#MobileMag2015: The Competition
In November, a friend of mine in the MNO (magazine, newspaper & online) program asked me if I wanted to help develop a tablet magazine with him and another friend for a competition in February. I thought, “Sure, why not?” As an advertising student, I’m really interested in understanding different medias to the best of my ability.
The Mobile Magazine Competition works in stages. February 21 marked the first round of pitches. Eventually, they select an overall winner and that magazine concept is used in the graduate capstone class during the summer semester for the MNO students.
The interest meeting was in November, when February still seemed really far into the future. About four weeks ago, the three of us realized the pitch was coming up and we should probably start actually thinking about it. But how do you develop a magazine concept that can be successful? And how do you prove that it will be successful once you’ve developed your concept?
These were questions I wasn’t sure how to go about answering. Every competition team was given the recommendation of choosing a niche audience, but after that you were just feeling your way around in the dark. You can choose topics that are relevant to you, but that doesn’t mean there needs to be a magazine about it.
I tackled the scary questions with research. Who’s reading tablet magazines? What’s trending? What trends are growing? Are those trends marketable or are they being marketed? A year ago, if you’d asked me how to answer any of these questions I would have had no idea where to even start. I never thought I’d say that research is my game, but my researching skills have only gotten better since I started at Newhouse.
The competition included a workshop with professors and judges on Friday and the pitch presentation on Saturday morning. We sat down on Thursday and fleshed some things out, but when we arrived on Friday and started discussing what we were supposed to have, we realized we might be behind.
Friday’s workshop lasted about five hours, from 2 to 7 p.m. We worked as a group until almost 9 p.m. I went home to start designing. I sat down at my desk around 10:30 p.m. and started on wireframes, presentation slides, logos and all of the other elements we needed on my long list. The deck, or the presentation slides, had a hard deadline of 8 p.m.
I crossed the last item off of our list at 6:15 p.m. and emailed our deck out at 6:30 a.m. Our pitch was at 10:45 a.m., so after a shower and an hour’s sleep, I got presentation-ready and headed back up to campus to be there by 9 a.m.
If I’ve learned anything about presentations in my time at Newhouse, I’ve learned that the most important thing is practice. You can’t get in front of a group of people and expect them to buy your pitch or your product if you look disorganized and unplanned. It’s like trying to sell a great product in horrible packaging.
We rehearsed right until 10:40 a.m. when we headed down to the pitch room and presented to a panel of three judges, Elite Truong from Vox Media, Issac Phillips from Tagg.ly, and Aileen Gallagher, a professor in the magazine department. Also sitting in were a few professors and other students on the competition teams.
We were one of five teams and we pitched Whiskered, a magazine for casual men’s facial hair styling. Whiskered has become my little brain baby. I never thought I’d be so attached to a concept born from the increasing number of Google searches for ‘how to grow a beard.’
My two teammates and I put a lot of time into the pitch and developing Whiskered as a brand and an experience. We couldn’t tell how our pitch went, and we’d only seen one other team present. We thought it went well, though.
That evening, I woke up from a nap (a rare moment in grad school) to a text from my teammate saying we’d made it into the top three and onto the next round. After pulling an all-nighter, nothing is more satisfying than being told it was all worth it.
So, Whiskered will be moving on to the next round of the competition. I couldn’t be happier or more excited to keep developing and enhancing our idea. We’ll see what the next phase brings.
