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We provide publishing teams and brand agencies with the

tools to implement a print and digital content strategy.

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The products and services in the Publisher’s Toolbox all provide immediate value at an innovation, platform and business level to any organisation with a focus on the commercialisation of digital content.

The Publisher’s Toolbox needn’t be positioned as a complete replatforming, its value proposition is that each product can exist independently of the other. As proud designers, developers and operational implementors of this unique suite of publishing products we encourage disruption within the publishing industry by challenging the current costing and license models.

We hope you enjoy discovering more about The Publisher’s Toolbox for the digital world, and you are encouraged to think more simply when it comes to defining a content strategy, knowing the digital landscape can be reconfigured with minimal change control, resulting in less cost, risk and time to market.

SOLUTION DELIVERY Design, configure and implement digital publishing and distribution platforms based on our unique product components

CLOUD HOSTING Provide high performance, reliable and scalable hosting of solutions on AWS

MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT Develop white-label or custom mobile apps across all platforms

SYSTEMS INTEGRATION Integrate our solutions with other existingor third-party systems including subscription management, analytics, advertising and content management systems

CUSTOM DEVELOPMENT Develop tailor-made content distribution and mobile solutions based on a framework of tried and tested product components

STRATEGIC CONSULTANT Provide strategic insight regarding digital publishing strategy and roadmaps

DIGITAL SERVICES

PRODUCTSWe hope you enjoy discovering more about The Publisher’s Toolbox for the digital world, and you are encouraged to think more simply when it comes to defining a content strategy - the digital landscape can in fact be reconfigured with minimal change control, less cost, risk and time to market.

The Enterprise Publishing Platform for a Digital World

Secure mobile journalism app and cloud based web dashboard

Each one of these products has a story behind it, a team and a journey to travel. The Publisher’s Toolbox product development teams are enthused by the adventure each one of our homegrown digital products can provide us and our customers. Our team enjoy having the ability to disrupt and challenge the traditional digital publishing and broadcasting industries by being able to provide alternative solutions that is simpler, quicker and more cost effective to market.

The below products can exist independently of each other, and when integrated they provide an enterprise grade media distribution capability that is sustainable.

Powerfully Simple DigitalAsset Management

Bring your brand to life

Configurable MultimediaApp Platform

Powerful image and video analysis and delivery

Innovative web tools to optimise existing online solutions

These are the digital products that make up The Publisher’s Toolbox.

Capture the news as it happens. Anytime. Anywhere.

Photo by Seth Reese.

Journalists can send secure MOJO packages containing videos, audio, photos, and GPS locations to multiple destinations for backup, review or further publishing.

TEAM Edition app users can publish to their private closed Team MojoReporter dashboard.

All MOJO packages from the community or team can be followed within the app.All MOJO users have the option of backing their packages up in Google Drive or MOJO Dashboard.All videos are transcoded into multiple formats for post production streaming / download.

SEND POSTS STRAIGHT TO THE NEWSROOM

• MOJO Packages are securely stored compilations of any “Digital Senses”

• MOJO Media such as video,

audio, pictures and GPS location can be included at any time

• MOJO Library is a secure

storage facility within the app that can’t be accessed unless authorised user

MULTIPLE RESOLUTION VIDEO DOWNLOAD

MOJOREPORTER FEATURES

MOJO WEB DASHBOARD

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

AUTOMATIC VIDEO TRANSCODING

ADAPTIVE BITSTREAM PLAYER

CLOUD HOSTED

ANDROID AND APPLE MOBILE APPS

MULTI DEVICE ADAPTIVE PLAYBACK

SECURE USER MANAGEMENT

NO MORE MESSY NOTESOR CLUTTER

DO YOU HAVE ANY EXISTING APP AND WOULD LIKE TO MANAGE USER GENERATED CONTENT (UGC)?Consumers can now make enquiries or submissions that can be managed via an in app UGC module! UGC is all content generated by unpaid contributors as opposed to by professional journalists or marketers. Used in marketing campaigns, UGC becomes fan generated content lending a campaign authenticity, promoting greater brand awareness and establishing a greater community wherein brands can interact with contributors expanding multi-channel integration.

Our in-app module can be integrated into an existing app in order to enhance the existing platform without costly redesign or extended development in order to add enhanced functionality. The UGC module bundles the full scope and range of functionality that is available in MojoReporter into a Software Development Kit (SDK) to be integrated into your Android and iOS apps existing code. Users can send content as secure digital packages containing videos, audio, images, and GPS locations to multiple destinations for backup, review or further publishing in app and to an integrated web dashboard.

The TEAM EDITION implementation of MojoReporter best suits a media group or publishing house with a team of mobile journalists. We will setup and brand your own closed, secure and branded MojoReporter TEAM EDITION platform.

It’s a great way to keep all the media captured by your MOJO team in a secure app and web environment for further distribution or retrieval.

The TEAM EDITION establishes a private MOJO community feeling for safe and private reporting before being published to the world.

INTRODUCING MOJOREPORTER TEAM EDITION

By implementing our TEAM EDITION the following challenges experienced by media groups can be overcome:

• DISTRIBUTION Standardisation - eliminate the myriad of file transfer mechanisms such as FTP, Email, Whatsapp, Dropbox?

• REPORTING on Activity - transparency around individual MOJO team member activity

• REUSE - ability to search, find and reuse MOJO media submitted

• SECURITY - all MOJO media on device, in transit and stored in cloud is protected and only accessible by authorised users

• TRANSCODING - automatic transcoding of raw device captured video, to be downloaded or streamed via embeddable adaptive bitstream player

PROUD TO BE PARTNERED WITH LEADING BRANDS

GET YOUR TEAM MOJO ON

S I M P L E , P O W E R F U L ,D I G I T A L A S S E T M A N A G E -M E N T

Photo by Fabian Grohs

The BiblioDAM is a powerful cloud search media library that allows for the centralised storage, control and management of digital assets. It provides a facility to reuse, reference and clone articles. Digital assets can be referenced from multiple websites or apps and maintain a single instance of storage.

The BiblioDAM can be tightly integrated into a CMS platform of choice, similar to how it has been used with Baobab Editorial and WordPress Dashboards for related articles and clone article capability.

WHAT IS BIBLIODAM?

VIDEO TRANSCODING / DOWNLOADING

WHAT CAN BIBLIODAM OFFER YOU?

BULK MEDIA ARCHIVE

ELASTIC SEARCH

EDITORIAL INTEGRATION

METADATA SEARCH

CMS OF CHOICE

MULTI-TITLE CAPABILITY

REUSE ASSETS ACROSS GROUP

BIBLIODAM MANAGES IMAGES, VIDEOS,AUDIO, PDFS AND PUBLISHER WEB ARTICLES.

CLOUD BASED DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT• Bulk media archive upload and index facility• Elastic search algorithms• Standalone or integrated with existing editorial process• Metadata search and update capability• Integrates with CMS of choice (WP editorial plugin)• Multi-titled digital assets capability• Reuse digital assets across titles or groups• Video transcoding and download capabilities

T H E E N T E R P R I S E G R A D E

PUBLISHINGP L A T F O R M

PROUD TO BE TRUSTED BY LEADING MEDIA ORGANISATIONS

The Baobab Suite is a digital platform for publishers which enables publishing, distribution and monetisation of digital content across multiple channels. It’s unique “Mobile Backend as a Service” architecture and open API’s provide efficient and scalable management of content and subscribers giving publishers the flexibility required to support their transition towards digital driven business models.

Designed and developed by technologists and publishers, Baobab has been successfully deployed within a number of leading media organisations, including the Telegraph Media Group (UK) and Independent, one of Africa’s largest print newspaper groups. It has also recently been customised and deployed to meet the rigorous requirements of Africa’s first news syndication service, African News Agency.

WHAT IS BAOBAB SUITE?

HOW CAN BAOBAB POWER YOUR DIGITAL ROADMAP?

Improve efficiency and lower operational overheads through a single view of subscribers and centralised control of content across multiple apps and websites.

Freedom to choose multiple app development partners and reduced risk of vendor lock-in with open content APIs.

Experiment and modify functionality on an ongoing basis to both inform and support the long-term evolution of your digital strategy.

Reduce costs in developing tailor-made, integrated solutions from MBaaS architecture and a wide range of APIs and SDKs.

Multiple options for revenue generation including advertising via Google DoubleClick for Publishers ™, numerous subscription options and metering.

High performance cloud services tailored towards superior search and archive facilities.

IMPROVED EFFICIENCY

NO VENDOR LOCK-IN

FLEXIBLITY

REDUCED COSTS

INCREASED REVENUE

EXCEPTIONAL PERFORMANCE

CORE CONTENT REDISTRIBUTION MODULE

ADAPTIVE STREAMING

CONTENT SYNDICATION

DIGITAL FIRST MODULE

CLOUDSEARCH API

APP STORE INTEGRATION

PRIVATE PAYMENT GATEWAY

DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT

VIDEO TRANSCODING

CUSTOM MEDIA PLAYER API

CONTENT SYNDICATION AND VIDEO STREAMINGCloud based enterprise grade syndication and aggregation services. This CORE platform can import and export content packages effective in the newswire services and also private secure syndication environment. Bulk import and upload of posts, multimedia files in association with content is processed effectively for future search, retrieval and distribution in a secure and sustainable manner. Video processing and transcoding capabilities complemented by a media player engine.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi. Asilah, Morocco

POWERFUL VIDEO STREAMING AND IMAGE ANALYSIS

Afrozaar’s Imigino was born out of the need to have access to a single API service layer that can aggregate and merge the most powerful video and image analysis services offered by both Google and Amazon. Our team have also reviewed and analysed a number of the monetizable adaptive bitstream video players in the market and decided that there should be zero lock-in to a single player and their respective video archive facility. Our Video API services is light and flexible when it come changing players, or branding and customising a video experience for a viewer.

POWERFUL VIDEO STREAMING AND IMAGE ANALYSIS

Let us add dynamic video adverts to your video streaming, all wrapped up in a custom branded video player.

MONETIZATION

Unlimited, scalable, redundant, versioned cloud storage. Have full control of user access. Accessible through GUI or API

CLOUD STORAGE

We have included a combination of both Amazon and Google Cloud Video Intelligence API that assist with making videos searchable and discoverable by extracting metadata, identifying key nouns, and annotating the content of the video. By calling an easy-to-use REST API, you can now search every moment of every video file in your catalog and find each occurrence of key nouns as well as its significance. Separate signal from noise, by retrieving relevant information by video, shot, or frame

VIDEO SERVICES

Have video automatically transcoded into any format for adaptive bitstream players

VIDEO TRANSCODING

Stream your transcoded videos using a your custom branded HTML5 video player or any other device or platform

VIDEO STREAMING

Unlimited, scalable, redundant, versioned cloud storage. Have full control of user access. Accessible through GUI or API

Resize, scale, optimise your images dynamically on request. Keep one single hi-res image

Get your optimized images served blazingly fast via global cloudfront CDN edges

CLOUD STORAGE DYNAMICALLY SCALE

IMAGE SERVICES

We have extended and merged the well-known Google Cloud Vision API and Amazon Image Rekognition deep learning into our Imigino offering, to enable you to extract metadata and also understand the content of an image by encapsulating powerful machine learning models in an easy to use REST API. We can quickly classify bulk set of images into thousands of categories (e.g. “train”, “pyramid”), detects individual objects and faces within images, and finds and reads printed words contained within images.

IMAGE SERVICES

Dynamically crop your images on the fly

DYNAMICALLY CROP

Detect and read text in an image with automatic language recogntion

Detect and locate popular natural and man-made structures within an image

Search for ALL usages of a given image including exact matches and visually similar images

Using powerful maching learning algorithims detect categories of objects within an image

Detect popular logos within an image

Detect faces and their features within an image, detect attributes like anger, joy sorrow, surprise, etc

Detect explicit content like adult content or violent content within an image

Detect the copyright information contained within the metadata of the image

TEXT EXTRACTION

LANDMARK RECOGNITION

USAGE DETECTION

GENERAL IMAGE RECOGNITION

LOGO DETECTION

FACIAL FEATURES

EXPLICIT CONTENT DETECTION

IMAGE COPYRIGHT DETECTION

ADVANCED SERVICES

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash near yellow wall of supermarket.

E N T E R P R I S E G R A D E

M O B I L E A P P S

DO YOU WANT A MOBILE APP?Convert your content website into a mobile app for iPhone and Android using our MobileAppSuite.

Afrozaar have been building custom mobile apps (iOS and Android) and content web sites for leading publishing groups since 2010: The Telegraph Media Group, Media 24, Sunday Business Post, Independent Media Group, Africa News Agency and Conde Nast.

WHAT IS THE MOBILE APP SUITE FRAMEWORK?

Our team have built single-title, multi-title, continuous & edition based news & magazine apps and websites that have competed globally.

We’ve learned a lot from building number of custom apps for the large and medium sized media groups, and feel we have a solid product offering that is sustainable for our product customers.

It’s a collection of mobile apps, across iOS and Android platforms, that can be configured to meet the specialised digital needs of media groups, broadcasters, brands and digital publishers.

The Mobile App Suite has a selection of in-app modules to boost user engagement and commercialisation of digital content. The platforms can be integrated easily with existing web CMS (e.g: WordPress), enterprise grade editorial or broadcasting platforms to provide an affordable and scalable mobile app strategy.

MOBILE APP FEATURES

APP FEATURES

ARTICLE SHARING

GOOGLE ANALYTICS INTEGRATION

BOOKMARKINGMULTIMEDIA ENRICHED

SMOOTH PAGE SWIPE TRANSITIONSAND PRELOADING

APP STORE ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

OFFLINE VIEWING

WORDPRESS API

APP STORE PROMOTIONAL MEDIA

QUALITY EXPERIENCE

CONTACT / ABOUT INFO

Apart from the professional user experience and navigational transitions across all forms of published media (articles, image gallery, videos, maps) there is the option to include one the complementing Enterprise In-App Modules to promote Advertisement, Social Authentication, User Generated Content and Augmented Reality to help drive engagement with app users.

ENTERPRISE IN-APP MODULES

CUSTOMER REGISTRATION (FACEBOOK, GOOLGE+, LINKEDIN, TWITTER)

eCOMMERCE CONTENT MONETISATION VIA SUBSCRIPTION MODEL (ITUNES, PLAY STORE)

CONTENT METERING (PER SECTION OR AT ARTICLE LEVEL)

CORPORATE VOUCHER ENABLEMENT

DFP ADVERT INTEGRATION (SWIPE INTEGRATION)

USER GENERATED CONTENT (UGC) MODULE INTEGRATED

AUGMENTED REALITY PRINT SCANNING

Baobab WebSuite consists of a number of plugins or content rendering services that easily complement existing web properties to ensure improved performance, navigational expertise, monetisation and editorial capabilities.

• AWS Cloud hosted service facility • User OAuthentication (Facebook,

Linkedln, Google+, Twitter) plugin• Content ordering and decryption

plugin • Cloud search enablement plugin • Wordpress plugin and security

management • Video streaming with custom

branded player • Google Analytics • DFP advert embed tagging • Comments • Payment gateway plugin • Social sharing • Galleries • Tagging

ENTERPRISE GRADE WORDPRESS PLUGIN SET

“With the BaboabWebSuite plugins publisher’s can

consolidate and centrally manage and share digital

assets and web content securely and effectively.”

Enterprisation of Websites through Baobab Plugin Set

PWA (Progressive Web Apps) solutions have incredible benefits, making it easy to delight your users, grow engagement and increase conversions.

Here is a checklist of what makes up a PWA solution and also looks to the value proposition in choosing to implement such a web app architecture

Engaging Reliable Fast

• Safe : Served via HTTPS to prevent snooping and ensure content hasn’t been tampered with.• Progressive : Work for every user, regardless of browser choice because they’re built with progressive

enhancement as a core tenet.• Responsive : Fit any form factor: desktop, mobile, tablet, or whatever is next.• Connectivity-independent : Enhanced with service workers to work offline or on low quality networks.• App-like : Feel like an app to the user with app-style

interactions and navigation because they’re built on the app shell model.• Fresh : Always up-to-date thanks to the service worker update process.• Discoverable : Are identifiable as “applications” thanks to W3C manifests and service worker registration scope allowing search engines to find them.• Re-engageable : Make re-engagement easy through features like push notifications.• Installable : Allow users to “keep’’ apps they find most useful

on their home screen without the hassle of an app store.• Linkable : Easily share via URL and not require complex

installation.

PROGRESSIVE WEB APP SOLUTIONS

PROGRESSIVE WEB APP91

PERFORMANCE93

ACCESSIBILITY100

BEST PRACTICES100

Bring your brand to life.

Augmenta gives print and online campaigns a digital boost, connecting retailers and manufacturers, and allowing shoppers and readers a digitally enhanced experience.

With Augmenta, you can easily create your own interactive augmented reality experiences, with no code or technical know-how required. You’ll be up and running in no time, and we’ve got everything you need to ensure your project is a success.

WHAT CAN AUGMENTA DO FOR YOU?

Take your brand and the reader far beyond the pages of your pages.

Upload images of your adverts, magazine covers, packaging material and more to create your Augmented Reality experience in minutes.

Imagine the ability to get paying customers from the pages of a magazine!

When scanning an image, redirect users to an an e-commerce portal to drive a purchase, bridging the gap between print and digital

BRING PRINT ALIVE

ENHANCE E-COMMERCE

Utilising our in-app module, Augmenta can be integrated into an existing app enhancing functionality to the existing platform without costly redesign or extended development.

The Augmenta module bundles the full scope of functionality in Augmenta into a Software Development Kit (SDK) to be integrated into your Android and iOS apps existing code giving your app the capability of scanning and viewing your AR campaigns created in the Augmenta Campaign Manager.

DO YOU HAVE AN EXISTING APP WHERE AUGMENTED REALITY COULD ENHANCE ITS CAPABILITIES?

EDITORIAL PLUGIN SET TO ACCESS VIDEO AND MEDIA

WEB DASHBOARDCAPTURING MOBILE MEDIA PUBLIC MOBILE APP

REAL TIME

VIDEO COMPRESSION

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

ONLY AUTHORISED

USERS

USER / SUBSCRIBER

SEARCH REUSABLE

VIDEOTRANSCODING MAPS

UGC

Posts Image

Collections Video

Work�ow Publishing

Multimedia Search

EDIT / CURATE MULTIMEDIA CONTENT

PUBLISHING WORKFLOW PROCESS

MobileAppSuiteBAOBABWEBSUITESINGLE DIGITAL ASSETS

BRANDED VIDEO PLAYER EMBEDS

CLOUD SEARCH ENGINE

EMBEDDABLE / DOWNLOADABLE

TAGS / CATEGORIES

BULK UPLOAD PROCESS

- AR+ SDK- UGC SDK- Offline Storage

AUGMENTA

MobileAppSuite

YOUR BRAND

USER / SUBSCRIBER

ONLY AUTHORISED

USERS

ONLY AUTHORISED

USERS

SECURE UGC INTEGRATION APIDIGITAL PUBLISHING WORKFLOW LANDSCAPE

EDITORIAL PLUGIN SET TO ACCESS VIDEO AND MEDIA

WEB DASHBOARDCAPTURING MOBILE MEDIA PUBLIC MOBILE APP

REAL TIME

VIDEO COMPRESSION

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

ONLY AUTHORISED

USERS

USER / SUBSCRIBER

SEARCH REUSABLE

VIDEOTRANSCODING MAPS

UGC

Posts Image

Collections Video

Work�ow Publishing

Multimedia Search

EDIT / CURATE MULTIMEDIA CONTENT

PUBLISHING WORKFLOW PROCESS

MobileAppSuiteBAOBABWEBSUITESINGLE DIGITAL ASSETS

BRANDED VIDEO PLAYER EMBEDS

CLOUD SEARCH ENGINE

EMBEDDABLE / DOWNLOADABLE

TAGS / CATEGORIES

BULK UPLOAD PROCESS

- AR+ SDK- UGC SDK- Offline Storage

AUGMENTA

MobileAppSuite

YOUR BRAND

USER / SUBSCRIBER

ONLY AUTHORISED

USERS

ONLY AUTHORISED

USERS

SECURE UGC INTEGRATION APIDIGITAL PUBLISHING WORKFLOW LANDSCAPE

It was 2014, the Independent Media Group had recently been acquired by a consortium of private and government investment businesses from the original Irish Independent owners. Back then it was previously known as Independent Newspapers, which had over 32 printed newspaper titles (national, regional and community) and only one news website (www.iol.co.za).

The Afrozaar digital product team approached the new owners and proposed a digital journey and digital platform implementation plan to transform the traditional newspaper group into a globally positioned digital first media business.

After partnering with The Telegraph Media Group (2011 to 2014) Afrozaar had the experience needed to assist with establishing a high-frequency digital publishing ecosystem.

OBJECTIVE:

To define a change-controlled roadmap and journey to systematically transform the group’s print content to be digitally compliant for wider distribution across a suite of newly deployed digital web and app properties. Following the initial objective, the team ensured print produced content was digitally available and archives thereof manageable for reuse and reference, we were tasked

with transitioning the group’s people, process and platforms further towards a digitally first focused mindset.

By utilising The Publisher’s Toolbox suite of products we believed that immediate value would be realised from a digital asset, publishing, presentation perspective, and over time the commercialisation and enrichment of print content into a digital world would be possible with little change.

TRANSITIONING AFRICA’S LARGEST PRINT NEWSPAPER GROUP INTO A GLOBAL DIGITAL FIRST MEDIA GROUP.INDEPENDENT MEDIA GROUP GOES DIGITAL

CASE STUDY

IMPLEMENTATION APPROACH:

We assessed and applied a systematic approach starting at the physical infrastructure deployment layer where we embarked on migrating all media systems to the cloud.

To understand the challenge and opportunity here is a summary of the digital landscape we analysed; numerous nationally distributed editorial teams, no digital publishing process, no digital products, no digital subscriptions, no digital title specific apps or websites, no centralised digital asset archive or storage facility, no user roles or workflow from security perspective, no centralised analytics and no digital customer database.

CLOUD ARCHITECTURE

The digital journey begun by establishing a cloud based infrastructure within Amazon Cloud: AWS. Where our first challenge was to preserve yet port the propriety Atex Prestige Print Editorial platform to run in a scalable AWS environment. Such a migration had never been performed. This did not stop us, and so Acacia Cloud Solutions, a subsidiary within the Afrozaar group, was responsible for all cloud setup, configuration and optimisation. It was a success and a an achievement never done before.

“We needed a reliable and scalable hosting environment to deploy media platforms, leverage digital services,

archive digital assets and facilitate efficient digital publishing cycles.”, Rich Cheary (CEO of Afrozaar)

CONTENT REDISTRIBUTION AND DIGITAL FIRST CMS

It was important that the traditional publications had an equal opportunity to establish their brands digitally. Initially the impact on people and process was minimal, and resulted in maximum satisfaction when we were able to repackage print content within Baobab Suite and auto publish to a branded app and web platform. By utilising Baobab Suite’s Import and Export of content APIs syndication and aggregation of content within and from external sources is tightly regulated and managed for further redistribution.

“Such an undertaking of migrating and supporting a media group’s platforms had to be handled with care and zero tolerance for failure. We were dealing with traditional newspaper brands, that were over a century old and never before missed a print run, so we weren’t going to miss one now because of new digital rollout.”, Rich Cheary

MOBILE APP STRATEGY

We wanted to mobilise the print-run content whilst respecting each title’s brand, so we defined a mobile app offering (Android and Apple) that had a digital newsstand facility allowing each print brand to be represented, ensuring their respective print editions were digitally available for download as

well as past editions. It was NB for us to steer away from outdated PDF based experience and transition the print content into unique content elements with complementing multimedia files, however we couldn’t veer away from complementing the edition with a PDF download facility for ABC purposes.

The Afrozaar team used an enterprise version of their Mobile App Suite framework which had the ability to scale rapidly with regards to single-title, multi-titled, continuous and edition based publishing cycles, and included metering module and subscription entitlement layer for digital newspapers.

MULTI-TITLED APP SOLUTION

IOL News Mobile app is available on Google Play Store and Apple’s iTunes Store where one can subscribe to any of the groups daily or weekly newspapers.

Single-titled Mobile App SolutionsAn example can be found in The Star newspaper single title mobile app is available on Google Play Store and Apple’s iTunes Store where one can subscribe to any of the groups daily or weekly newspapers.

“By choosing to use the Mobile App Suite, we provided the Independent group with a massive advantage and differentiator in the market, as new mobile title apps could be deployed within a week, thus rapidly expanding the group’s mobile distribution and reach”, Rich Cheary

WEBSITE STRATEGY

We fulfilled a role of content API provider to a 3rd party web development team who designed and built a custom web framework / platform (Baobab WebSuite) for the group utilising the content API. IOL website utilizes Json services. We as team decided that the group’s newspaper titles couldn’t hold out until the fully fledged group wide web framework was ready, so offered a more nimbler and flexible solution. By implementing the WebSuite framework which allowed for a collection of WordPress sites to be made secure and standardised to meet a large Enterprise Media Group standard. Some examples of these sites are: www.tyi.com, www.video360.co.za, www.houseandgarden.co.za,

MONETISATION OF CONTENT

GOOGLE DFP IMPLEMENTATION

The next objective and approach taken was to provide mechanisms upon which the new digitally minded group could monetise their content and brand effort in a digital environment. We implemented Google DFP and managed all AdOps tagging across all websites and mobile apps from within the Baobab

Suite centralised configuration engine. Afrozaar was able to implemented fractional, banner and interstitial DFP adverts across mobile app navigations, display adverts on web and pre-roll video adverts within the customised branded media streaming players.

AUGMENTED REALITY

With our mindset being digital and app oriented, we needed to be sure we didn’t cannibalize the print advertising side of such a large group. We decided to implement an in-app AR+ module that would enhance and enrich the print version of newspapers, especially any print adverts. By combining Augmented Reality scan module in the apps, we plan to complement the print editions and provide the audience with a way to unlock additional value and benefit, most importantly give print adverts a digitally enriched capability. Our implementation of AR+ Augmenta is now at the heart of the group’s print advertising commercial upsell strategy.

MOBILE JOURNALISM

Ironically this was one of the final solutions we implemented. Not only did this give the group the capability to secure break stories from the field, but it allowed for the centralisation and storage of such media to be made available within the editorial workflow and asset archive immediately. MojoReporter is now not only rolled out across all editorial teams, but also made available as a plugin to the Mobile

Apps whereby citezen reporters can now too contribute into the braking news editorial workflow

KEY DIGITAL PLATFORMS

By implementing the following digital platforms and products across the group the Afrozaar team have been able to achieve the objectives set out:

• Digital First CMS complete with permission based editorial workflow

• Subscription based content metering• Evolving content APIs for serving

various websites and mobile applications

• Digital Asset Management (DAM) – centralising media assets across multiple print and digital brands

• Mobile Newsstand App of all their titles

• Mobile Apps for each digital brand in the group

• Google DFP AdOps and tagging• Video streaming and player services• Content Syndication• Enterprisation of their WordPress

ecosystem by installing Baobab plugins and hosting in AWS.

• Social publishing Facebook, Twitter with tracking

• Push notification facility to auto or manually communicate

• Reporting – editorial performance metrics, digital subscribers

• Advert Booking App• MojoReporter (Mobile Journalism app

platform)

OUTCOMES AND LEARNINGS:

IMPROVED EFFICIENCY

Independent has a large amount of content produced daily for print. There is a need to improve efficiency and lower operational overheads through centralised control of content across multiple apps and website brands and a single view of subscribers.

REDUCED COSTS

Reduce costs in developing tailor-made, integrated web and app solutions from MBaaS architecture and a wide range of APIs and SDKs.

NO VENDOR LOCK-IN

We wanted to give Independent freedom to choose multiple app development partners and reduce risk of vendor lock-in with flexible and secure content APIs.

INCREASED REVENUE

Drive digital revenue growth through multiple channels including advertising via Google DoubleClick for Publishers, numerous subscription options and content metering.

FLEXIBILITY

When trying to drive a digital first mindset into an organisation that focuses primarily on print, there is a strong need to experiment and modify functionality

on an ongoing basis. This in order to both inform and support the long-term evolution of the digital strategy.

EXCEPTIONAL PERFORMANCE

Providing business and consumer facing digital products in an emerging market means being reliable, fast and considerate to geographically distributed editorial teams. High performance cloud services tailored towards superior search and archive facilities for sharing content across the group provide a competitive edge.

TECHNOLOGY USED:

JAVA, MySql, ElasticSearch, Polymer, JavaScript, Android, iOS, ReactNative

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE PROJECT:

Being able to scale digitally rapidly to roll out Getting IOL content team onto Baobab CMS editorial workflowUnlocking tools like integrated social sharing, article preview, and publish schedules to increase online engage-ment

Working with AdOps teams to create effective digital advertising campaigns across websites and mobile apps

“Thank you Afrozaar. The quality of your delivery into Independent, a large media organisation, was done extremely well. We now have the digital foundation to scale our product & service offering across web & mobile.”

– ANTHONY ROBINSON (CDO, Independent Newspapers)

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