M y job was really to put together a comprehensive strategy for digital video for the company for our assets. Question I got the most …: Why can a print company think they can move into the video space and be successful?
My viewpoint on it was that we weren’t a print company, that … we were a company of storytellers.
Our strategy was very, very simple in my opinion. Three points. The first, not surprisingly: great programming.
Just like someone subscribes to the magazine each month ’cause they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the book is going to show up in their mailbox every month, people would subscribe to our video channels if we could guarantee that we were going to have a consistent, quality video programming offering in each of our channels.
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Photo by: MARC BRYAN-BROWN
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This isn’t content that’s a literal translation of the magazine. … What it really is, is entertainment-style content inspired by what the brands stand for.
We put out in our first year almost 2,500 pieces of content across our network. So we really did stick to that consistency to help us build our audience.
The second piece to the strategy … was distribution. Traditionally, Condé Nast was very much about keeping the content within the four walls of our websites, but I’m a big believer that the Web is an open place.
It is very, very difficult to get consumers to come to you. It is much easier to go to where consumers already are.
YouTube, Yahoo, AOL, MSN: This is where the audiences were.
We basically distribute our content to about 25 different partners across the Web, across mobile, across OTT devices like Apple and Xbox, Roku devices, to really achieve that scale against our programming.
Our third point of strategy, which I think was our biggest differentiator in the marketplace: Supported our content with a dollar-for-dollar commitment in marketing support.
I’ve seen a lot of P&Ls in my time where people have said we’re going to create all this video content, we’re going to put it on our site, and our unique audience is going to jump by 3X or by 5X, a kind of build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. I just don’t believe in that.
If you look at the traditional television space, every fall the networks spend countless millions of dollars creating new shows, and then they spend countless millions of dollars … telling you about those shows.
In my opinion, every piece of content that you release needs to have a well-thought-out marketing and audience development plan.
We put that strategy in place in March of 2013 with our first two channels that we launched, which were GQ and Glamour, and we quickly followed up over the course of 2013 and into this year with 12 more channel launches. We’re now operating a network of 14 channels.
Our network has generated over a billion and a half views, and a typical month will do between 100 [million] and 150 million plays across the network. Before … the company was doing about 3 [million] to 5 million views a month.
I think one of the biggest challenges we had was that we couldn’t point anybody to one place where all of our content existed. So traditionally, we operated very siloed. You have VanityFair.com, you have Wired.com, you have GQ.com, those sites and brands. They don’t cross-pollinate or -promote.
We thought about going a little bit broader and trying to fill what we perceived to be a void in the marketplace. And we launched The Scene. The Scene is really our attempt at curating the best premium video content being made for the Web today from trusted sources.
The core of that experience is obviously the 20 Condé Nast brands that we represent. So we bring content and expertise in fashion and beauty and lifestyle through our brands Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, etc., but if we really wanted to take a shot at creating something that fills this void in the landscape, we really needed to go outside of just what we could offer.
In April, we announced our first five partnerships, and since then we’ve offered another five partnerships.
The Verge, for example … really focuses in on the tech scene and news on the tech space. Great complement for what we were doing with a channel like Wired.
For Fashion Week this past year, we executed a program called #followme. And in this program we took a 360-degree look at a New York Fashion Week show with Zac Posen through the eyes of four different brands at Condé Nast. So Vogue followed Zac and his team in putting together this show; Glamour followed the photographers of the show; Allure followed the makeup artists of the show; and Style.com followed the models.
And that culminated into a single episode on The Scene. All of these brands were then promoting each other’s content as a cohesive, singular program, and this is simply an execution that would not have been possible even six months ago. And this was something that we were able to get sponsored by AT&T. It was very successful for us. The engagement was tremendous.
