Using Brand to Disrupt an Industry with Priyanka Vazirani and Shannon Almeida, Volv Media

Episode Transcription

Priyanka:

To everyone creating a product out there, it's really important to have a voice. It's really important to have your branding solidified so you're able to communicate with your users, otherwise your product's probably not going to do that well, I would say.

Christian:

This is a Better Product, original series on product brand. I'm Christian.

Anna:

I'm Anna.

Christian:

Before we jump into this episode, I want to pause and invite you to join our upcoming speaker series. It's five weeks, five speakers with countless product insights starting October 28th. You can register by going to betterproduct.community/speaker-series. Again, that is betterproduct.community/speaker-series. In case you're wondering the dash is a hyphen, if you want to be official about it. Anyway, if that's too long of a link to remember, just go to our community site to get connected.

Anna:

What if I told you there was a Tinder for news? Well, there is... Kind of. Our two guests, Priyanka Vazirani and Shannon Almeida, are the founders of Volv Media. An app taking the bias out of news using AI and a Tinder-like swiping experience.

Priyanka:

We noticed the conflicting narratives between right and left publications. When we started looking at the news more intently, that's when we realized that this is something that we could actually solve, and it's something that AI could be used to solve.

Anna:

Shannon shares the problem they aim to solve, while noting she wanted to work on something that had social impact.

Shannon:

We both wanted to do the same thing, that same vision of creating some kind of meaningful impact, and so that's how we got started.

Anna:

Priyanka echoes Shannon's words, and they did just that starting Volv Media in 2019 as a news app. Brand plays a major role in how it's grown. They were intentional about showing up differently than other news sites and really using brand to differentiate. Now, typically when we talk about brand, it's about capturing the voice, it's how things resonate with the intended audience, it's an experience. Yet Volv is app for consuming content. So how did Shannon and Priyanka manage to layer brand on top of the app content, separating itself from what the users are consuming? Let's start there with Shannon.

Shannon:

For us, when we started out, it was all about misinformation. We were creating AI to tackle this huge problem. At that point, that was our only product that we had. When you feel back and you just look at your audience, your target market, which are Millennials, Gen Z, what did they want? So it was all about changing the way we presented the news to everyone. How do we make it more engaging for them? How do we make it more pleasant for them? How do we change the entire experience of consuming news? That's when we came up with the idea of 9-second news.

That's why for us, branding is so important, because without the brand, no one's going to read your news if no one finds it engaging enough. So if we tackled misinformation and there was no one coming on the app, there was this huge disconnect, we had to bridge those two. That's when we realized that we had to bridge that gap, and then we realized that branding is a huge, essential part of it all, and not just an add on.

Christian:

I don't want to dive too much into the news aspect of this since this is a show about product, but I feel like a lot of people might be thinking the same thing as me, which is, in the space of news, I think we have seen, especially since 2016, that it's exposed the clickbait, the hooks, the way that people are playing off of human being's propensity to believe or get attracted to sensational headlines. So in that, that seems to be the model for engagement. It seems like a lot of news is based off of, the more sensational the headline, the more it grabs your attention. Then of course, you hear so many people that quote articles and are like, "Oh, I didn't read the article. I just saw the headline." So how are you contrasting with that? What are you doing to engage users in reading the news?

Priyanka:

I think first things first, when it comes to engaging people, we don't really need clickbait for them to open the article. Everything just fits in a screen, the headline is there, the article's right there. You just keep scrolling, you see everything. The entire article is in one screen. So we don't need to entice you in terms of, check out this sensational headline, now click on it, and then come on this article and keep reading. Our brains are hardwired in a way that when we see something sensationalized, so when we see something really terrifying, we are prone to click on it because our brain thinks of it as danger. Right. That's the whole point of why people sensationalize things or make everything sound really scary.

I think there is a lot of things going on in the world anyway. I feel like people need to have that balance of positive and negative. So one thing we tried to do in terms of our content, is we try and balance off coronavirus news, or the BLM protest, with some kind of positive news too, so then when you're on the app, you're not going to be like, "Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God." It's fair to find that bad, but then there's something positive happening in the world. Then, it's also a balance between serious and chill, so you're going to read about 2020 elections, but you're also going to be reading about [Supreme's 00:05:14] latest school labs or the latest song dropped by Beyonce. So it's a mix of different genres to keep you entertained yet informed.

Shannon:

Yeah, and I think the main differentiation between what we've done is that, most news publications, they depend on a per page click, so they have individual articles on Facebook or Google and they're trying to get clicks per article. For us, it's more we just need to get people on the app and once they're on the app, they just keep scrolling. So it works for us better that we don't need to rely on clickbait, we can just rely on good content, and easy to read content actually, at the end of the day.

Christian:

That makes a lot of sense. Now, following that, what is the business model behind Volv? If the articles are really based on per click, your app is free, what are you leading towards right now?

Shannon:

We're going to be doing native advertising. It's just going to be these really catered to our app ads that are going to be placed after a few stories, so it's going to be a very seamless, enjoyable experience, and it's going to merge into all the articles. It's not a pop up or... It's a menial subscription, it's just going to be a very easy to read experience. For us, we don't really care about the click per view for sensationalism, because people spend a lot of time on our app actually. So they're scrolling on average, at least 20 stories per session, which is a lot. We place ads every five to six stories. Mind you, these are native advertising ads, so it's not really a full page ad. It's going to look it's like it's part of Volv. It's just in the margin, it's not going to be a standout. It's just a really easy experience for everyone. For the user, especially.

Priyanka:

Yeah. You can just think of it like Instagram. You know, when you're just scrolling through your feed, you're going through your friends' posts and everything, and then you see a sponsored ad, it doesn't bother you because your experience is just the same. So similarly, when you're reading the news, it's just going to say, sponsored. Obviously, it's going to look very different, so you don't confuse ads as the news, but it's not going to bother you or come at you from every side like the news sites today.

Christian:

I probably should have asked this in the beginning, but backing up, where do the stories come from? Can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by AI and where these stories are being sourced from?

Shannon:

We rely a lot on human curation. We do take our breaking news from a lot of important news fire agencies because that's where breaking news comes from. Then, when it comes to trending news, we rely a lot on social media, so a lot of the news breaks on social media. Today, Twitter is just amazing. We find out a lot of what happens like trending hashtags and you just dig deeper. We have a team that's working constantly, and our editors, and we're just looking for what's happening out there.

Apart from just breaking news, which we use our AI for, because that's the politics. So we use AI primarily for that, but we also use AI for just making sure everything is well balanced. We use Twitter, Reddit, just looking at what's trending all the time. So it is human curated right now as a first step, and we do plan on using AI to curate more for us. We do want it to supplement us as well. But as of now, it's just human curation.

Anna:

I want to talk about a little bit of the attributes of your brand. Your brand feels so breezy and fresh. It feels so different from a common news brand where there's more a hard-hitting, breaking, these really hard and rough edges and strong primary colors, and yours is more pastels and it feels more calm. It sounds like that ties a bit to what you were trying to do with how people are consuming the content. I'm curious, could you talk a little bit about some of those specific brand decisions around color, around shapes, and how that relates to the experience you want people to have in reading the news, because reading the news can be very stressful?

Shannon:

When we started out with Volv, we just took the UIs of all these news apps and we listed them all out, and you could just make up an easy story. As you said, these loud colors like red and yellow. The headlines were just glaring at you, and there were just too many buttons and toggles, and just too many options for a user, and it gets very convoluted. For a user, you just don't know where to go. You don't know what to read. For us, we wanted the exact opposite of that. We wanted to be the antidote of a traditional news app, so we chose all very subtle airy, fresh, crisp colors that just made you feel calm. We wanted Volv to be evocative of this very calm experience anyways, so that's where it stems from.

Then we started designing the entire process, everything had to circle back to that. When we would design something, if it went against the core of it being fresh and airy, we scrapped the entire thing. I just feel that was the core for us. For us, we just wanted people to read the news. Reading the news shouldn't be so daunting, it should be more accessible. I think that's what a lot of news publications don't understand today, is you need to make it more easy for your readers to read the news because no one wants to read the news if it's just so much going on. I think that's just where we came from, and it came down to designing the app, about just making something that was just really simple and just another thing about giving users less options. I think when you give them too many options, they just don't want to do.

Our Volv is just based on two screens right now. We have the main screen, which is the story view, and you have the headline view. We were launching this new feature and it required a third screen, and because it just got too complicated, we just scrapped the entire thing and we were like, "Okay, we're going to redesign this," to an aspect where there's not going to be three screens, there's just going to two screens. For us, it's just really important to give the users as little as possible, because they want to be told what to do. They don't want to decide themselves. They want you to tell them, "You should be reading this. You should just go here and you'll get everything that you need." So that's the premise of Volv and how we designed the app.

Priyanka:

One thing that we really like, is that a lot of people are responding really well to this. A bunch of users have commented back saying, "This is a surprisingly, very calm experience," and that is exactly what we were gunning for from the start. So that's very positive for us. The other thing is that we've emulated the whole sticky UI situation from Tinder and TikTok, so a lot of peoples are also comparing it to that, and that's something they're so used to. You know, they just like swiping through in Tinder or scrolling through Instagram, it's just something that they're so used to. The generation we are targeting, they're so used to doing this a couple of hours of every day. So then when this comes around, it's like, "Okay, this is different. This is interesting. I can do this."

Christian:

Do you feel like your brand is more a statement about Millennials or a statement positioning against existing, common news sources? Which of those drives what you're trying to create from a brand perspective?

Shannon:

I think it's a bit of both actually, because from our generation standpoint, we are so used to convenience. The first to know, and first to share generation. In that sense, when every other news publication is going towards newsletters, it works against the whole model. A newsletter is basically a newspaper that you're reading the next day. We're going backwards in time instead of forward. You're reading memes on the news, on Instagram, within the hour, but you're telling people that, "Okay, wait for a couple of hours or wait until the next day, and I'll give you five stories." That's not how we work. So that's one problem that we saw, and we were like, "Okay, we need to make it a continuous stream of information. I think in that sense we were trying to do something that people aren't seeing and trying to give them almost a newsletter experience in real time, so it's like news digest in real time.

`But as for the generation, I feel like back to the whole, "We don't have time to read or we just don't care to read that much." There's also a lot of statistics that show us that most people, I think there's only... I think an average user only reads about 37% of an article, so if you boil that down, it's literally just one or two paragraphs. So we might as well just give them the news in that much space. It's just looking at what people want and what we as readers do as well. So we've literally thought of it from a consumer standpoint and it delves into what do we want and what do our friends do?``

Christian:

As you project out how your brand evolves, do you see it changing to encompass a broader user base? Or do you plan on maintaining this Millennial focused, very calming positioning against other news sources for a long time?

Shannon:

I definitely think we'll be targeting different people across Millennials and Gen Zers. I feel like that's definitely in the books, but I don't think we'd ever stray away from the core of Volv, which is have a very calm experience when reading the news, because I genuinely think that's what's gotten a lot of non-use readers to start reading the news again. We get a lot of emails today saying, "Oh, I used to never read the news and now I do, because it's just so easy." We get messages from 13 year olds who are reading Volv because we've simplified the news for them. So I don't think we're ever going to stray away from the whole... Like, "Let's streamline the entire process or change the branding of it," but I do think we would eventually start targeting more people. Different countries are definitely on the books for us.

Priyanka:

One more thing that I wanted to add, is the fact that we want to include more content going forward as well. So apart from the news, we also want to fill in guest writers. You as a reader would be interested in AI, or fashion, or something else. So it's more about getting experts to add those kinds of pieces as well that we aren't able to add. It's not going to be user generated exactly, because they're going to be curating literally the experts in the field to give you that piece of information. So it will also be unbiased, but you will get a bigger variety of the kind of content that would be on the app.

Anna:

I always will dig into the details. Christian wants to know your strategies and I'm always like, "Tell me about your UI," but I have a really specific UI question. You talked about positioning Volv against these other existing news apps and I noticed that you have no comments anywhere, and I'm curious about that, because that can be such a terrible place on the internet. Talk to me a little bit about that as a decision?

Shannon:

I don't think that was a strategic decision that we made in Volv. We just wanted to de-clutter the entire experience, that was our goal. Comments is something that we do plan on introducing in the future, because community engagement is very important. I think a very easy first step instead of bringing comments first, is we've started with polls. It's just a very simple judge of what people are thinking, because we all have been talking about it for a while, our news and bias. At the end of the day, you do want to get a sense of what other people are thinking. So it's not going to be a messy experience. It's going to be a very simple poll looking at 70% people think that, 30% people think this. We try to make it more engaging in that way too. We push out a couple of polls every week, which we think are interesting, but we do plan on pushing out more and then eventually bringing comments in so it's a more broader perspective in terms of what people are thinking too. And why,

Anna:

When you think about bringing in comments, I'm curious, have you thought about how it will fit in with the... Obviously, people have opinions and you don't want unbiased comments, that sounds boring to read, but have you thought about how maybe you would keep it from devolving into fighting or name calling? Or are you hoping that the environment that Volv is creating, that won't happen? If that makes sense?

Shannon:

That's a really interesting question actually, because I get where you're coming from. You're coming from, we've kept a very calm experience, but adding comments would just disrupt the entire experience. That's very interesting actually. I don't necessarily think those two go hand-in-hand per se, I think the brand is to have a good experience and only if you want to read comments, you could just click on it and then read all of them. Comments, I just think it's very necessary. Everyone has opinions in life and it's just requires that people are able to share them because then you're being oppressed. Right. So I do think it's necessary. I don't think they necessarily goes hand-in-hand with the brand, just because we have this calming experience for a news app, that we shouldn't have common, per se.

Christian:

When you think about the app or you talked a little bit, Priyanka, about the polls that you take, and I've been curious too, how have you thought about judging whether your brand is succeeding or not? What are the metrics or what are you looking for? Then a follow on, how do you separate maybe a feature or something of the app from some brand impression or the relationship or the expectation you've set?

Priyanka:

I think it's just the feedback that we get. Initially when we asked people... I think I was at a political conference initially at the beginning of the year and I just went up to a few people who are in the industry, journalists in the industry. And I just wanted to get their comments on unbiased news. They just looked at me like I'm crazy and they're like, "What do you mean unbiased news?" Another time, everybody was really confused, but at the same time, if you talk to anybody younger, they're all about, "Yeah, I don't want you to tell me what I think, I want to decide for myself. I feel getting like that positive reaction from our target audience is very positive for us.

We've done a bunch of surveys the past few months and we realized that a lot of people are responding really well to unbiased news. They made sure unbiased news is something that they are looking for. So while the industry doesn't necessarily understand it, or the older generation doesn't necessarily accept it, I feel like it's the younger generation that's really pushing for it. So then getting that positive feedback is like we're doing something right. So it's definitely something that we see going forward. Obviously, we want to hone in on that niche and make it or prove it, prove to the industry that this is possible, and this is what is necessary actually.

Christian:

One free idea I'll give you is integrate with Apple watch. Then, if you can tell that nobody's heart rate increases while using your app, then you know you succeeded. That's a really dumb idea.

Shannon:

That's actually really smart.

Christian:

As I said, that would actually be pretty cool if you could check that, because a lot of us are not able to read the news without raising blood pressure. I want to be conscious of time and I have one more really serious question. So after a year, what's a key thing that has surprised you so far and what's one thing that you're looking forward to in 2021, if you can even think that far ahead? If anybody's even able to imagine a year after this one...

Shannon:

Since this is a podcast about branding then we'll talk about branding. For us, I think the most surprising thing is that a lot of people come up to us and they're like, "Oh, do you love your brand? We love what you guys have done with it." It's really funny because to Priyanka and me, it's still a work in progress. It's always a guessing game for us. We're like, "Is this really our brand?" It's never set, so I think for us it's just to stop. Even after a year, you're never going to be perfect. It's never going to be completely done. Your brand always evolves. It's always going to be changing and you just have to adapt to the situation, whatever requires it. So I think that's something for us that we've learned the hard way a year on, that it's never going to just be set from the beginning. You just have to keep reiterating, keep bringing out what works for you.

Christian:

Have you found yourself actually making changes or adjustments to it even in the past year?

Shannon:

Yeah.

Priyanka:

Yeah. If you look at our Instagram, it starts of really well and the colors match, et cetera. Then in the middle, it goes all haywire. Right now, we're just like, "Okay, we got to get a grip on it again." So it's always like, "Wait, we got to bring it back to the core." So yeah, it's hard work and it's a lot of time and effort, but as much as people say branding is not important, it's also one thing that... A lot of startup founders are just like, "We don't have time. We need to come through on products. Then again, the brand is what people see at the end of the day and that's what connects with them, so then we need to make sure we're also giving that our time and effort.

Shannon:

Just the final point I would like to add, is just that for us, I think the branding aspect, apart from the colors and how it looks. As far as 9-second reads, with the huge branding aspect to leverage Volv. We used to get a lot of questions actually asking us, "What's more important? 9-second reads or unbiased news?" And I would always go back to them and being like, "You know, without the convenience, no one's going to even read our news, so it really goes hand in hand." I just think to everyone creating a product out there, it's really important to have a voice, it's really important to have your branding solidified so you're able to communicate with your users, otherwise your product's probably not do that well, I would say.

Christian:

So Volv, where can people find out about Volv and start getting 9-second reads?

Priyanka:

Our app available for free on the App Store and on the Play Store. It's for free, you can download it right now. If you want to know more about it, you can just go to our website. It's volvmedia.com, V-O-L-V media.com. Or of course, you can go to our Instagram and follow us.

Christian:

Yeah. Well, and also go to their Instagram to watch their brand evolve.

That was one of the more... Technically, the word is unusual, not unique, because they're not the only news place, but it's unusual for this podcast to have something from the news. I feel when I say the word, unusual, it sounds negative, but it is against the norm for us to have a news app. That was a lot of fun. I think it was great on the topic of brand because having to establish a brand when your brand is that, "We're neutral," seems like a really big challenge.

Anna:

Yeah, I agree. I think it's interesting if we were to do our... You know, we have our brand methodology where we build our spectrums and it's like, "Is it this or this?" And then you put it on the slider. If I were thinking about a brand for a news app, I definitely would not... Their app doesn't hit me that it's news. I don't see it in the brand, but I see that that is a very conscious decision that they made, because it's almost like... And they didn't say this, I'm definitely putting words in their mouth, but it feels almost like they want you to feel differently about this news, and they want it to be a different experience than going to whatever your CNN app or something like that. Or getting your breaking news alert. It's just different and I think that's a really interesting choice. I think it's a very intentional choice too, to say, "We're using brand elements, we're turning it on its head, and we're doing that very intentionally as opposed to using the attributes that people are really familiar with."

Christian:

As I've reflected even on the visual identity of a lot of the major news sources in the US, there's heavy primary colors, and they've gone completely away from that. I know brand is bigger than colors, but I think in this case, a lot of it is really meaningful, especially when we think of left and right media when it comes to politics, it's red and blue. So the colors have some distinct importance in this realm that they may not in others, so I think color being a very important choice too.

I still felt they have to be the Switzerland of news, which is a very successful country, even though they've never been really one that [imperialized 00:25:39] anyone or things that, so it's interesting to see that. I think it's possible, but they still have a personality on the site. Even right at top of the site, they say, "No BS." So, that's sort of overt, and their story is very personal, how they got started. It's not as if being neutral means being bland. I don't know how to quite categorize it. I think they seem to do it really well where they've created a distinct personality, but in a way that's like, "But we're not diving in to tell you how to read these stories," and I think they do that well.

Anna:

I think they're not drugged down in the history of the news industry, if you will. A lot of apps are built from old timey type setting newspapers. You can see a lot of that aesthetic in the New York Times app. I know CNN is a little different, it came out of television news though, the 24 hour news cycle. So it's like they are a news organization that is not bound by the constraints of traditional news or traditional journalism even.

Christian:

The other thing worth diving into a little bit, because this is a show about product, but thinking about how they had to brand the news, what can we learn from that when we think about brand for product? They mentioned that the experience, the design of the product, I think, and the brand are very intrinsically tied together. They talked about things like, the brand is not set. Even in the last year, they've modified their brand a lot. I think that's true for all products. You need to imagine that their brand is not something that you just do one time. Now, maybe you don't have to update it if you're in B2B SaaS, as frequently as you do in the consumer space, but you do need to keep updating it and you keep need to refreshing it to keep up with your audience.

Then specifically, as the brand evolves, it evolves with your audience. They are very Millennial focused now, and then they talked about Gen Z. Then I would imagine at some point, an older audience will start to adopt this, because it's almost like that target audience, that demographic is really just the early adopter mindset, but eventually it'll expand out to others, and so I think with that, their brand will evolve. I think it's useful to think about that too, when it comes to product, that as you go after different market segments, or after you go into different verticals, those things will all have impact on your brand. So I think those are all points where you have to reflect and figure out, is your brand still setting the right expectations, still communicating the way that you want it to when you go to new audiences?

Okay. Last thing that I want to hit on is, at the end, Shannon had a really good quote that, "Without convenience, nobody will read," when we're talking about how they balance being unbiased versus being convenient for the news. What about that stuck in your mind, Anna?

Anna:

I think what I heard from her in that, is that I think the 9-second news is really important to get people to the unbiased part. There's almost a couple of layers that they want people to go through. They want people to feel excited about the brand, intrigued by it, and they want it to be that first touch point. They come in knowing it's only going to be a nine second read, which is great, but then the content is ideally unbiased and that's what the person is looking for. So it's almost like that really strong balance between your brand and your product. That your product has to have the features, it has to be oriented and focused in a way that people want to use it, but also your brand has to be very thoughtful and engaging.

I don't know that there is this eternal battle between product and brand necessarily, but I think this is another example of where the brand has to be right on, and the product has to be totally right on in almost a different way. So the brand is how people feel about it, how they feel about themselves with it? Then, the product has to functionally do the things that people want to do, but still reflect that brand image. They talked a lot about how the brand exists inside the UI, and how it's calming, and how it's simple, and how they thrown out features because they felt like it added too much complexity. I think it's basically going back to what we believe Better Product is, is a product where the brand and the actual functionality of the product are so deeply intertwined. It's a completely seamless experience from start to finish.

Christian:

Yeah. I think that's really well put. It almost reminds me a little bit of... I think if you ask everybody, it's like, "I want unbiased news." You'd probably get most people to say, "Yes," but we definitely don't behave that way. We definitely go seek it out. They're smart enough to know that, that's not enough to just pitch the app. To me, it reminds me of almost the organic food movement of maybe 15, 20 years ago. Then more recently, as we're seeing plant-based meats, things like that. Or electric cars.

You look at Oatly as this really strong, non-dairy based milk brand, they've invested big into brand as well, because they have to almost establish a relationship that's bigger than, "Oh, I just don't want dairy." Or you have Tesla that's evolved their brand and their design beyond just, "Oh, I want to drive electric because it's good to the environment." It's almost like when you have a key value or a key mission like that, you still need to wrap it, or add something to it that has a different perspective. I think what you said is perfect, that it is that blend of the product experience with the brand.

Anna:

Thanks for listening to the show this week. If you're looking for more resources on how to design, build, market and sell better products, then head over to betterproduct.community to join, well, the community. As always, we're curious, what does better product mean to you? Shoot us an email at podcast@innovatemap.com.