GLOBAL – UNITED STATES, FEBRUARY 18, 2013 – Hearst Digital Media, a unit of Hearst Magazines, will soon incorporate a new look in its online publications. The change will see the company prioritize responsive design and personalization of ads.
The first two magazines to make the switch are RoadandTrack.com and TownandCountryMag.com. Other titles that will go under facelift include Cosmopolitan, Popular Mechanics, Good Housekeeping, and Esquire.
In an interview with Techcrunch.com, Tom Smith, Hearst vice president of technology and strategy, said that the whole company is switching to a new publishing platform, which incorporates both responsive design and personalization.
Responsive websites or website optimization has long been a popular strategy for companies to keep their audience across the range of screens available. The new responsive design is the more obvious change for Hearst, a company that is known to have declared effectiveness of its contrarian internet ways in 2009 when the company saw an increase in physical magazine readership for most of its surviving titles.
Hearst Digital’s personalization strategy is also significant, something that will allow different audience segments to view different ads. This approach will now target editorial content as well. Not to position its editors as marketers, Hearst will roll out this strategy in small increments, allowing its audience to adjust.
An example of ads personalization in the editorial side is by showing a different set of recommended content links to different readers of the same article, depending on factors like their location, what device they’re using and how they came to the current page. Still another take on this is creating different versions of an editorial promotion, Smith said, such as different headlines and images designed to appeal to different audiences.
