The Sparkbeat

23 Oct 2012

4 Gold, 3 Silver Canadian Online Publishing Awards for Sparksheet

2012/10/23 · Dan Levy · Responses (7)

Sparksheet is an international publication but most of our team is based in Montreal and it’s always exciting to be recognized in our own country.

Last night we won big at the fourth annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards, picking up a total of seven awards in the Blue (business-to-business, professional association, farm, scholarly) division, including:

Best overall online-only publication (Gold)
Best website design (Gold)
Best e-newsletter (Gold)
Best mobile-optimized website (Gold)
Best blog (Silver)
Best use of social media (Silver)
Best article of series of articles (Silver)

Other big winners this year included the CBC, the National Post, Maclean’s and Huffington Post Canada. A huge thank you to the COPA judges and congratulations to all the other winners.

24 Sep 2012

Sparksheet @ Digital Book World Discoverability and Marketing

2012/09/24 · Sophie Woodrooffe · Responses (8)

The digital publishing industry made international headlines last April with an antitrust lawsuit involving Amazon, Apple and five major publishing houses. If digital publishing wasn’t considered a mature market then, it certainly is now.

But there’s a whole lot more to the e-book world than backroom distribution deals. And that’s why we’ll be attending (and live-tweeting!) the Digital Book World Discoverability and Marketing event this week in New York. The conference brings together content creators, publishers and publicists for two session-packed days of e-book marketing info.

And since e-books can be published with the click of a mouse, the industry is attracting a diverse crowd of stakeholders, including traditional publishers exploring business models that will maximize print-to-web profits as well as social sites like Goodreads that capitalize on the sharability of online content.

Traditional topics like word-of-mouth, SEO, and social media solutions will be accompanied by more industry-specific sessions, such as those that offer advice on how publishers and authors can share the burden of marketing their titles online.

Speakers include Charles Duhigg from the New York Times, Book Riot co-founder Clinton Kabler and Amazon’s author and publisher relationships director, Jon Fine. Follow us at our usual home on Twitter or else check out the event hashtag #DBWDM12 to receive live event coverage.

14 Sep 2012

Sparksheet Nominated for Three Folio Magazine Awards

2012/09/14 · Dan Levy · Responses (4)

We’re thrilled to announce that Sparksheet has been nominated for three Folio Awards this fall.

Comprising The Eddies, which recognize editorial excellence, and the Ozzies, which honour excellence in magazine design, the Folio Awards are one of the largest international awards programs in magazine publishing. Sparksheet is nominated in the B2B category for:

Best Standalone Digital Magazine (Eddie)
Best Online Column or Blog (Eddie)
Best Digital Magazine Design (Ozzie)

Last year, Sparksheet won Best Online Column or Blog for our design director Charles Lim’s column Print in Digital Clothing: The Problem with Magazine Apps.

The awards will be presented in New York City on October 31. Congratulations to all the other nominees! It’s an honour to be selected.

13 Sep 2012

What Does Platform Agnostic Mean?

2012/09/13 · Sophie Woodrooffe and Dan Levy · Responses (42)

We’ve been using the term “platform agnostic” for years. But our recent feature article about the future of magazine apps has given us pause to reflect on an uncomfortable truth: We’re not entirely sure what “platform agnostic” means anymore.

Ask a web developer and she will invariably start waxing poetic about hardware architecture, software frameworks and programming languages. Ask a journalist and he’s likely to start talking about the places content is housed – in print, on the web or in an app.

Speak to a film or television producer, writer or marketer and they might casually drop the term “transmedia,” a close cousin of platform agnosticism which is coming into its own as an industry. Last year we attended a conference in San Francisco all about transmedia.

We like to think of Sparksheet as a platform agnostic magazine. That means we aren’t wedded to any particular medium. We love the web, but we also think there’s a time and place for print, TV and even radio (check out our new podcast).

It also means our content is available on whatever screens or device you want to consume it on, thanks to our website’s responsive design.

Confused yet? So are we.

Which is why we’re asking you to give us your take on the same question:

What does platform agnostic mean to you? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

For Rosie Allimonos, transmedia storytelling expands the brand universes of BBC shows like EastEnders and Doctor Who.

If you’re going to extend a show in any way, you have to figure out what its DNA is, what its essence is as a brand. Then you can carry that over to different platforms and decide if there is anything new to be added to the mix.

-Rosie Allimonos, BBC Television

Transmedia pioneer and media scholar Henry Jenkins thinks cross-platform content is all about extending the lifespan of a story.

Pieces of the story can be scattered across media platforms and that creates incentives for us to return to that content again and again, creating multiple touchpoints for brands but also creating an expanded canvas for storytellers to work on. The story is not tied to one platform. It is in all media.

-Henry Jenkins, Author, Convergence Culture

Henry Jenkins. Image by WayneKLin via Flickr.

Brazilian storyteller and startup founder Mauricio Mota thinks the platform itself can shape how a transmedia story is told.

You are not locked to a little island, you’ve got this big map and people will want to explore it on the Internet, on their cellphone, at an event, or reading a newspaper or magazine… Transmedia allows you to develop different parts of a story, for different audiences, on whatever platform suits it best.

-Mauricio Mota, The Alchemists

Platform agnosticism isn’t just about telling good stories. Medical doctor and science journalist Ivan Oransky thinks it has pedagogical power, too.

Journalists have always reported, curated, edited and managed information in various ways, no matter what we called it. What has changed over time, as technology gives us more options, is how we display that information to readers, viewers and listeners.

-Ivan Oransky, Executive Editor, Reuters Health

New York Times editor Jonathan Landman boasts about the flexibility that reporting on the web gives to print journalists. For him, multiplatform means the convergence of real-time news on the web with classic print publishing.

Are we a genuine, platform-agnostic 24-hour newsgathering operation or what? Guy climbs building at 1:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning after the paper had closed and the print editors had left the building. Web staff is on the case. We publish the news at 3:11 a.m. We add new information as it becomes available. We mobilize Sewell Chan at 4:30. By 6 a.m. there’s a 1,000-word story with pictures. Good morning, New York.

-Jonathan Landman, Deputy Managing Editor, The New York Times

Maurício Mota. Image by jmm kazi via Flickr.

For content marketer and writer David Preece, being platform agnostic means being adaptive to the constantly shifting winds of mobile and web-based technologies, be they applications or hardware.

By staying platform agnostic, and making sure you do what’s best for your clients and content, you’ll already be one step ahead of those agencies who are fixated on just developing for the latest web platform regardless of suitability.

-David Preece, Beyond

Same goes for digital and social expert David Patton, who argues that staying platform agnostic lets marketers focus on good content.

Companies looking to sell to consumers or enterprises need to be creating content that can be easily adapted to any platform. Like newsrooms, marketing needs to evolve from being focused on filling a specific platform to creating compelling content that fits in any bucket.

-David Patton, Waggener Edstrom

Tell us: What does platform agnostic mean to you?

31 Aug 2012

China, Chile Have Fastest-Growing Mobile Markets

2012/08/31 · Sophie Woodrooffe · Responses (9)

No piece of modern technology has been adopted at a faster rate than iOS and Android-enabled devices, according to a study by mobile application analytics firm Flurry.

The study takes stock of worldwide mobile growth five years after the launch of the iPhone and finds that the market for what the study calls “smart devices” (iOS and Android-enabled smartphone and tablets) is growing at an unprecedented scale.

This growth is unmatched by the Internet Boom of the ‘90s and the adoption of social media in the ‘00s. The study puts iOS and Android device adoption at 10 times the rate of PC adoption in the ‘80s.

chart of mobile growth

Flurry collected data from 200,000 applications that it tracks across the globe to paint a picture of market growth and device penetration. The study estimates that 640 million iOS and Android devices are in use as of July 2012 and puts the U.S. and China as the most dominant countries in terms of usage.

When it comes to growth, it’s all about the developing countries. Chile ranks second after China in the list of countries with the fastest growing Android and iOS markets. Brazil, Russia and India also appear at the top of the ranking.

Emerging markets dominate the list because early adopter markets like the U.S. and Western Europe are already reaching market saturation. Topping the list of saturated markets are three countries with relatively small and wealthy populations: Singapore (92%), Hong Kong (87%) and Sweden (86%).

While more active devices exist in the U.S. than anywhere else (165 million), China, with an explosive year-over-year growth rate of 401 percent, stands to overtake the U.S. by December 2012.

That means the mobile revolution is a truly international event, thanks in large part to the ease with which applications can be designed and shared. As Peter Farago, Flurry’s VP of marketing wrote in the company’s blog, “with international growth accelerating, there has never been a better time, in the history of technology, to be a software developer.”

24 Aug 2012

Mobile Health Apps On the Rise: Study

2012/08/24 · Sophie Woodrooffe · Responses (23)

The market for health and fitness apps may be in its infancy, but it’s growing up fast, concludes a study released this month by marketing and public relations firm Verasoni Worldwide.

The firm collected download data from the top 150 medical apps for iPhone and Android in the U.S. to provide a “snapshot” of the mobile health market.

The point of the study is to give health providers (pharmaceutical companies, physicians and dentists, life sciences companies and hospitals) a sense of the downloading behaviours of the public in relation to mobile health.

The report cites Pew research, which found that 11 percent of adults with cell phones have downloaded a mobile health app. Still, the market remains in its infancy, says the study, and healthcare providers are only beginning to grasp the potential of mobile.

Healthcare professionals are developing niche apps that might one day revolutionize the way healthcare is provided. Mayo Clinic’s iPad app, for example, helps recovering heart surgery patients.

They can access their plan of care and ask questions to their team through the app. The app also sends data to the healthcare team.

The study found that weight loss and exercise apps totaled 60 percent of downloads and were the biggest sellers. The next most popular categories are: Women’s health, sleep and meditation, pregnancy, “tools and instruments,” reference and emergency.

Another key finding was the popularity of tracking devices that let users download, store and measure data. The study offers Nike’s FuelBand as an example, which tracks its users’ daily activities through a bracelet. The data is then transferred to an app that motivates users to accomplish their fitness goals.

The study also compared iPhone and Android downloads. People with iPhones bought seven times more health apps than Android owners. App downloads on iPhones (67 million) outpaced Android (59 million) by more than 8 million downloads.

The most downloaded apps across devices were “Lose It!” and “Calorie Counter & Diet,” with a combined total of 24 million downloads. Next on the list are “Pregnancy Tracker” (2.5 million), “MapMyRUN” (2.4 million) and “Period Tracker Lite” (2.2 million).

For more information, check out the executive summary.

8 Aug 2012

Presenting Sparksheet’s Free Emerging Markets E-Book

2012/08/08 · Dan Levy · Responses (7)

For the past few years TNS Austalia’s Carolyn Childs has been writing think pieces for Sparksheet that help marketers unpack the cultural challenges and business opportunities of the world’s emerging markets.

Today we’re thrilled to present the culmination of that cross-continental partnership: A brand new Sparksheet e-book!

In Same Same But Different: Understanding Emerging Markets, Carolyn offers insights and data about digital trends in Brazil, status anxiety in India, travel habits in China, mobile adoption in Africa, sexual politics in Russia and much more.

Much thanks to Carolyn, Vanessa Hamilton and the rest of the team at TNS Australia’s Travel and Leisure Research division for their ongoing support and collaboration.

You can download the e-book for free on our special microsite at – and test your own knowledge in our interactive Emerging Markets Quiz.

7 Aug 2012

Brazil and Mexico Dominate List of 50 Most Valuable Latin American Brands

2012/08/07 · Sophie Woodrooffe · Responses (5)

As a mark of South America’s budding global impact, WPP research agency Milward Brown has published its inaugural BrandZ ranking of the fifty most valuable Latin American brands.

The report uses data collected from about 800 brands and interviews from over 25,000 Latin American consumers. Only brands from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were included.

Image by Millward Brown

With a value of $10.6 billion, Brazilian energy company Petrobas topped the list. Mexican communication provider telcel came in second and Bradesco, a financial institution from Brazil, ranked third.

Latin America is fertile ground for investors looking to capitalize on new wealth in emerging markets. Since 2006 the middle class has grown by 25 percent throughout the continent and despite a worldwide economic lull, GDPs are on the rise.

As the affluence and influence of Latin American countries rise, local brands are gaining a foothold on the regional and international stages.

The value and reach of financial, communication and retail brands have grown the most, according to the report. Brands from these categories comprise more than half the ranking’s entries.

The two best represented countries in the index are Brazil and Mexico. Meanwhile, Chile, Colombia and Argentina comprise 40 percent of the ranking’s total $136 billion brand value.

Regional and local differences

While Brazilian and Mexican brands dominate the list, consumers in those countries are extremely diverse.

Mexico is the largest Spanish speaking country in the world with access to a wider variety of brands than other Latin American countries, thanks to its proximity to the United States. As a result, Mexican consumers tend to be less loyal to brands.

Portuguese-speaking Brazil, on the other hand, has the most loyal customers, with 65 percent choosing brand favourites and sticking to them. Brazil also has the most optimistic consumers, due in large part to its fantastic economic growth over the last five years (we actually did a whole podcast on this which you can listen to here).

Digital up for adoption

When it comes to internet usage, Latin America continues to play catch up (although significant growth is expected in the near future). Poor infrastructure, spotty G3 network coverage and expensive data plans have kept internet penetration at a paltry 50 percent for most countries (Chile has the highest, according to the report).

But these numbers are at odds with Latin America’s enthusiasm for social media. Latin Americans are accessing digital content via mobile connections more than ever (especially in Mexico) and are using that connectivity to interact on social networks.

Colombian users, for instance, spend up to eight hours per week on social networks. That’s nearly double the global average of 4.8 hours.

The report’s conclusion: Brands looking to engage Latin American consumers should make themselves at home on social media. Because as internet penetration improves, brand reach will, too.

For more information, download the full report [PDF].

20 Jul 2012

McDonald’s French Fry Controversy Shakes Up Brand Olympics

2012/07/20 · Sophie Woodrooffe · Responses (5)

Image by David King, via Flickr.

Will London 2012 be remembered as the first social media Olympics or for the great dictatorchip overthrow (The Gaurdian’s pun, not ours)?

Last week news went viral that McDonald’s had secured the right to be the exclusive hawker of fried potato products at the Games.

There is one exception, however: the iconic British duo of fish and chips. Replace the halibut with a burger or sausage and you’ll be booted from London’s infamous’ brand exclusion zones.

The Guardian reports that LOCOG had to gain special permission for its caterers to serve fries to those working on the grounds after the ban caused massive uproar among the employees preparing the site. The rule, however, will stay in place for spectators (who will also be prevented from bringing “excessive” amounts of food and bottled water to the games).

Heineken is the official beer of London Olympics.

And in case spectators were hoping to wash down those fish and chips with a refreshing Newcastle or Carling, they’ll have to think again.

Dutch brewer Heineken is the Games’ official beer, putting LOCOG at odds with Liberal Democrat Greg Mulholland, who raised the issue in Parliament. His website says, ”by choosing a mass-produced, bland foreign lager, the committee has ignored all the wonderful, traditional beers that the UK has to offer and instead gone for the company with the biggest [chequebook].”

LOCOG has been stirring up plenty of controversy for its aggressive approach to enforcing sponsorship and Olympic trademark protections, which can be traced back to the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act of 2006, formulated specifically to protect the value of Olympic sponsorships.

Trademarks like “London 2012” and the tagline “Higher, Faster, Stronger” cannot be used by businesses operating around the Olympic park, but other less direct words will also be prohibited. “London,” “Summer,” “Gold,” Silver” and “Bronze,” cannot be used, for example, if their intended meaning references the Games, reports the Independent.

In a now-famous case, one proprietor was forced to change the name of his establishment from Olympic Café to ‘Lympic Café. In another case, local florists were given a warning by officials because of their window display, which featured the Olympic rings made out of tissue paper.

Bristol-based graffiti artist Criminal Chalklist's artistic protest.

The East London district where the Games are being held is famous for its thriving artistic community, and some artists, such as Bristol street artist Criminal Chalklist, have taken to the streets in protest of the law.

There’s still plenty of time to place bets on London 2012’s legacy. Right now the brand politics surrounding the games seems like a pretty good wager. But, then again, that might change once the torch is lit and the athletes take their rightful place in the spotlight.

17 Jul 2012

Good Ideas: The Sparksheet Podcast – “Brand Brazil”

2012/07/17 · Dan Levy · Responses (15)

At Sparksheet we’re proud to call ourselves a multiplatform magazine and today we’re adding yet another platform to our content arsenal – a podcast!

We’re big believers in the power and intimacy of audio and agree with folks like Mitch Joel and Jay Baer that podcasting is an undervalued and underutilized medium.

Called “Good Ideas” after our trusty tagline, the podcast will allow us to delve deeper into some of the content, media and marketing stories we explore on Sparksheet.

In our first episode, we explore the increasingly relevant phenomenon of country branding (also known as “nation branding” or “place branding”) through the lens of one of the most successful country brands out there: Brand Brazil.

We speak to one of the world’s leading country branding experts and sit down with two marketing profs (a Brazilian and a Canadian who runs a Brazilian exchange program) who help us unpack how Brazil transformed itself in the minds of travellers from “the land of favelas and corruption” to “the land of joy and creativity” in just a few short years.

It turns out that many Brazilians have a more nuanced view of the country’s rising brand than those of us looking in.