Home Publishers How Do You Disrupt Yourself? Five Media Execs On Succeeding In The Age Of BuzzFeed

How Do You Disrupt Yourself? Five Media Execs On Succeeding In The Age Of BuzzFeed

SHARE:

Digital-Media-CEOsMedia CEOs have to do a lot of maneuvering to steer a print/digital publication, and many take different routes.

At the American Magazine Media Conference in New York on Tuesday, five executives from Hearst, Condé Nast, Time Inc., Meredith and Rodale discussed how they compete with disruptive digital-first publications by investing, acquiring or imitating them.

“With the exception of Vox, we have investments in most [startup pubs],” said Hearst Magazines President David Carey. By investing, Hearst learns what it can apply to its core business.

But learning isn’t dependent on investing, he added. For instance, Hearst execs took notes when startup CEOs gave strategy talks at conferences about “A/B testing headlines on social media” and other tactics to grow digitally.

“We will not be as public about our strategies,” Carey said. “They did us a favor we probably will not return.”

Time Inc. has been acquisitive. It bought Hello Giggles and xoJane last year and acquired three other companies to form Sports Illustrated Play. Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp anticipates more, and some moves won’t be as obvious as acquiring a publisher.

“There will be more acquisitions you will scratch your head about,” Ripp said. “They’re about data. Money is going to Facebook because they have data.”

But publishers do have subscriber data because of their print magazines – the challenge is how to translate that online.

“We are still a direct marketing company, but the key is who owns the customer,” Rodale CEO Maria Rodale said. “Facebook now owns our customer, Amazon owns our customer, Google owns our customer, and that’s what we have to get back.”

Publishers looking to acquire (or be acquired) need to look at numerous factors, agreed Meredith CEO Stephen Lacy. “We have to look at things that are very nontraditional.” 

The TV Effect

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

As advertiser dollars flow away from the volatile world of cable TV – thanks to consumer time spent on places like Netflix and mobile – digital publishers hope to grab their share.

The upheaval will be bigger than what happened in the book publishing and music recording industries, Carey said: “That dislocation is going to free up an enormous amount of money. We are competing for this in a way that in the past would have been challenging to do so.”

Condé Nast CEO Robert Sauerberg Jr. hopes to grab that money by developing influential video content. But that’s easier said than done. “What makes me nervous is that we don’t move fast enough, because we’ve got to do this and got to do it well,” he said.

Banal Banners

The decline of banner advertising and the rise of native means brands are more interested in telling stories through content. And publishers hope to benefit.

“All our large traditional advertisers were becoming media companies, and the problem was that they were product companies,” Meredith’s Lacy said. “It was not part of their DNA, but it’s part of our DNA.” In addition to Meredith’s efforts, Condé Nast is enlisting its own editorial talent to created branded stories. Time Inc. created The Foundry, in Brooklyn, which functions as a type of content marketing agency.

Knowing what readers want in this disruptive time is what these media companies hope will see their brands through. “Unlike other businesses, we know who our consumer is,” Ripp said. “That makes me more confident in the future.”

 

 

 

 

 

Must Read

After The Election, News Corp Has Harsh Words For Advertisers Who Avoided News

News Corp’s chief exec blasted “the blatant biases of ad agencies and ad associations,” which are “boycotting certain media properties” due to “personal political prejudices.”

LiveRamp Outperforms On Earnings And Lays Out Its Data Network Ambitions

LiveRamp reported an unexpected boost to Q3 revenue, from $160 million last year to $185 million in 2024, during its quarterly call with investors on Wednesday.

Google in the antitrust crosshairs (Law concept. Single line draw design. Full length animation illustration. High quality 4k footage)

Google And The DOJ Recap Their Cases In The Countdown To Closing Arguments

If you’re trying to read more than 1,000 pages of legal documents about the US v. Google ad tech antitrust case on Election Day, you’ve come to the right place.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters

NYT’s Ad And Subscription Revenue Surge As WaPo Flails

While WaPo recently lost 250,000 subscribers due to concerns over its journalistic independence, NYT added 260,000 subscriptions in Q3 thanks largely to the popularity of its non-news offerings.

Mark Proulx, global director of media quality & responsibility, Kenvue

How Kenvue Avoided $3 Million In Wasted Media Spend

Stop thinking about brand safety verification as “insurance” – a way to avoid undesirable content – and start thinking about it as an opportunity to build positive brand associations, says Kenvue’s Mark Proulx.

Comic: Lunch Is Searched

Based On Its Q3 Earnings, Maybe AIphabet Should Just Change Its Name To AI-phabet

Google hit some impressive revenue benchmarks in Q3. But investors seemed to only have eyes for AI.