We just celebrated the big 3-1 here at TMG.
Since Day One, we’ve been helping our clients dream up, build, and share their custom magazines, a business that has evolved to now include digital media and video. Everything about content is changing fast, and we’ve been keeping pace.
Most recently, we worked with our client WebMD to redesign its 7-year-old magazine for the first time, re-imagining the design, sections, and the overall look and feel.
I talked with TMG’s Senior Vice President of Content Kim Caviness to find out more about the process.
Redesigns are kind of a big deal in the magazine industry. What sparked the conversation about redesigning WebMD the Magazine, and why was it the right time?
We launched WebMD the Magazine in 2004. That’s practically the Jurassic era in today’s change-or-die media environment. The entire social media/digital content revolution has since happened. Our pub had evolved along the way, of course, but it was time to start from scratch and rethink everything. Start over and create an all-new kind of content machine that captured the way we consume health and healthy living information now.
We are one of the very few magazines published by a major website —in our case, WebMD.com, the online leader in health information — so the bar is higher for us than it was on our competitors to produce a modern, digitally-inspired publication that reflected the mindset of today’s plugged-in health content consumer. Additionally, the launch of our popular iPad app issue earlier this year had already started us on the process of re-imagining how every piece of content needed to connect with our audiences to deliver on the power of the WebMD brand.
Finally, WebMD.com is currently undergoing a major redesign itself, as the entire brand evolves to include more healthy living and lifestyle content and modernize its signature health content.
It was the right time to spread our wings, think big, and realign ourselves to all of these exciting developments.
From soup to nuts, how long did it take to re-imagine WebMD the Magazine and produce the September issue? Where did you even start—and how did you get to the end?
We got the green light the second week of May and shipped to the printer the first week of August, so it happened fast. Scary fast, actually. We were ready, though. The entire team had been hoping for a redesign and top-to-bottom transformation for a while. Last fall, we met several times as a group to brainstorm the biggest changes that we owed our readers, the website’s users, and the brand. We gutted the old magazine, re-imagined it A to Z, and page-by-page built ourselves an entirely new print and digital iPad app pub experience.
What considerations were most important when updating WebMD the Magazine?
Foremost was the not-small detail that our magazine is published by a website. All of our health and healthy-living magazine competitors are a magazine first, digital extension second. Our differentiating factor needed to rise to the foreground in a way that was transformative. We are able to determine what topics, articles, blogs, posts are the most popular and most shared by the 100 million unique visitors who visit WebMD.com every month. We know what America wants to know when it takes part in the national health conversation. That information had to be showcased front and center. How were we going to uniquely weave in food, beauty, health experts, community voices, social media, blogs, slideshows, videos? That kept our editorial team awake for weeks.
What were the challenges along the way? What are you most proud about?
It all happened so terrifyingly fast that we just had to dive in, keep our users’ desires top of mind and in our hearts, listen to our instincts no matter how much noise tried to get in the way, and focus on the finish line. The biggest challenge was time itself. In 10 weeks we had to blow up the old publication’s content map and re-imagine every page, every image for the print and iPad app, deliver a completely new design, secure all approvals, and not lose focus.
It was one of those magical, blessed, lucky experiences. Seriously, when I’m lying in my grave, this will be one of life’s high points that flash across my (closed) eyes.
What is your biggest take-away from this experience?
Blow it all up before you build. Challenge yourself, draw, and make lists before you sit down with the creative directors. Their brilliance will make for a beautiful, innovative, mind-blowing product, if you are lucky and all the stars align. But they can only be as good as the user-need solutions, guiding philosophy, and animating ideas that inform the content experience. What is your magazine’s unique value proposition? Don’t cop out, push yourself to really answer why your magazine needs to exist. Why is reading your magazine more rewarding than all of its competitors?
This is a big one for me: What is the secret that your magazine will whisper in the ears of its readers and users? All good magazines do that. My favorite pub is New York magazine and its Approval Matrix back page whispers in my ear delicious things I hadn’t realized that I couldn’t live without knowing, until it found me.
Our secret wish page is “WebMD on the Street,” a beautiful vertical spread that brings WebMD’s legendary Symptom Checker to life in a healthy-living, real-people-real-life voyeuristic way that taps into, I believe, our most essential needs as humans with wants, desires, fears, questions about our lives. I think it really works. Can’t wait to see how the market accepts it.
Who’s the next celebrity cover?
I’m delighted to tell you that Taylor Swift is back for her second WebMD the Magazine starring role this November/December and we couldn’t be more excited.
2012 cover, Hot Topics and WebMD on the Street
