The Digiday Podcast

BET actually entered the streaming wars before Disney and Apple. Two months before the debuts of Disney+ and Apple TV+, the ViacomCBS-owned TV network rolled out its own subscription-based streamer BET+. Now, as the current streaming era enters its third year, BET is preparing some updates to its streaming strategy in 2022, including testing an ad-supported tier and selling a subscription bundle with sibling streamer Paramount+.“We are very excited about the premium positioning that we’ve established with BET+, and so we’re working through what is the approach to a premium service with an ad-supported model. What I think our audience will see in 2022 is us kind of experimenting with different pricing models to see what their response is to those,” said BET CEO Scott Mills in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Having overseen the launch of BET+ in 2019 while serving as president of BET, Mills was named CEO of the TV network owner in November 2019. But, as he explained in the interview, that was mainly a change in title and he had already been serving in the role stewarding BET, which like every other TV network is sorting out how to balance its business between traditional TV and streaming.“The offering we have in BET+ is not identical to our linear offering. There are some services where the offerings are identical. But the BET linear offering actually is different than the BET+ offering, and so we do position them as different offerings,” Mills said.

Turner Sports has been one of the faster moving media companies in the blockchain space, having made its first concerted effort in launching an NFT project in 2018. For a sports media company, this made sense in a lot of ways. Sports fans have a fair amount of characteristics that would lend to them also being interested in cryptocurrencies, NFT collection and playing in the metaverse. For example, a large number of people participate in fantasy sports, while a number of others like to collect rare trading cards or signed baseballs, and many more will support their teams by buying season tickets or jerseys for decent chunks of money. All of these things can be translated to the blockchain, which gave Turner Sports a leg up when launching its Blockletes game, an online golf game that uses NFTs to add real world value. When Yang Adija, Turner Sports’ svp of digital league business operations, growth and innovation, started thinking about applying the blockchain to his company, he saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between gaming and collecting, thus launching Blockletes — or “Blockchain Athletes.”In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Adija discussed creating the NFT game, which is set to launch on mobile this month, and why gamifying a new and unknown concept like NFTs helps onboard non-crypto native audiences.

It’s been a busy and well-publicized year for Axios, which has made a ton of headlines given the newsletter publisher — known for its trademarked “Smart Brevity” style — is only five years old. In December 2020, the company acquired the Charlotte Agenda to get its local news arm into gear. In February, Axios launched its new software-as-a-service business, Axios HQ, which made over $1.5 million in under a year. And in the spring and summer of this year, rumors circulated the media space about whether Axios would merge with The Athletic or be acquired by Axel Springer.Those rumblings have since quieted down and Axios’s president and co-founder Roy Schwartz said that “It’s too early at this point to sell the business or to merge it with something that would be larger than we are.”But either thanks to or in spite of the headlines, Axios is set to hit $86 million in revenue this year, replicating the 40% year-over-year growth the company saw in the year prior — all while maintaining profitability for three years running.

For Condé Nast, 2021 was the best year the company has had in the past decade, according to global chief revenue officer Pamela Drucker Mann. And after a tumultuous 2020, that outcome was neither a guaranteed nor expected. As of mid November, the media company’s total global commercial revenue -- including print -- was up 20%, Drucker Mann said on the latest episode of the Digiday podcast. Specifically on the digital side of the business, revenue rose nearly 40% year over year, which she attributed much of to its new e-commerce business (up 46%), investing further into digital video, and shifting focus from audience targeting to contextual targeting in ad campaigns. And thanks to all of that growth this year, Condé Nast is using 2022 to invest in "legitimately becoming the best, most refined, most sophisticated, direct-to-consumer company -- not just an advertising company," Drucker Mann said. This includes getting experimental with new businesses and projects, including NFTs, hosting events in the metaverse, and diving deep into live shopping.

TikTok has transformed the way that consumers and brands interact with each other online over the course of just a couple of years. But the past year in particular has given those brands, and the media companies they partner with, more confidence in their approach to creating content for the platform.The biggest helper in decoding the secrets to TikTok success from a brand perspective is having the scale and regular posting cadence to quickly identify hits, as well as learn when to change course. That’s at least been the case for Gallery Media, publisher of PureWow and One37pm. The digitally native media company, owned by Gary Vaynerchuk’s creative media agency VaynerX, has the unique advantage of having both its roster of 25 owned-and-operated editorial TikTok channels and the creative control of more than 10 brand partners’ channels to get a good sense of the type of content that organically thrives on this highly creative social media platform. So over the past year, regularly posting on those 35-plus pages has illuminated some of the bigger TikTok trends of the year for Gallery Media, which led to gaining views, followers and even dollars from brands looking to CEO Ryan Harwood’s team to implement those learnings into their own social media strategies. In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Harwood discusses creating a team of creatives who could quickly adapt the company’s playbook for the ever evolving platform, as well as how the editorial successes inform the brand campaigns posted to TikTok, and vice versa.

Shortly after Daisy Auger-Dominguez joined Vice Media Group as its chief people officer in May 2020, the murder of George Floyd spurred companies across the media industry to pledge improvements to their organizations’ levels of diversity, equity and inclusion. VMG then took the further step of uploading its DE&I initiatives into a dashboard for all employees to see the company’s plans and track its progress.“Think of it as a project management app,” said Auger-Dominguez in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.VMG’s DE&I dashboard features an entry for each active DE&I project, including links to corresponding documents, updated information about its performance metrics and progress toward those goals as well as the name of the employee responsible for overseeing that project.“It not only creates transparency around accountability, but it also creates connectivity that can galvanize other employees that are interested in any of those particular projects [to see], ‘Oh, here’s the person I should be talking to,’” Auger-Dominguez said.In keeping with the dashboard’s purpose of keeping employees up to date on VMG’s DE&I efforts, the company removes completed projects and adds new projects as its overall efforts evolve. Heading into 2022, some of those newer projects will likely concern VMG’s return to the office and the part DE&I plays in an in-person workplace. However, Auger-Dominguez is cognizant of not categorizing every initiative under DE&I, which can have the effect of putting it in a silo.“I don’t want to start adding everything to DE&I, so everyone’s just like, ‘Oh, is that a DE&I initiative?’ No, actually it’s the other way around: Everything has a DE&I lens, but not everything is a DE&I initiative,” Auger-Dominguez said.

Everything has accelerated since the pandemic, including the historically slow-moving TV ad market. Not only did this year’s upfront cycle blow by, but early talks ahead of next year’s upfronts are already underway.“We’re having earlier conversations,” said Kim Kelleher, president of commercial revenue and partnerships at AMC Networks, in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. “Maybe it’s because I come from digital media and publishing, which were always-on mediums, that television is starting to feel a lot more like the always-on world that I came from. We’re having conversations already about next year.”To be clear, Kelleher described those conversations as “preemptive” planning discussions. “Certainly not negotiating,” she said. Still, the fact that conversations about next’s upfronts are taking place a month after this year’s deals took effect indicates how the overall TV ad market is changing as the dividing line between linear and digital blurs and advertisers reevaluate their options for reaching audiences.“There’s a level of thoughtfulness that needs to go into the media mix and the distributions you’re going to choose to tell and market your stories with,” Kelleher said. “It’s never too soon to start.”

Ten years after its debut, Vox Media’s technology news publication The Verge hasn’t necessarily changed all that much — at least not compared to its ambitions from the outset. Rather than changing course over the past decade, the outlet has followed through on its original trajectory.“The biggest difference between The Verge now and The Verge 10 years ago is that we have the staff and the capability to actually do all the things we wanted to do,” said The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.That being said, The Verge does seem to be in upgrade mode. Not only is the outlet preparing a site redesign for sometime in the next year, but within the past two months, it has opened up new product lines and revenue sources. In September, Vox Media acquired podcast newsletter Hot Pod, which has become part of The Verge and which operates a subscription business that has become the publication’s first paid product. A month later, The Verge debuted a connected TV app and hosted its first live event.The Verge hadn’t exactly planned to be making these leaps to coincide with its 10-year anniversary. “We thought 2020 would be our growth year,” Patel said. The pandemic postponed the publication’s plans by a year.“All of that energy was pent up, and it is all coming out at once because we’re turning 10. We’re excited. We want to take the next step of our evolution,” said Patel.

When the Biden administration named antitrust reform scholar Lina Khan as chair of the FTC, it didn't take long before Amazon and Facebook asked for her recusal in cases related to the two companies. But even as lawmakers call for regulators to rein in big tech algorithms, some have pushed against giving a Khan-led FTC any more money or power to help do it. And some who recall the 1980s-era episode that led congress to drastically diminish the FTC's authority warn against the risks of enacting rules or changing policy without consensus.

Condé Nast Entertainment is not a new player in the TV and film industry. Formed in 2011, the magazine publisher’s entertainment division has had a hand in adapting Condé Nast’s content into shows and movies, including an article by GQ that was made into Netflix documentary series “Last Chance U” and a short story from The New Yorker into Robert Redford-starring film “The Old Man and the Gun.” But now CNE is looking to play an even bigger role in Hollywood.“What we’re doing in film and television is a real, deliberate and intentional lean into our brands in a way that we haven’t done before,” said Agnes Chu, the former Disney+ executive who took the reins of CNE as president in September 2020.Under Chu, CNE has hired a roster of experienced Hollywood heads to help raise the magazine publisher’s profile in Tinseltown. That includes Helen Estabrook, an Oscar-nominated producer who joined CNE in March 2021 as global head of film and TV and joined Chu on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Estabrook’s charge has been to have Condé Nast’s entertainment arm working more closely with its publications to identify articles, short stories as well as podcasts that can be developed and adapted into film and TV projects.“We’re creating new systems of working so that we can work with them in the ways that they have all individual systems for how they work, for how they find stories or how they tell those stories,” said Estabrook. “It is one great production company, but in some ways, it’s several different production companies because it’s GQ Studios and The New Yorker Studios and Vanity Fair Studios.”