Linda Bustos Discusses a Smarter Way to Monetize Content and Manage User Experience
Elastic Path is an e-commerce company, founded in 2000, that enables publishing companies to monetize their media services across all channels and touch points. Its market reach surpasses the publishing industry as it provides services to companies in telecommunications, software and retailing industries. Its e-commerce blog, Get Elastic, is described as the leading blog reporting on e-commerce trends and research. It boasts a list of 20,000 subscribers.
In an interview with Linda Bustos, the Elastic Path Director of E-commerce Research and curator of Get Elastic, she shares the e-commerce efforts conducted by Elastic Path, the role that this e-commerce company can play in the publishing industry, and what publishers can do going forward in the current climate.
One of the innovative products offered by Elastic Path is an application programming interface (API) that allows its customers to better manage their digital users across all channels and to broaden and natively monetize their services. This product can be purchased as a stand-alone item or as part of Elastic Path’s e-commerce software.
SC: Tell me more about Elastic Path.
LB: We’ve actually changed our target market and our strategy [recently]. [Before], we were really focused on digital goods. Our biggest customers were these software [companies] and a few different publishers. We found out that was kind of a small market to own. [Therefore] we partnered with Adobe. Now our strategy is really [about targeting] anyone who wants to buy Adobe products and needs an e-commerce platform. Instead of focusing on magazines and newspapers and requiring simpler functionalities (and really you don’t want to pay an e-commerce platform for that), we [decided] to work with McGraw-Hill and Pearson. They’re doing some interesting things with digital textbooks by putting commerce within the actual book experience. Sometimes, you have a course in which you’re only using five of the 13 chapters of the book. We will sell subscriptions for the time of your term just for the chapters you need. It will be at a reduced digital price. You can get it through the app. Next semester, you can unlock the rest of the chapters if you take another class in that subject.
SC: What differs Elastic Path from other e-commerce platforms?
LB: There are different ways publishers can monetize their content and sell their books. That’s where Elastic Path can help. We have what’s called an API, and in the digital world, the API is sort of what connects different systems. From a publisher’s perspective, the e-commerce system should tap into the content management system and should be able to make a new website, a new mobile app or a new product. For those things to be able to [communicate with] each other, they need this sort of API layer in the middle that can make database call from one to the other. What makes us different from other e-commerce companies is that most e-commerce companies do have an API, but the way that we architected this API makes it easier for developers to build [the new website, mobile app or product]. Other platforms may have more features, but their code doesn't [communicate] as easily with other services [as ours].
SC: How is Elastic Path serving publishers in particular?
LB: If you’re an Adobe Experience Manager customer, the bulk of your experience is going to content rather than e-commerce. You probably have noticed that when you get to the dot com of some sites, it’s full of amazing products, but you can’t buy from any of the pages. If you want to buy, you have to click on a little store link, which takes you on a different experience. That’s a situation in which a brand is using a really high-end content management system to run a website and at some point decided to add e-commerce. [However,] while it can put a buy button through its e-commerce system, it has to buy another platform and get another domain. That really hurts the customer experience, and it is harder on the marketer to be able to tie up those analytics and tie together marketing campaigns. What our product does is allow you to use it with the Adobe experience manager to run your front ad. With the API, you can pull whatever e-commerce services and just put them right into your website. It eliminates that need to have a full front store. I think that this would be relevant to certain publishers. Instead of having a subscription page where you jump out to a separate lineup process, you would be able to do it within the actual website experience. you would be able to potentially within the tablet version of a magazine put shopping capabilities.
SC: In our previous interview we talked about the fact that this native monetization model — [allowing users to shop within the website instead of directing them to another website] wasn't trending. Why do you think this model has not become a trend yet? Has Elastic Path gone out to market it?
LB: Usually when people hear native monetization, they think of native advertising. So they think of the editorials that have a very small nondisclosure that says they’re sponsored. So when we came up with the native monetization value proposition and tried to do some marketing around that, we had that hurdle to overcome — that sort of legacy of native advertising. But, native monetization is basically the transaction happening in your experience of not being kicked out to a secondary experience. So I still think that it’s a really small business model, and publishers want to do it. I’m not going to say publishers are slow to innovate, but I think that they don’t have a lot of cash floating around to experiment with things that are going to fail. So, unless there are really proven cases that people want to shop within content, those things sort of get into the end of the list, priority wise. That might be another reason. But, we certainly are working on [this model] with our higher education publishers. They definitely want to natively monetize their textbooks, and we’re working with Time magazine.
SC: How do you think Elastic Path is addressing the publishers’ concern of having enough money to take a risk? Do you think Elastic Path is trying to find some way to alleviate some of those issues?
LB: The tough thing is we need to charge a fair price for the API. We’re not giving it away. So, really, we have to qualify our customers once they can afford us. Publishing is small of a market for us, and maybe not a sustainable one to go after. Certainly we’ll happily sign up any publisher who wants to leverage us, but that’s kind of why we are going back to this strategy of partnering with Adobe Experience Manager and its customers who really need an e-commerce piece. They’re already paying a lot for Experience Manager, so being able to add an e-commerce piece and keep using Experience Manager makes financial sense to them rather than buy this other big expensive e-commerce platform and try to make those two things communicate with each other. They don’t communicate very well. That’s where we have a strength in the market. We are pretty much invested to a degree with Adobe Experience Manager. Some publishers might already be Adobe Experience Manager customers, which would be a perfect fit for us. But, I don’t think that we’re doing anything to help bring the cost down for getting experience with e-commerce to the publishing world.
SC: How do publishers need to see themselves as they navigate through this digital era, and why?
LB: It is difficult because publishers, depending on what type of publishers they are, are dealing with every other businesses out there. Businesses have to look more and more like publishers. Content really is important for search engine, social content and [so forth]. People today are being bombarded by Twitter, Facebook, emails and blogs that they like to follow. Free is a pretty difficult model to compete against. The old publishing was about writing articles a couple of months in advance. The artwork had to be done and had to be sent out to print. So the September issue is really starting to be produced months before where as of now everything has to be in real time. We haven’t really embraced the digital version of magazines because they’re not updated in real time. They’re like the PDF version of the actual magazine just being repackaged and delivered in tablets. Just coming back to your question, how should publishers see themselves? I think they really need to see themselves as publishers that offer a value proposition above and beyond what’s already out there for free. That’s hard to do. Involve a huge social component, maybe Instagram. It has to be more than just content delivered to you twice or delivered in a print format. So it has to be experience driven. It has to be social, and it has to understand how to stay relevant and have better content than all the free content out there. That will involve a reinvention.
Linda Bustos is currently the Director of Ecommerce Research at Elastic Path and one of the marketers topping the list of the DMNews 30 Direct Marketers under 30 of 2009. She leads Elastic Path’s blog, Get Elastic, and served as speakers in prominent events, including the Affiliated Marketing Days and Shop.org Annual Summit. Bustos also served as a consultant to numerous e-commerce companies throughout the world. She can be reached at linda.bustos@elasticpath.com.
