers dipped their toes in and said, “I’m going to go off and do this because I need to be in the marketplace.” Now what we’re working towards is an integrated solution. We have one core audience and we need to have all the solutions in place and they all need to work together in a very symbiotic relationship. What’s the benefit of having all your digital publications created internally using one system? We’ve got both paid circulation and controlled circulation magazines and newspapers. What we’re looking to do is take the paid circulations and bring them onto the Adobe platform so we can bring them into the whole paid subscription model. Right now we distrib-ute our daily newspapers in a print for-mat, digitally on our websites and mobiles websites, through apps, and the digital edition right now is a PDF version. And what we’ve found is that people are read-ing that regularly and we have no stats, no data, no information about that and it’s not controlled within the entire subscrip-tion workflow. We see that as an oppor-tunity to bring them into the family and long term really grow our subscriptions because we’ll have much better data. A 14 Publishing ExEcutivE • august 2014