The Digiday Podcast

Condé Nast's third quarter was seemingly better than what other media companies have reported, at least according to Craig Kostelic, the company's global chief business officer.In August, Axios reported that Condé Nast is on track to surpass 2021 revenues, equating to more than $2 billion, which is inclusive of both advertising and consumer revenue. Kostelic confirmed this report on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast and added that even just the commercial and advertising side is "definitely going to exceed last year's total," though he declined to share hard revenue figures for that business in particular.This growth is primarily credited to the company's ongoing globalization process, according to Kostelic. Through this process, the sales teams in both the U.S. and Western Europe have started working in tandem, versus being siloed, to sell larger global campaigns to advertisers -- a reorganization that Kostelic has been overseeing since entering this role in 2018.Starting in the New York City office, he said the first step was switching the sales team from being brand focused to category focused, meaning instead of one salesperson only selling ads for one title like Wired or Vogue across a number of advertising categories, an individual salesperson is now category specific and has the ability to sell ads on any and all parts of the company's portfolio.Not immune to challenges, Kostelic said that while starting to replicate this same transition with the Western European teams this year, he's needed to learn from the mistakes in the first go around and really focus on clarity and transparency with the sales team to make sure that people feel supported in their new roles, especially during an economic downturn.

Semafor launched on Oct. 18 with a business model that’s entirely reliant on direct-sold advertising and event sponsorship revenue – a risky business in some eyes during the current economic climate.But the company’s founding CRO Rachel Oppenheim is confident that her team’s client-centric approach, which prioritizes “innovative” branded content and running ads against “experimental” editorial products, will be the wind in Semafor’s sails, she said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Not only that, but focusing on the pockets of advertisers’ budgets that are directed to corporate reputation building will help insulate the company from the ebbs and flows of consumer and product advertising, which for now, is not a priority in the sales team’s selling strategy. Programmatic is also not a part of Semafor’s advertising mix, once again, preferring to build relationships with clients that are hopefully long term, according to Oppenheim.While having launched with partners like Verizon, Mastercard and Pfizer, Semafor recently came under criticism for having gasoline manufacturer and distributor Chevron as an advertiser on the company’s Climate newsletter in its second week, to which many criticized as tone deaf and irresponsible in the coverage of climate change.Oppenheim said post-interview in an email to Digiday that “advertisers have no bearing on our editorial coverage and we maintain a strict separation between news and third-party advertisement."

Let’s be clear: The advertising market has hit a rough patch amid the broader economic downturn. But that hit has not necessarily been a full-on body blow.“We’re seeing some shifts [in advertisers’ spending] but not necessarily dramatic cuts,” said UM Worldwide’s U.S. chief marketplace officer Stacey Stewart in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. To be clear, she added, “Don’t get me wrong when I say there hasn’t been many cuts. They’re still cuts. They just haven’t been as dramatic as I think we all had feared.”Typically, advertisers are cutting ad dollars from deals that provide less flexibility, such as those earmarked for traditional TV. “That’s where we saw a lot of the cuts,” Stewart said.To an extent, advertisers are holding on to those dollars, but they are also redirecting them to places that provide greater flexibility for advertisers to cancel deals as well as more performance-oriented ad opportunities.“There’s definitely a shift to more immediate results — lower-funnel metrics if you will — focusing on revenue in the short term versus branded-building,” said Stewart.

More than a decade ago, Dan Roth left the world of traditional journalism to join LinkedIn as the business-centric social platform’s executive editor. Eleven-plus years later, the former managing editor of Fortune.com and now editor-in-chief and vp at LinkedIn has built up the platform’s news operation into one that bears some of the hallmarks of a traditional outlet.“I had a lot of belief in what the company could create, but I didn’t know how it was going to work out. And I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting into,” Roth said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Under Roth, LinkedIn’s news division has been getting into producing more original content, from newsletters to podcasts and videos. In September, the platform announced the hire of former CNN executive Courtney Coupe to be its first head of original programming, which appears to portend the next phase of LinkedIn’s editorial ambitions, which were already raised earlier this year with the formation of the LinkedIn Podcast Network.“The hiring of Courtney Coupe is designed to push us in a more professional way through creating original video and audio content,” Roth said. “There are about 180 people on the editorial team at LinkedIn. But half that team comes from a business journalism background, and almost all of those who come from a business journalism background come from mostly writing. So it’s a text-heavy team. When you’re creating audio [and] creating video, there’s something unique about creating that content.”

Unionization has been on the rise at media companies over the last nearly three years after the pandemic upended the way publishers work. But it seems that the list of concerns shared amongst journalists, editors and other media employees is only growing and few resolutions have been met during that time.It's all created a need for more communication, community rallying and strategic training, to get workers the most leverage possible when communicating with management, said Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York, which represents unions including The New York Times, Insider, The New Yorker.In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, DeCarava discusses why unionization is on the rise and how her team has implemented programs like the Strike School to help embolden media employees to make change within their companies, be it around the return to the office, equitable pay or ensuring equal treatment amongst employees.

It’s been nearly a year since German-based Axel Springer acquired Politico for over $1 billion, which included both the U.S. and EU iterations of the brand, in addition to the almost 3-year-old technology-focused title Protocol. Since that acquisition, the Politico brand has started undergoing a merger of sorts internally as well.Despite sharing a brand name and founder — Robert Allbritton — Politico U.S. and EU have operated as separate businesses until earlier this year. Now, Politico EU’s chief revenue officer Nicolas Sennegon said the Washington, D.C.-based and Brussels-based teams have developed global ambitions that include working together to sell ads across both regions, bundle subscriptions and find ways to editorially cover unfolding political news for readers around the world.Most of the cross-brand collaboration has originated at the advertising level, which represents about one-third of Politico EU’s revenue currently (the other two-thirds come from its subscriptions business, which runs about €17,000 per year), according to Sennegon. But as the brand pursues its global expansion, he added that there are opportunities to further link those two sides of the business, by turning subscribers into advertisers, where Politico EU already sees about a 50% overlap.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Sennegon said that over the next year, Politico will be further branching the two brands together, though he would not disclose exactly what a global Politico will look like or when we can expect its launch.

Publishers’ commerce businesses can take many forms nowadays, from earning small commissions with in-article affiliate links to creating an entire direct-to-consumer (DTC) product line that turns a publisher into a retailer.But given commerce revenue is down this year for some media companies and the economic slowdown has put restraints on shoppers’ wallets, publishers may need to rethink their commerce strategies.Take Hearst which is in the process of launching a new marketplace in the fourth quarter. The marketplace is meant to be the new hub for the company’s DTC products and licensed products, but it will also be a new sales channel for the brands and products that readers of Hearst’s media brands regularly shop for as well, according to Sheel Shah, Hearst’s svp of consumer products and partnerships on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, which was recorded in front of a live audience at the Digiday Publishing Summit on Sept. 20.This is an expansion of the media company’s current commerce shop strategy, which consists of 20 individual online branded shops for nearly all media brands in the Hearst portfolio, including the Oprah Daily Shop and Good Housekeeping Shop. The shops currently sell branded merchandise and licensed goods and are collectively on track to make 500,000 transactions this year, a 15% increase over the previous year’s transactions, according to the company, which declined to share hard revenue figures.Ultimately, Shah hopes that the marketplace can tie together the company’s commerce business — from DTC and licensed products to affiliate links to direct brand deals — and ultimately drive digital subscriptions to the brands in Hearst’s portfolio.

Advertising is taking a hit from the economic slowdown. For some advertisers with podcast and audio budgets, they want to reach more listeners efficiently rather than invest in expensive custom branded content. For Wonder Media Network, however, programmatic advertising isn't part of its inventory.There are certain instances where programmatic advertising in audio makes sense, according to Shira Atkins, CRO and co-founder of podcast company Wonder Media Network, such as targeting people who are in one specific region versus running national ads. But on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Atkins said she still believes that programmatic is “a tragedy for the podcasting ecosystem at large." Her team does not sell any of its ad space programmatically.Instead, the podcast network uses its branded content studio to make bespoke audio ads, which Atkins said creates memorable ads that listeners are less likely to skip over.

The summer can be a slow period for many companies, however the economic downturn, supply chain issues, rising inflation rates and world events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine didn’t take time off when the rest of us did. Now heading into the fall, a lot of media execs are trying to strategize for a business environment that doesn’t reflect how it used to look even six months ago.At Digiday, we spent the summer following these subtle – and not so subtle – changes to the industries we cover and narrowed down key trends that either emerged or expanded during the past few months. On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, my co-host Tim Peterson and I unpacked the biggest takeaways from that time period as well as chatted through what this could mean for media companies’ fourth quarter and the start of 2023.

CBS News is adding more traditional TV talent to its streaming outlet. After rebranding its streamer as CBS News Streaming Network in January and adding a show hosted by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell, the Paramount-owned news organization is now updating its streaming service’s primetime lineup by having former “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson anchor CBS News Streaming Network’s 7 p.m. slot.In the latest Digiday Podcast, CBS News and Stations co-presidents and co-heads Neeraj Khemlani and Wendy McMahon discussed the new nightly primetime news program and the streamer’s development since its November 2014 debut.“We’re now lapping a year working together across CBS News and Stations, and the momentum’s been awesome,” said Khemlani. After accumulating more than 1 billion streams in 2021, CBS News Streaming Network is averaging more than 80 million streams per month — the number of times people have started streaming a video on the service — with viewers spending 1.4 billion minutes, on average, in aggregate per month watching the service’s programming, according to a CBS News spokesperson.CBS News is also plying the streaming service with more programming from its local news stations. At the start of this year, the news organization set the goal of increasing its live local coverage on CBS News Streaming Network by 15,000 hours to 45,000 hours by the end of 2022. But it has updated the amount, coinciding with the upcoming launch of CBS News Detroit in November, which will mark its fourteenth local channel on CBS News Streaming Network.“It’s quite the expansion effort, not only through the lens of more channels but also through the lens of the number of hours we’re producing live now across those channels. Nearly 46,000 hours annually of live coverage on those 14 streams by the end of the year,” McMahon said.