La Presse launched a free subscription iPad edition Thursday that will serve as the flagship product for all of its online and print properties.
The new product, called La Presse+, will be delivered to subscribers at 5:30 a.m. seven days a week through Apple’s Newsstand app for iPad. Groupe Gesca, La Presse‘s parent company, has poured $40 million and three years in the development of this product, which La Presse president and publisher Guy Crevier hopes will redefine the way French Canada gets its information.
Crevier said La Presse elected to make its iPad edition free because the company “believes in the irreversible phenomenon of the availability of information free of charge on digital platforms,” and has no plans to charge for La Presse+ subscriptions. (He said the La Presse chose to create an iPad edition instead of a platform-agnostic product because the iPad is the most popular tablet used amongst current subscribers and in Quebec at large.)
Before launch, La Presse presented the product and its ad offering to over 500 agency staffers. While Crevier said the content on La Presse+ is a mix of short broadcast style clips and print-style reporting, the company worked to make the ad units as interactive as possible. For example, by tapping an ad for a car, a reader may be able to view it in several different colours. Making the ads interactive has led to higher consumer engagement and more time spent looking at advertisements by readers in test periods, he said.
A special ad lab was created two years ago by La Presse to work specifically on this product. The group created about 1,500 different types of digital ad units and tested over 100 of them with focus groups until it was satisfied with the results the ads achieved.
