Publishing companies like Penguin have struggled to marry their formerly print-based content with digital media. Emily Andrews explores Penguin and Stephen Fry’s partnership with WeTransfer

Problem: Penguin Books wanted to tap into Stephen Fry’s audience appeal when it launched his new memoir, More Fool Me. The resulting YourFry digital project is running parallel to the October book launch and is a collaboration between Penguin and WeTransfer.

Penguin and WeTransfer had worked together on a series of projects, and the YourFry collaboration is the realisation of their desire to unite the traditional medium of print with the modern medium of digital to appeal to the broadest possible market. 

Nathan Hull, digital product development director at Penguin Books, says, “We know how to reach the book buyer market, and the people who we would traditionally market to. But with Stephen Fry, because he’s interesting to people in so many different ways, we wanted to reach a much broader audience than we’d perhaps done with his previous book; particularly within the creative and the technology spaces because Stephen’s such a tech advocate.

Fry has a formidable social presence and this latest venture follows in the footsteps of the award-winning MyFry app; an indication of his passion for technology.

“Penguin has a really strong, rich, design heritage that people aspire to; whether it be more complex designs or the very simplistic orange, cream and orange tri-band design. It’s iconic. Transferring that resonance into the digital space is probably one of the single biggest challenges we have at Penguin. We’re building a strong reputation around what we do digitally as well. But that process of designing things digitally to have that same impact is different, and its one that publishers are relatively new to,” continues Hull.

Penguin sought out WeTransfer to help with this challenge. It wanted to tap into digital as a new market for the traditional publishing company, but a market which WeTransfer understands. The YouFry project is the latest product of this ongoing collaboration.

Strategy: Once Penguin had come up with a strategy for the promotion of Fry’s latest memoirs it held a trial run in Toronto, Canada. The success of the trial and Fry’s openness led to his agent engaging with WeTransfer, allowing it to contribute its own ideas. The YourFry digital project encourages the public to engage with Fry’s memoirs by producing their own interpretations of text, imagery and audio taken from the memoirs More Fool Me and The Fry Chronicles and upload them to WeTransfer. The brief, explained in a video of Fry on WeTransfer, invites entrants to focus on a theme based on Fry’s passions including, but not exclusive to, technology, language, gay rights, mental health and love.

As the project moves forward, both Penguin and WeTransfer will measure the success of the project and will adapt the platform where necessary. To inspire further entries, WeTransfer will showcase some submissions on the site.

Damian Bradfield, chief strategy officer at WeTransfer, says, “There’s an awful lot of things that ask people to submit ideas or send in concepts, and the actual ask of the consumer is quite big, so we want to make sure that we’re helping them enough to make it worthwhile. That’s quite an important part of it, to make sure people understand what they need to do and what they can do, and to stimulate them by giving examples of what others have done. 

Results: WeTransfer has created a portal that moves away from the wordy offerings of Penguin, instead delivering a page designed to appeal to WeTransfer’s 60m-strong following while delivering Penguin content in a simple and engaging way. Hull says, “We’re very wordy people who like to write lots of flowery, wordy synopses over everything, and the initial ideas we were putting over to WeTransfer would have lost the message. One of the first things WeTransfer came back to us on really pushed the necessity for simplicity of message and hopefully we’ve now achieved that.”

In exchange, WeTransfer benefits from the heritage, credibility and ideas that both Penguin and Fry bring to the table since it provides its audience with quality content that they will enjoy. This helps WeTransfer raise awareness of its capacity as a discovery tool, rather than just a file transfer service; what it is frequently still perceived of by the media.

Bradfield says, “A lot of press would have us down as a file transfer service and of course that’s true, that’s fundamentally what we do, but one of the biggest successes of WeTransfer has been this use of full-screen image being used as a discovery tool. We spend a huge amount of energy curating the types of images, brands, organisations, or people who are presented through WeTransfer, and that discovery platform is really the thing that takes up the biggest part of our time.”

The project encourages creativity, diversity and innovation and some of the best entries will be exhibited over WeTransfer’s, Fry’s and Penguin’s multiple channels. The project only recently launched, but there have already been a number of downloads.

The partnership allows Penguin to learn from WeTransfer’s digital-savvy and reach new markets, while providing WeTransfer with interesting content that makes an impact. The ongoing partnership between the two companies is an interesting development for the publishing industry.