The innovation experts reinvent their own app experience.

Fast Company, the world’s leading progressive business media brand, working in close collaboration with Adobe, recently launched a new mobile app that breaks from today’s print-like digital magazine offering to give readers a holistic brand engagement experience that combines magazine content with real-time news on a platform optimized for mobile devices.

The new Fast Company app gives an early look at many of the capabilities that will be part of the new digital publishing product that Adobe will bring to market in the summer of 2015. These capabilities will be instrumental in driving deeper brand engagement on mobile devices.

Here is a detailed look at the new Fast Company mobile app:

A content-first experience

The Fast Company app gives readers direct access to content as soon as the app is installed, removing barriers like storefronts, issue downloads and immediate payment requirements that have inhibited engagement in the past. Once the app is installed, readers can explore articles, videos, the magazine and more. It delivers an immersive mobile experience, capturing audience and engagement.

A modern browsing, reading, and viewing experience

The Fast Company app is a mobile-first experience that breaks from the print-replica model and offers its audience a browsing, reading, and viewing experience that is thoughtfully designed and delivered seamlessly across multiple screens through responsive layout.

The app has three main sections:

Today’s Top 5: Our Picks

Fast Company editors handpick five new articles each day for their mobile audience and date stamp them to clearly indicate that fresh content is constantly available to readers.

Latest Stories

A dynamic feed automatically pushes the latest stories from fastcompany.com and the Fast Company networks including Co.Design, Co.Exist, and Co.Create, a perfect aggregated mix of Fast Company brand properties.

The Magazine

The monthly magazine is now presented in an article-centric, easy-to-browse experience and is no longer a fixed dimension layout format optimized for a single screen.

Fast Company also integrated offline reading so that when readers find themselves without internet access—on the train, the subway, on a plane—they can still interact with the Fast Company brand everyday, whenever and wherever they are.

“People have their phones with them all day long, and there are many interstitial moments in which they might want a quick dip into a high-quality story from a trusted brand.”
— Anthony Kosner from Forbes, in a recent article about the new Fast Company app

Continuous content updates

At the heart of this modern app experience is the ability to give readers fresh content that creates a reason for frequent visits and drives deeper brand engagement. Mobile app publishing is no longer tied to print schedules and instead content updates can be made as makes sense for today’s mobile world. Native capabilities in the application offer the reader a tailor made custom experience that feels fluid and rich.

Article-based–not issue-based–publishing

Fast Company adds 40-50 articles to its various brand properties each day and now, they are easily able to push those articles as bite-sized pieces of content to their app throughout the day so their audience can quickly read while on the go in a native app experience. With article-based publishing, the app stays up-to-date and relevant with its readers. Early data indicates that 67% of daily visitors click through to at least one article per day.

Subscription options

This new model of continuous, article-based publishing requires a new way for readers to pay for content. While single issue and subscription purchases will continue to be available in the future, a new, all-access payment model will become available in Summer 2015. So, while the Fast Company app is free for the first three months, they will have the ability to offer an all-access subscription that entitles the reader to everything in the app—an attractive option that mobile readers will welcome.

Enterprise-grade administration tools

This re-imagined mobile experience will also include an accompanying flexible set of administration tools that will empower practitioners to assign the right level of responsibility and access to everyone on the team, including employees and external agencies.

The new Fast Company app is the first step toward delivering an even richer brand engagement experience to all types of audiences. Whether a media company, large corporation or higher education institution — there will soon be an entirely new way to bring engaging, relevant content to audiences.

Angie’s List sees 670% increase in readership with transition to weekly format

Angie’s List was founded 20 years ago as a trusted resource to help consumers find reliable, local service professionals. What started as a review service has transitioned into a leading local service marketplace where the best consumers and the best service providers are transacting nearly $15 billion on the platform each year. In addition to the digital marketplace, their three million members also enjoy an award-winning, print magazine, and exclusive discounts on popular home services a task-based mobile app to shop, fix and search on the go and, now, a weekly brand engagement app that delivers tips and trends, exclusive content and practical advice for home and health.

Here, Ry Lickliter, Angie’s List’s Mobile Creative Director for Content, who recently presented at a DPS Symposium, and Shelly Towns, Senior Vice President of Product for Angie’s List, share more background about the strategy behind Angie’s List Weekly, the app’s success, and their plans for the future.

Adobe: Tell us how you initially started using Adobe DPS.
Towns: From day one, our award-winning monthly print magazine, Angie’s List, provided a tangible reminder of the valuable service we offer. We ship about 2.4 million issues each month, putting us among the top 20 publishers in the U.S. Our staff of 80 produces 120 versions of the print magazine, each tailored for specific markets. With so many monthly versions, we needed a digital publishing solution that would seamlessly integrate into our production schedule and workflow and Adobe DPS was the perfect tool for this. Our first foray into digital publishing with DPS, was creating a digital version of our monthly magazine with limited interactivity.

Adobe: Why did you move to a weekly publication?
Towns: We were looking for a way to augment our website, our app, and our print magazine. We decided to retire our monthly magazine app and create Angie’s List Weekly, a completely reinvented native experience that gives us an opportunity to interact with consumers much more often. The weekly publication gives our members exclusive articles and tips, smart ideas with refreshing perspectives, and practical advice for home and health — all from Angie’s List and the highly-rated service professionals our members trust.

Lickliter: Building a native app also gave us the ability to more easily publish to more devices and broaden our audience. Today about 52% of Angie’s List Weekly users access the app on their iPhone and about 48% access it on their iPad.

Adobe: What are the most important business goals for the app?
Towns: Our primary goals are to increase customer engagement and drive transactions. We create content that inspires readers to tackle projects around their home by shopping our local service marketplace for the best service providers and pre-packaged offers. We use bite-sized, easily digestible content to craft the mobile experience and use it as a hook to acquire new members who find us in the App Store. We also plan to roll out an Android version.

Adobe: How has the app performed in the first three months?
Lickliter: We’ve seen an amazing 670% increase in readership since transitioning to the weekly model. As noted earlier, driving members to our website or task-based app for monetization opportunities is key. We’re really excited because since March, 27% of CTA clicks point to actions that drive commerce — very strong indicators that Angie’s List Weekly readers are getting inspired and taking action.

Another important metric is how soon and how frequently users return and engage with the app. When we moved from a monthly to a weekly publication, we immediately saw 61% of readers return within one week and 76% return within two weeks—proof that our user base is engaged and coming back.

Adobe: What are you seeking to learn about readers?
Towns: The app is new, so we’re still learning which content drives stickiness, and which drives monetization. Ultimately, we’re looking for buying behavior, whether in the form of renewing a membership, purchasing prepackaged services, submitting reviews and SnapFix jobs that we handle for the consumer from start-to-finish.

Lickliter: We really want to get smarter through DPS analytics. We run a weekly and monthly content audit to understand how content is performing, how deep people are getting into the articles, how much on one topic is too much or too little, and so on.

We want to define the best possible experience for readers. We want to know when we lose them, when we engage them, and whether they are more likely to click on something above or below the fold. All of these things will make our app even more successful.

Adobe: How do you market your app and keep existing readers coming back?
Towns: As you can imagine with our large subscriber base, we have huge marketing and social channels. We use email marketing, promote the app in our print magazine, and get good results from App Store promotions. We’re also leveraging push notifications in a smart way, and have an enviable push opt-in rate of 92.5%, up from around 10% with the monthly edition.

Lickliter: We have a dedicated interactive content team working on the app. Organically, we’ve gotten great placement in the App Store. When we got a top five placement we saw a big surge, and we’re still in the top 20. We also got a nice bump when we were named Best New Publishing Brand for Angie’s List Weekly at the 2014 Digiday Publishing Awards.

Towns: Our content and visuals are the reason we are seeing terrific engagement. We will continue to leverage content production across channels. We view content as a valuable differentiator between our competitors and us, and Adobe DPS is helping us to continue moving forward.

Download the app to see more Angie’s List Weekly.

Buffalo Bills Doubles App Audience Size and Wins Microsoft Surface as Title Sponsor

When the Buffalo Bills launched the Buffalo Bills Touch app for the 2013 football season, it successfully expanded the team’s reach and fan engagement well beyond Ralph Wilson Stadium. Since then, the app, created with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (DPS), has continued to evolve and has become a crucial component of their brand strategy. The Buffalo Bills have built a powerhouse content strategy heavily informed by metrics and reader input, expanded their reach across both Android and Windows platforms doubling their audience year over year, and secured Microsoft Surface as a title sponsor.

Aaron La Porta, who drives strategy, content, and design for the Buffalo Bills Touch app, is excited by the results.

Adobe: Tell us about the Buffalo Bills Touch app.
La Porta: Buffalo Bills Touch is a Bills fan’s dream come true. The weekly publication, Buffalo Bills Fan Playbook, offers an interactive, second screen experience for fans that want a closer connection to the Buffalo Bills. Content includes interactive rosters, animated depth charts, behind-the-scenes team videos, a live image gallery that updates during the game, and an in-app streamed featured video segment from Bills All Access Live pregame show. We want fans to wake up on game day, sit down with their coffee and their tablet, and start getting excited about the game.

We‘ve also expanded from publishing just the Buffalo Bills Fan Playbook for the games to publishing more content, including an interactive guide detailing the renovation of Ralph Wilson Stadium, an NFL draft preview issue, and a team guide with thumbnails of coaches and players, their roles, stats, and cool videos. Fans loved the renovation guide, which lets them see what’s new at the stadium, take an interactive virtual tour, and see 3D fly-throughs of the stadium.

Adobe: How has publishing across all three platforms — Windows, iOS, and Android — impacted the success of your app?
La Porta: When we first started we were on iOS only, so a key goal was to expand to Android and Windows for broader brand exposure and therefore, a more attractive vehicle for sponsors. We’re now on all three platforms, and it was well worth the investment because this expansion has resulted in a more than 100% increase in our audience, and we now have a larger audience on Windows and Android combined than on iOS.

Adobe: Securing Microsoft Surface as the title sponsor is a really big deal. How did you do it?
La Porta: La Porta: It was important for us to work with a sponsor that was the right fit for the savvy digital experience that Buffalo Bills Touch offers. It was clear from the start that Microsoft Surface was the right partner as they were already an official sponsor of the NFL and we wanted to tie them to the Buffalo Bills as an official sponsor as well. This partnership is a great way for us to offset the costs of publishing our app and further elevate the Buffalo Bills brand.

Adobe: How do you market the app?
La Porta: Our focus is on marketing the app to keep it top of mind with our fans so that they feel compelled to engage with it on a regular basis. We promote the latest issue through push and text notifications, our website, email campaigns, social networking channels, and printed materials. We want fans to be excited when they receive a notification on their tablets letting them know that there is a new issue available.

Adobe: How are you gathering feedback from fans?
La Porta: We have a weekly giveaway during the season for fans who fill out our feedback form. We ask them how they use the app and what they would like to see included in future issues. In return, they have a chance to win a player-autographed item. This helps steer us toward making the app a more meaningful experience for fans.

Adobe: What important things have you learned from the analytics in DPS that have impacted your content strategy?
La Porta: At first, we were publishing issues on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning before each game. After looking at the analytics, we found that the majority of fans weren’t downloading until later in the week, with the majority downloading on Saturday and Sunday. We realized we could push publishing back 24 to 48 hours and include more up-to-the-minute content and have adjusted our publish schedule based on that feedback.

Adobe: What makes Buffalo Bills Touch unique?
La Porta: We’re one of the only teams in the NFL that develops its creative content for mobile apps in house. This gives us the ability to react immediately. We have a very fluid pipeline internally so when big news comes through, such as a new hire or a trade, we can publish the news immediately and use push notifications to drive our audience back into the app to read more.

Adobe: What are your goals for 2015?
La Porta: Now that we have a title sponsor, we want to attach more sponsors to the various app sections, similar to what we do on the Buffalo Bills website, which will help us further underwrite the cost of producing the app. Overall, the app fits well into our brand marketing strategy, and it’s great to have the data to support its value. We want to continue to make Buffalo Bills Touch an integral part of Bills fans’ experience and keep them more connected with the franchise.