NEW YORK ? A Time Inc. executive at the Mobile Marketing Summit: Holiday Focus 2013 conference said it is programming content for mobile to address its shorter user sessions.

During the session "How the World's Largest Magazine Publisher Is Adapting to Mobile," the executive said user sessions are longer on tablets than on smartphones. However, smartphone users continually come back on a regular basis when they have a couple of minutes to check the news headlines or send a tweet in a phenomenon Time Inc. calls ?found time.?

?We need to start programming for mobile devices the way users are actually using this stuff,? said Sol Masch, director of mobile sales and strategy at Time Inc., New York. 

?For People, we hired a mobile editor to program content specifically for mobile platforms,? he said. ?It has a lot of the same content as the Web, but we program it differently.

?The user has found time and we want to make sure we serve them all the articles they need when they want to find it."

Mobile traffic
Time Inc. publishes well-known publications such as People, Real Simple, Health and Sports Illustrated.
With its mobile traffic growing quickly the company has been aggressively bringing these brands to mobile to make content available whenever and wherever readers want it.

Currently, Time Inc. reports it has 28 million mobile users who are hitting its sites each month ? up from 16 million unique users a year ago. This makes it one of the top 25 mobile publishers in the United States.
Additionally, 27 percent of digital traffic comes from mobile devices.

In general, users are hitting their smartphones on average 40 times per day, with the overall volume of use fairly even throughout the day

In comparison, tablet users are spending up to 20 to 30 minutes per session ? often later in the day after work ? when they have time to sit back and look through a magazine.

Snackable content
One way Time is addressing this difference between tablets and smartphones is with a dashboard for Fortune on tablets. When users open up the app, instead of getting a straight copy of the magazine, they are served a dashboard that features a mix of content from the Web and the print publication.

The digital content can be read for free. To read the print content, users have to subscribe or buy that issue, which is done via iTunes.

This serves an important way to up sell readers.

?It provides a mix of the Web and print together that gives users everything they want from one dashboard,? Mr. Masch said.

For smartphones, the approach is different.

For example, the Real Simple No Time to Cook app features thousands of recipes that can be done in under five minutes.

?We know they want snackable content,? Mr. Masch said. ?If you have found time to cook, this is a great app for it.?

Editing for mobile
For People, Time Inc. has hired a mobile editor who is looking at trends on the mobile site in terms of which stories are popping and what type of content mobile users are coming to the site for the most. The main pages of all the sections served in mobile are then programmed to have the most popular content to be highlighted.

Time Inc. is applying some of this same thinking to advertising on its mobile and tablet platforms.

While Time Inc. has significant scale in mobile, Mr. Masch reports that up until a year ago advertisers had not gravitated to it for reaching mobile users as much as they did properties such as Pandora, ESPN or The Weather Channel because the publisher had not been innovative in the space.

However, according to Time Inc.'s own research, when brands advertise on its various platforms, they see a 38 percent lift in reach when advertisers use its mobile platforms as part of their marketing campaign.

Over the past 12 months, Time Inc. has worked to revamp its mobile advertising offerings, including a number of new ad units that can be delivered across devices or that combine a banner ad with an in-stream ad and animation. 

For the movie Olympus Has Fallen, which debuted earlier this year on the same day that the March Madness basket tournament began, Time Inc. created photo galleries for the various competitions leading up to the tournament. Users could scroll through the galleries in less than two minutes to learn what had happened.

?We are trying to do stuff like this more,? Mr. Masch said. ?Offer them the ability to create these custom experiences that can be consumed during short periods of time.?

Final Take
Sol Masch is director of mobile sales and strategy at Time Inc., New York