Hearst Magazines has developed nine mobile sites for its key magazine brands. The mobile versions are not exact knockoffs of their online or print counterparts, but tailored to the constraints of a small screen and the mindset of an on-the-go consumer. There's no other way.

In an exclusive interview, Sophia Stuart, director of mobile at Hearst Digital Media, discusses the New York-based publisher's mobile strategy for magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Seventeen, Esquire and Marie Claire. She told Mobile Marketer's Lauren Mooney that "women would rather leave home without their lipstick than without their cell phone."

Read along to find out how one of the world's largest publishers of women's titles is treating mobile -- from content, commerce and carrier relations to advertising, technology and mobile's role within the organization.

What is Hearst Magazines' view of mobile media?
Hearst Magazines [has] 19 brands in the U.S. and almost 200 international editions, so we think we know a lot about how to talk to women and we know that women are out there and using their mobile phones. And we know that we can be a great source of information. We call it "Delightful Solutions on the Go."

We think we should be surrounding her with content now, so we have magazines, television, live events, radio -- Cosmo radio on Sirius -- and now we have mobile.

So we have nine mobile sites and we have nine text clubs as well, so we're using SMS as well as mobile Web.

We just want to be wherever she is and sometimes I say that women would rather leave home without their lipstick than without their cell phone. But don't tell that to Harper's Bazaar.

Which nine Hearst magazines have a mobile edition?
Harper's Bazaar, which is m.bazaar.com -- that's what you type in on your phone. Then we have Cosmo Girl, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, Redbook and Seventeen.

So many young people today communicate on their phones via text messaging. Do you have any research on the willingness of women to access the mobile publications on their mobile phones?
I don't have any official research that I can quote to you. But obviously we did a lot of research before we launched all of our sites and we found out that women are on the go constantly.

We have a tag-line which is, "I had no idea my phone could do that," because generally nine times out of 10 that's exactly what women say when we demo any of our mobile products -- they had no idea they could get this on their phone.

So, on Good Housekeeping's [mobile site] one of the biggest page views for us is Recipe of the Day.

We have blogs, which are written by editors, so you follow along with another woman's life. And it's just that couple of minutes in your day, where you're sitting on the bus or you're in carpool, so you just have a couple of minutes in the car while you're waiting for the children outside school.

I'll tell you the best thing about -- as you can tell I'm from the U.K. -- I used to run digital media for Hearst in England and the first mobile product for Hearst, back in '99 in the U.K.

And the thing you noticed almost overnight in London was that women when they were queuing up to get their sandwich at lunchtime, they were all staring at their phones. They weren't making phone calls. And they were either picking up text messages or they were using the mobile Web.

And that gave us an idea, particularly for Cosmo. We have the bedroom blog, which is updated regularly. It's a young woman in her 20s -- it's her torrid tale of dating and her job in LA. And it's wonderful. It's like a soap opera, and this has become enormously popular for us.

Women are at lunchtime getting their sandwich, and they're reading the bedroom blog or their checking their horoscope or they're looking at the fashion tips on Marie Claire [where] we have a great section, which is called "What to Wear." And it's what to wear for all occasions.

In Good Housekeeping in the magazine this month, you'll see they run a little promo which says, "Don't know what to cook at 4 p.m.? Neither do we. So we check out m.goodhousekeeping.com."

And it's all about -- you know most moms don't know what they're cooking this evening, so we're there for them. So they're at the grocery store, they look at their Good Housekeeping mobile site on their phone and there's the grocery list and the step-by-step instructions and the nutrition facts, everything they need.

Do you feel like the country is there yet, in terms of consuming leisure-oriented content on a small screen such as the mobile device?
The most important thing is that you have to design it for the device that you're looking at it on. So what we have done is, everything we're using on mobile we have re-edited, re-formatted. It's absolutely perfect for the mobile device. It's a quick recipe, a horoscope, a fashion tip, it's the key looks from the runway in Bazaar.

And I do think that the American woman is ready for this, because our traffic -- I can't give you numbers at the moment -- but our traffic is doubling every single month, so obviously we've really hit something here. You know she's looking for content on the go and now she has it from us.

Is Hearst creating special mobile-only content?
Most of it has appeared elsewhere, but in very different forms. So, for example, when we sat down with Stacy Morrison, editor in chief of Redbook, we said, "OK we want 150 tips on relationships." And all of this stuff has appeared at some point or another, but we had it all re-edited into just tip form and you can just go through and it's incredibly useful.

The mobile-specific content that we have: we also have a wallpaper business, which we're doing with a partner, so we have all of the vintage covers from 1900 to 1930, because people often requested these. So we've gone into the archives and made them into wallpapers you can use on your phone. So that's mobile-specific.

But also Alberto Vargas, the illustrator was on staff at Esquire from 1941-1943 -- so we own 20 of the original Vargas girls -- the pin-ups -- which are so wonderful in miniature, so again that's mobile-specific.

And the other thing that's mobile-specific is our Cosmo Fake Call service. In Adweek we were in the Brand Leaders 2007 Hot List, and the quote from them was, "A call-back service [that] for 99 cents lets women escape from a bad date has to be one of the cleverest brand extensions of the year."

So if you're inside m.cosmopolitan.com you'll see there's a link for a fake call. And what you can do is maybe you're heading to a date and you're really not sure about this date so you hedge your bet.

So you can book a call from us and you can select the flavor of the call. It could be a boyfriend, girlfriend, work, your French lover, and then you ask us when to call you, ASAP, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour -- maybe you're going to give the date a little bit longer than you thought.

And we will call you, and the whole thing is scripted, it will tell you when to throw back your head and laugh. Basically it will get you out.

Is the same strategy in place for the Web sites as it is for the mobile content? Or would you say the strategies are different?
The strategies are very parallel. I report into the general manager of Hearst Digital Media, which I think you know is a new division that was set up less than a year ago at Hearst. And we're within Hearst Magazines.

So I report into the general manager, and then the Web sites run parallel to the mobile sites. We talk all the time to the Web site editors, and talk to them about what's really working on the Web -- what can we re-edit and re-publish for mobile.

We also take a lot of direct feeds from the Web site. The idea being, let's say Good Housekeeping, for example. Maybe a woman has been checking her computer in the morning and she's been reading the blog, "Good Grief," and it's a mom of two tween boys, it's a wonderful blog and she's a very, very talented writer.

So maybe the woman has been catching up with that in the morning on her computer and suddenly the phone rings and she needs to go out to a meeting or she needs to pick up the children -- whatever it is -- but she really wants to finish reading the blog. Well, she can, because once she's in the car and she's waiting maybe outside the grocery store, she can actually finish reading the blog on her phone.

So we're following -- that's the really important thing for us -- we're following her wherever she goes.

What purpose does mobile serve for Hearst -- subscription venue, advertising platform, brand extension? Or is it a marketing tool?
It's all of them.

We have signed a deal with Sprint and we're talking to all of the others. As you know, there are many carriers in the U.S. and we view them as -- we'd like to have our magazines on every newsstand -- so we'd like to be on every carrier if we can.

So we signed a deal with Sprint fairly recently and Sprint took all nine of our sites and we are running advertising across those sites on-deck. And you will see us make other announcements with other carriers early in 2008.

At the bottom of the screen on every single page of every single one of our mobile sites is a click-to-call to subscribe to one of our magazines. Because often through digital you are reaching the audiences who weren't necessarily reading the magazines before, and we have found that through online, [digital] is a big subscription generator. And we think that will be the same with mobile.

You know they'll see some of the content and think, "I really like this, I think I want the magazine as well." So there's a click-to-call and [it will ] be sent straight to our subscription department.

In terms of marketing, we do a lot of work in print and mobile.

So let's say in Seventeen you see a full-page ad which will be from one of our major advertisers. You know we've done work with Clinique, Garnier, Adidas, J.C. Penney, Macy's, and all of these have done repeat business with us with SMS campaigns.

So maybe you see an ad for one of those advertisers and there will be send, and a keyword will be sent to one of our short codes at Hearst, and you will be entered into a sweepstakes. We did one with a hair care product where you could do a quiz to find out what hair care product from that advertiser was perfect for your hair and that drove traffic into retail stores.

We also do sign-up for tips. You can get four tips a month from an advertiser and you do that straight from the page. So it's a big marketing vehicle for us.

How do advertisers make media buys on Hearst's mobile properties?
We have historical relationships with all the major advertisers in the U.S. So what's been fun for us is all of these big advertisers have been doing sort of a wait-and-see about mobile.

And then once they saw that Hearst was getting into the picture, often these advertisers have come to us with a media buy and said, "We know you have mobile as well, so we are buying print, and we're buying online, and we're buying presence at one of your events, we'd like to book mobile as well." And we do that with them.

Who do you think your likely mobile readers will be?
All of our sites are free. You don't have to subscribe to them. That's really important because I've been working in emerging technologies for many, many years now, and I think one of the classic mistakes is to put a price on something right at the beginning when people still aren't familiar with it.

So we made our sites free to use -- there's nothing to download, nothing to install. Purely you start the mobile Web session on your phone, you type in the URL and you can save it into your favorites and there you are -- very very simple.

So we are finding a whole new audience because of our relationships with the carriers. If you are on-deck with Sprint, and maybe you haven't picked up a copy of Cosmo just recently, but you would really like to check out the content. We have Cosmo Mobile on Sprint and you actually see some marketing messages on the homepage of Sprint, which we produce for Sprint. They ask us for certain messages every month. And they are like teasers, just one-line teasers.

I do think mobile is great copywriting. I do think it's going back to the great heyday of copywriting, because it's such a small screen and you have to get your message across in five words or less.

So that's what we do with the carriers. So we're reaching a whole new audience. You know they're on-deck with Sprint and they are looking for mobile entertainment or for information or for solutions. So we are getting a whole new audience and it's really exciting for us.

Should magazine publishers make an extra special effort for mobile or should they focus more on the desktop Web since mobile phones soon will have regular HTML browsers that let them see sites the way they do on computers?
When the iPhone came out, lots of our publishers and editors asked me, "How is that going to change our business?" And I said, we've just got millions more potential in the market, because our mobile sites are designed specifically for the mobile phone.

Trying to access a regular Web site often is a very poor consumer experience. Regular Web sites aren't designed for a tiny screen. Often you are trying to look at a regular Web site on a smartphone, which can pull up a full Web site.

Obviously most phones like the Motorola Razr can't pull up a full Web site, so the consumer experience isn't that great -- you're scrolling down to try to find the menu, then you're scrolling across to try to find the content.

And I always show -- I have a whole range of demo phones -- and I always show our sites and I always show other sites that are full Web sites on the iPhone and I promise you, all of our publishers and editors say our Web sites look so beautiful, because we design specifically for mobile.

How has Hearst organized its mobile efforts internally?
The structure is, I head up mobile for Hearst Magazines and I report to Chuck Cordray, general manager of Hearst Digital Media. So everything digital comes under Chuck.

And the way it works is, we have site editors per brand and they sit within Hearst Digital Media and they also have a reporting line out to the editors on the magazines as well. So it's a dual reporting line and it works really well for us.

So we meet with our site editors very regularly to find out what's working online and to re-publish some of that for mobile. And then to have mobile-only specific conversations with the brand.

What trends do you see happening in 2008 in mobile media?
I think a lot of people are going to realize that mobile is about "Delightful Solutions on the Go." It's about "I need to check the weather, I need to find a recipe, I need to find a date night idea, I need to get out of a date by using Cosmo Fake Call, I want to pick up my horoscope, I want to find out what's 'in' in fashion, I'm heading to San Francisco for the weekend -- I've never been there before -- I want find out what to wear in San Francisco and I'm going to be on my phone to do [all] of this."

That was me plugging everything shamelessly, of course, because "What to Wear in San Francisco" is part of our "What to Wear" list on Marie Claire -- it's everything from what to wear to a first client dinner to what to wear for a weekend in Paris. It's very directional.

I think people are going to realize that women are out there on their phones and they need this information and traditionally they haven't been able to get it on the go. And I think that's going to be very exciting.

Are there any lessons from online media that apply to mobile media?
Yes. If you want to work in mobile -- the thing I've really learned, because I've been in technology for a while -- is that it's all about the user, it's all about the consumer.

However, you have to know everything about the technology to know what not to use. Because there's so much technology out there in mobile and we are very clear at Hearst that unless it worked out of the box, unless it works across all carriers, and as you know, all the different carriers have different technology backgrounds, so something that works on Sprint might not necessarily work on Verizon. But there are ways of doing it.

So we only work with technology that works on all the different platforms.

For mobile you have to test for 1,600 browsers, because that's how many browsers are in the marketplace through the different handsets and the different carriers. So it's very important to really understand the technology and then to make it very seamless for the end user.

I don't think the end user should have to download stuff to use an application. I don't think they should be told, "Oh I'm sorry, you can only use that if you're on AT&T (www.attwireless.com)." I think that's just wrong.

I think that if this market is really going to grow, then you have to have people that really understand the technology and then know enough to make that seamless for the end user.

Do you think carriers still hold the key for mobile media's success here? What role do data plans play?
I think they are incredibly crucial and Hearst, as one of the largest media companies in the world, works very closely with carriers. The carriers have spent millions on upgrading those networks and they've spent millions on acquiring subscribers. And we really respect that, so we work hand in hand with them.

We have off-deck as well, which is just as important to us as a media player.

But the carriers are definitely our strategic partners. And the more great content that the carriers can bring on-deck, the easier it will be for them to persuade their subscribers to upgrade to greater all-you-can-eat data plans.

What's your goal for Hearst's mobile efforts in 2008?
We want to grow the business. Traffic and revenue are two of our major goals.

We want to make sure than the end-user experience is just exquisite in terms of design and in terms of the content that they can really access.

We also want to increase our response rate from the end user. We have a "Talk to us" link on every single page and we're starting to gather in content from the users themselves, which is wonderful.

An example of this: we have something on Esquire called Best Bars in America. And it's a wonderful franchise from Esquire -- they've been running it for many years, all of the bars that they really think are the great bars in America. And so we have their entire database on the Esquire mobile site.
And then what we did [was] David Granger, editor in chief of Esquire, said, "I really want guys to be able to tell us if they're at a bar in Chicago and they really think that we should check it out."

So we came up with a Java script form, with just drop-down menus. You're on your phone and you can just tell us exactly what you like about the bar you're sitting in and that information will come to us and then we hand that over to the editors. So next time they do the big upload of the Best Bars in America, they can go check out some of the bars that guys have been recommending.

This is such a success for us that we also replicated it on Cosmo. We have 100 Hot Cities on Cosmo. So if you're going out of town with a bunch of your girlfriends next weekend and you're heading to Miami, then you might want to check out Cosmo's 100 Hot Cities, because we have all the places in Miami that we really love.

And then what we did was, we thought well, if you're in Miami maybe you found a great café or a great restaurant or a great place just to hang out that's very beautiful. And so again we've replicated the form we used on Best Bars and women from all over the U.S. are now replying to those forms and they're sending us that information.

Again we're giving that to the editors so next time they do the big upload of 100 Hot Cities for 2008, they're going to check out what some of women have been saying themselves.

This article appeared in Mobile Marketer's Mobile Outlook 2008 . It is saved in the Classic Guides section on www.mobilemarketer.com . Please click here to download the PDF file.