April 3, 2019
Recently, we've enjoyed the unique pleasure of onboarding Creative Review onto Apple News. Working closely with the team we strived to create an Apple News channel that communicates as well as its website and print publication, presenting journalism as graceful as the work it covers, presented in an equally tasteful fashion.
Creative Review occupies an unrivalled position within the creative industries. Alongside the print edition, which you'll find on many a creatives' desk, the digital publication operates inside a 'freemium' framework, where 50% of its content is behind a paywall, and the other 50% is available to anybody. This model launched last year with much success.
Creative Review doesn’t provide dry, industry-only reportage. The team cover everything from art, film and television advertising, publishing to illustration, with unparalleled levels of coverage. Being part of the creative industries isn't a prerequisite to falling in love with its content. And, as their freemium model has proven, new readers who discover the publication will often convert into paying subscribers.
Apple News offers a number of opportunities for a title like Creative Review. Apple's algorithm works to learn a user’s interests and their UI surfaces stories of interest to that user. This allows a story from Creative Review to appear under a story from, say, The Independent, or within a user's personalised news feed, based either on context or personal taste.
International users who may never have heard of Creative Review could end up spending plenty of time with their content, which made Apple News an enticing prospect for the team. Creative Review is published by Centaur Media, and houses a lively, engaged editorial team and a busy development department who work across multiple publications. With that in mind, we had to make their induction into Apple News as smooth as possible and make day-to-day delivery just as straightforward, to avoid obstructing hectic schedules.
“As a magazine which writes about the creative industry, we have to be a bit finickity about things like the leading of type and how images sit on a page. I think all of us breathed a sigh of relief when we saw the draft templates…they got CR straight away. We think the final templates do full justice to the brilliant photography, film and design work we write about. What’s even better, is that publishing to Apple News on a daily basis hasn’t added to our work load!”
Salonee Gadgil, Digital Content Producer, Creative Review
It goes without saying that a publication that appeals to creatives had to be designed well. This is a team that notice and care about the exact spacing between an image and a caption, or the perfect line height on mobile, tablet and desktop. Total control over look and feel was core to the brief, as was paying attention to the finest details, to ensure brand integrity.
We started out by listening to Creative Review's overall goals and how Apple News could help meet them. From here we offered insights into how Apple News performs and how best to approach growth on the platform. Considering the publication’s freemium paywall model many of these conversations focused around strategies to connect with readers that are most likely to be interested in Creative Review, helping the team to seed specific pieces of content to build loyalty.
Unique to FlatPlan is the ability for us to deliver beautiful "Apple News Format" pages through nothing more than an RSS feed. This meant the resource required from Centaur's tech team was minimal, with the system now running without any need for their developers to maintain. All the editorial team have to do to introduce stories to Apple News is tick a box when publishing a story to their site.
FlatPlan automatically maps content by category, so stories are automatically grouped into the relevant section within the Creative Review Apple News channel.Working to Creative Review’s brand guidelines we designed pages to perfectly replicate the desired look and feel. We then built out pages to be effective across mobile, tablet and desktop. This guarantees that the work Creative Review covers lives up to its full potential, no matter the device. Here’s a desktop story:
And here’s a mobile story:
A significant part of allowing the publication’s work to proliferate further was the custom footer we built. It appears at the bottom of every article, and working to the publisher’s goals it drives newsletter signups and key socials. Its sleek yet bold call to actions are tailor-made to invite conversions.
FlatPlan’s simplicity offered Creative Review a quick and easy turnaround on Apple News. Our knowledge of the platform helped Creative Review to launch onto Apple News with a strategy driven by insights and guidance on growth. It's early days, but Creative Review has already seen huge success since launch, with articles featured in the Spotlight and chosen by Apple News editors within editorial groups.
Welcome to Apple News, Creative Review!
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