Gregg Hano, CEO for Mag+, talks about the advantages of the platform for business-to-business.
As summer comes to a close, one of Bonnier Growth Media's portfolio companies, Mag+, has been having a busy season. Mag+ is surpassing 3,000 apps and is looking to expand with several new employees. We caught up with CEO Gregg Hano and Bonnier Growth Media’s Ulrika Saxon.
While Mag+ started out as a platform for publishing magazines, it has expanded scope since then – who is the target audience for Mag+? How has it changed over time?
Gregg Hano: As one of the companies that helped pioneer content app development, Mag+ has a deep heritage in the publishing industry, with titles like New York magazine and Shape on our platform. We are firmly committed to traditional publishing clients and to helping enable those customers to distribute content to their readers. However, in an era where “everyone” is a publisher and where every corporation needs to communicate with customers and employees, it was natural that our dynamic platform and our business would expand rapidly into other categories with new use cases.
Our team always had the belief that mobile would completely change the content delivery ecosystem. We also have believed from day one that anyone with quality content to share would be creating mobile content apps. We now support 3,000+ apps among 800+ clients in 62 countries. Our platform is being used by corporations like Unilever, Volvo FH and Maserati, as well as a fast-growing number of well-known creative agencies serving businesses, who see the brand value, productivity and cost savings in creating mobile content hubs for employees, sales teams and customers.
What are the big advantages of Mag+ over other platforms?
GH: To begin with our product is, as your question notes, a platform. With all content going mobile, custom app development is simply not an affordable option for most customers. However, apps are the ‘language’ of mobile because they are native to the device, secure, powerful, work off-line and integrate with other systems.
Our advantages include the ability to deploy in days, with a low financial barrier to entry, no ongoing maintenance costs and easy scalability. The Mag+ platform appeals both to the one-man/woman operation (with no programmers on staff) who simply customizes our white label app, and to major corporations that want to build custom implementations on top of our software development kit (SDK), saving hundreds of coding hours as they customize more complex apps.
Can you tell us about some of your more interesting apps?
GH: Unfortunately we can’t discuss all of the best-known global clients we serve, but a few great example of apps our customers tell us surpassed client expectations include Maserati and Shape.
The Maserati e-Brochures App won “Gold Winner” at the World Luxury Awards held in Monte Carlo. Designed with Mag+ by Arachno, the app presents a stylish portrait of the Maserati cars.
From beautiful slideshow images to downloadable recipes, in-app videos and fashion trend pop-ups, Shape takes full advantage of the Mag+ platform. Using our built-in third-party solutions, Localytics and Appboy, Shape is able to message specific segments of its user base. For example, it can send offers only to non-subscribers or new issue notifications only to users who haven’t visited the app recently. These efforts resulted in powerful subscription and revenue increases.
How do you see Mag+ developing and growing?
GH: The primary focus for Mag+ over the next 12-24 months will be aligning every aspect of our business to capture as much of the opportunity as possible in the exploding corporate and enterprise publishing market, while continuing to provide a great experience for our existing clients. That will mean ongoing optimization of our sales and marketing efforts to capture and close all the inbound interest. Plus we have some really exciting new developments on the product side to keep us in line with where the future of content distribution is headed and the needs of these organizations. To accomplish that we are on the lookout for high-quality, forward-thinking talent to help us evolve and grow. We are currently recruiting for several key positions both in New York and Stockholm.
Ulrika Saxon, board chairman for Mag+ and CEO of parent company Bonnier Growth Media: It’s been exciting to engage in the development of Mag+ over time, through the "evolution phases" of touch screens. We think Mag+ is a strong brand and continue to see great growth potential in Mag+ as a publishing platform for a wide range of content.
Read more about Mag+ at www.magplus.com.