Lessons from ARTE: How Media Brands Can Maximize Content Engagement with a Message Center

Capturing and retaining your audience is a constant battle. Acquisition costs are rising. Organic referral traffic is plummeting in the zero-click era. To make matters worse, email open rates and social media engagement have declined. Media brands need to go beyond blunt promotional marketing to keep their audience coming back. This means creating unique value propositions for their app and website to engage visitors during moments that matter.

That’s what digital media pioneer ARTE set out to do with a message center experience in their app, designed to increase content visibility and maximize engagement without overextending resources. Read on for key takeaways from their success.

Create a Central Hub for Curated Content to Enhance Discovery

Airship’s Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2025 found that media brands send, on average, between 84 and 91 push notifications monthly, and top performers send as many as 293. Push notifications are important for immediate audience engagement, but reach is limited by opt-ins and building an organic habit of content consumption is equally, if not more, important.

ARTE recognized an opportunity to create a newsletter-like hub for curated content within their app to drive engagement beyond initial publishing with a message center. Their goal was to repurpose high-value content in a visible location, transforming their app into a destination for weekly digests. Delivered directly to the app inbox, ARTE’s newsletter was accessible even to opted-out users. The shift from ephemeral notifications to audience-driven discovery created new habits of content consumption, fueling weekly app usage.

Don’t Let Lengthy Development Cycles Hamper Innovation

As a public organization with limited resources, ARTE needed a solution that was efficient and scalable. This challenge is all too familiar for publishers. Reliance on lengthy development cycles is often a barrier to innovation, and those making editorial decisions don’t have the tools to build and optimize app and web experiences.

With Airship, ARTE custom-built a message center without developer support and empowered their editors to take ownership of the content curation process. With ready-to-use templates and full design control over fonts, colors and buttons, the team was able to build a rich experience that fit seamlessly into their branded app. The lean team of editors can swap out content on a weekly basis without any dependencies.

Experiment and Optimize for Increased Visibility and Engagement

The magic of message centers is that the content can be referred to at a later time, empowering people to engage with it at their convenience. For this reason, it’s important to optimize its placement within the app to maximize visibility and engagement. ARTE also tested different methods to notify users about the message center’s availability, zeroing in on the most effective ways to reach their audience and drive traffic to the new feature. 

A culture of experimentation enabled the team with data-driven insights to understand what’s working or not, and prioritize the optimizations that will create an engagement habit. The test-and-learn mentality also paved the way for new use cases, including monthly “last chance” reminders and enhanced, no-code onboarding experiences. 

The Impact?

Read the case study to learn how you can bring more views and clicks on your content. If you would like to learn how you can implement any of the strategies highlighted above, book a meeting with our team for a personalized consultation.