REMY BECHER: I'm mindful that not everyone is
aware of what the Espresso and Economist Films are all about.
So Espresso is our daily briefing product
that we launched literally two years and one day ago.
It would give you like five things
that will come up in the news today to prep you for the day
ahead.
And it will also give you a quick rundown
of what happened in the last 24 hours when you were asleep.
It's a product we launched as I said,
two years ago when daily briefing products were
emerging left right and center.
And despite a lot of people going down the newsletter
route, we went down a native app route
that is available on iOS and on Android.
Economist Films it's a project that we launched last year
to deal with the problem that we have around the globe,
but specifically in the US, where
60% of the people that ought to be reading "The Economist"
do not know the brand.
And a lot of people that do know the brand have
the wrong assumption of it.
So it's really a brand awareness and a perception play.
So we produce longer form video pieces
that cover all the topics that everyone always
thinks that we don't cover.
So most people think we cover economics and financial news.
Economist Films covers like the biggest stories
as global warming or the war on drugs,
or what's going to happen in the future
with the serious future works.
So when Google announced the Firebase product officially
at I/O 2016, we were quick to implement it
into one of our products.
Because in the current age of digital publishing,
has especially been a challenge to sort of innovate quickly.
And we've been empowered out teams
to make decisions, to use data to make those decisions.
And then based on that, pivot how products perhaps
are working at "The Economist."
And we use all the capabilities we
have from the Firebase platform in developing
our new feature, which is called Daily Watch,
and I'll talk about that a little bit more.
So what I'm going to cover today is the use of remote config
to launch a new feature.
Use notifications in [INAUDIBLE] to content discovery,
as well as dynamic links for people
that share your content out onto social media.
And finally, show you some of the turnkey-- well,
show you a little bit of the turnkey app analytics
that you get by implementing Firebase into your apps.
So introducing Daily Watch very briefly.
It's a daily product, two to four minutes.
It covers various topics like what we put on our cover.
What our cover leader is.
What happened like a week ago, a year ago in the news.
Things that are becoming topical again
in the news in that particular time.
And it also allows you to get a sneak peek
behind the scenes of what happens at "The Economist."
So you'll have an interview with the editor in chief
that explain you why we've gone for a particular cover.
And to do that, to build a new feature,
we have a 3 step checklist that we came up
with as part of this process.
So fortunately Firebase does a lot of things for you,
but it doesn't build your features.
You still have to do that yourself.
So once you go ahead, have your whole theme come together,
your UX designers build a feature, you put it through QA,
and you release it into the market using a state deployment
approach, or any of the other approaches
that you normally use for your apps,
and you can let it embed in.
You can really see if it works, if there's
anything else in there that doesn't behave as you expected.
And then when you're ready for a global reveal
of your new shiny future, you flick the switch
in a remote config, and within 24 hours
globally across all your platforms
your new future will go live.
Then in addition use push notifications
that come in part of the Firebase platform
to drive attention to your new feature.
But also not just look at the metrics
that Steve mentioned before like open rates, which
are the old ways of measuring success of push notifications,
link them to actual engagement in the app.
So what's important for us is how many people make it
past the 50% mark of a video, which
shows that they've engaged with the content in quite a way.
And the great stuff about that, about the way Firebase
conversion events work is that I don't
have to determine at design time what success looks like for me.
There's a whole bunch of events that come out of the box.
There's a whole bunch of events that I can put in.
And if I send a push notification that
say I want to test something new or I
want to change the wording somewhat, and see if people
play the video first or read an article, or I don't know,
share a video.
Because that some functionality that I
want to call out to them.
And I can just send a notification,
select a conversion event, and see if I have success.
And then in addition, dynamic links
is a great way-- when people get excited about your future,
and they start sharing it on their favorite social network
with all their friends, those people might not
have your app installed.
So rather than going to a dead end,
there might end up on the website
where they can still see your new feature or your new piece
of content.
They might have the app installed
and they go directly into the app.
Or if you choose to, you can use it
as an app install kind of campaign.
And people will go directly into their favorite apps store,
install the app, and enjoy the piece of content
that you've made available for them.
This is my boss's favorite quote.
If we have data, let's look at data.
If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine.
The quote came from Jim Barksdale, who
used to be the CEO of Netscape.
So how are we doing so far?
We've got some easy, some quick early results.
One that I've pointed out here is
how it assist us with decision making during spring planning.
So we all sit there, we've got a shiny design.
Looks really nice.
And someone turns around and says
but it looks shit on this device.
By going into Firebase Analytics straight away,
within 4 and 1/2 hours, and in the next couple of weeks
in real time, I can see how many people this will affect.
For Economist Films for instance,
there's a bug with the exoplayer in Android 4.03 and 4.04.
How many people does that affect?
Not enough for me to really care about that.
So we don't have to really put any additional effort into it
to engineer around it.
In addition, push notifications, as everyone know,
product feature releases, you always run out of time.
So the bit that we tend to forget
is training up our operational stuff to use the features.
And fortunately I didn't have to because they were presented
with this new interface and were able to use it straight away.
And then finally, how does the feature
itself actually perform?
We see a great uptake in week on week daily average engagement,
measured in time.
So people are spending nearly twice as long in the app
than they were before.
The spike you see is the Saturday, which is obviously
when people have more time.
And therefore look at the videos that we
publish throughout the week.
And then the dip is Sunday because we
don't publish on Sunday.
And a 30% decline in red is also day on day,
rather than week and week, which is something
we need to talk about tomorrow.
So key takeaways, remote config allows you to launch globally
across all your platforms in one go,
tied into your marketing campaigns and social activities
that you might do.
Notifications aiding discovery, aiding driving people
to actually perform the actions you designed the feature for.
And dynamic Links for people to have a good experience when
they share out your content, which you
encourage on to social media.
And then finally you get the turnkey
app analytics that provide you how your product is doing,
if people are engaging with your features the way you want,
and all sorts of really other interesting things.
So that was me.
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