The Digiday Podcast

As a publication specializing in fashion and beauty, Vice Media Group’s Refinery29 has its origins in commingling content and commerce. Now the outlet is looking to extend its expertise to live shoppable video.“We’re going to start live testing [live shoppable video] in the spring. We’re considering YouTube as a our starting place, and we’re probably going to start with beauty because it’s a strong category for us,” said Refinery29 global editor-in-chief Simone Oliver in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, which was recorded in front of a live audience at the Digiday Publishing Summit on March 29.With live shoppable video, Refinery29 expects to take a similar tact that it has adopted with its commerce content overall: Allowing its audience to experience products vicariously through its editorial staff. “We know for us creating that sense of community, having our editors out front, having their faces in front is really important,” Oliver said.As Oliver said of Refinery29’s overarching approach to commerce content, “we’re not gatekeepers. We’re here to experience the trends with you. Our audience is savvy as heck. They don’t need us to tell them the trends. What we do is we test-drive those trends for people. And that’s one of the ways we generate trust.”

In his forty years of experience in TV production -- spanning shows including Fox’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” NBC’s “American Ninja Warrior” and Netflix’s “Floor is Lava” Arthur Smith has seen plenty of changes. Nothing like the past two years, though.“There was a point between March and July [2020] where we were stuck in neutral. We couldn’t produce anything,” the chairman of A. Smith & Co. Productions said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Effectively overnight, six of Smith’s shows that had been slated to go into production that spring were put on ice. “The day that the NBA canceled their season was the day that we were supposed to start shooting [the new season of “American Ninja Warrior”] in Los Angeles. We were all set up, all ready to go -- and we canceled it as well,” he said.As quickly as the entire production industry came to a halt, though, projects soon began to return to production in the summer of 2020, albeit with significant adjustments. Two years later, there remain differences compared to pre-pandemic productions, but they are fewer.“We’re making shows again, and we’re making shows at the level that we were making them in 2019. We just show two seasons of ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’” said Smith, whose company produced more than 200 hours of programming in the past year. He added, “the amount of production and the types of production [going on today], it is essentially back to normal.”

Crypto trade publication Blockworks is on track to earn $20 million in revenue this year, up from $13 million in 2021 and a large part of that strategy is targeting a new wave of wealth — DAOs.Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are basically clubs for crypto enthusiasts, but they can be as organized and official as a company. Most typically operate under a shared goal and give each member an equal say in making decisions. As members have to buy into the DAO, they can potentially have more money than most clubs would ever know what to do with — sometimes billions of dollars worth of crypto, according to Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks.In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Yanowitz and co-founder Michael Ippolito explain why they’re training their sales staff to pitch DAOs on advertising opportunities and how brutally honest yet helpful the feedback can be from thousands of DAO members. And as a blockchain native publication, Ippolito and Yanowitz dig into their NFT strategy and why they feel publishers need to take a different approach to sell non-fungible tokens compared to other brands or artists.

One year ago, Overtime announced it was creating its own basketball league made up of 16- to 18-year- old players — a demographic representative of the sports’ publishers’ audience.Called the Overtime Elite League (or OTE), the social media-first sports publisher used some of the $80 million raised last year in its series C to build a basketball arena, boarding school and dorm facility in Atlanta, and recruit 27 high school-aged athletes, all of whom are paid six-figure salaries, to get the league off the ground.As the three-team league wraps its first official season, Overtime’s co-founder and president Zack Weiner came on the Digiday Podcast to talk about the advertiser-based business model his team has created around the Elite League. The ultimate goal for making the league profitable, however, is to sell the live game rights to a network or streaming platform, which is the money maker for professional leagues, like the NFL, NBA and MLB.Currently, OTE’s games are not broadcast to Overtime’s audience, but Weiner said the off-the-court video series and game highlight reels are working to introduce viewers to these players and generate excitement around the league, which will hopefully get a buyer to purchase the live rights for a sizable sum.

Mark Garner’s job would have been much simpler a decade ago. As evp of global content sales and business development at A+E Networks, he’s charged with doing deals to distribute the company’s own original programming.“My job is to sell all the content that we have in our library and all of our upcoming content that we’re producing on a go-forward basis across a multitude of partners,” Garner said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.“Multitude” may not capture the magnitude of distribution outlets. In the past, the distribution would have been largely limited to selling the shows through storefronts, be they brick-and-mortar like Blockbuster or digital like Apple’s iTunes. But the scope of those deals now spans the spectrum of streaming services, from Netflix and Discovery+ to The Roku Channel and Crackle. And then there are A+E Networks’ own streaming properties, including its 24/7 channels running on free, ad-supported streaming TV services.Setting up these deals isn’t so simple as selling to the highest bidder, though. Sometimes a near-term deal can cut into the long-term payday. “While there might be some really interesting check that could be written in the near term, they may, in fact, not take into account the opportunity cost of the long-term value, the lifetime value of this content,” Garner said.The equation would likely only get even more complicated if A+E Networks were to decide to roll out a standalone streaming service a la Paramount’s Paramount+.“Right now we’re very happy with where we sit in the ecosystem where we have the opportunity to distribute our content broadly across a number of different places,” said Garner.

While some brands are flocking to the blockchain by launching NFTs or establishing themselves in the metaverse, other companies are still on either side of the spectrum. From contemplating whether their customers are ready for a new virtual shopping reality, or if the crypto-native internet users will be receptive to their brand’s debut in Web3, not all companies are ready to embrace the blockchain.But in these early stages of blockchain development, what a lot of brands aren’t realizing is that the move to Web3 doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing transition and can be taken gradually and thoughtfully. That’s how Amanda Cassatt sees it, according to the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Cassatt is a pioneer in Web3, having assisted in the launch of the Ethereum blockchain as well as co-founding two companies, Serotonin and its subsidiary Mojito, both of which work with companies to find their footing in the Web3 space. As CEO of marketing agency Serotonin, her team works on customer acquisition strategies that are directed to crypto-native audiences, and as president of Mojito, a NFT studio and tech platform company, clients like Sotheby’s have worked with her team to execute NFT drops and develop metaverse presence in some cases for the first time.While there is a lot to understand about the blockchain, Cassatt said the strongest approach a brand can take to entering this space is to remain focused on the unique value proposition of a company.

In 2021, Integral Ad Science (IAS) took the plunge into the connected TV space with the acquisition of Publica, a company that sells ad inventory for CTV publishers. This was a departure for IAS as it primarily focused on measurement verification and brand safety standards, but CEO Lisa Utzschneider said that it was the right combination of skills, insights and data coming together that enabled the newly combined company to be a one-stop-shop for marketers transacting in the CTV space. Of course, as consolidation in the advertising tech industry takes place, monitoring potential opportunities for conflict of interest will be necessary for the buyers operating in this space, but in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Utzschneider said that IAS’s and Publica’s clients haven’t expressed concerns. That’s because the trust that both companies instilled in clients before the merger has carried through thanks to a deliberately long collaboration period prior to the point of sale, giving clients the chance to test the waters while the companies did not have shared finances. In this episode, Utzschneider talks further about the acquisition of Publica, as well as the ongoing need for brand safety on platforms and why IAS is doubling down on its contextual data strategy in the face of the cookie apocalypse.

In the entertainment industry, there’s a term called “multi-hyphenate” that refers to people who may act, direct, write, produce, sing and/or perform other crafts. As an entertainment journalist at The Undefeated, Kelley Carter is familiar with this term. She also embodies it as a journalist.Beyond her text-based reporting, Carter hosts podcasts — including ABC Audio’s recently debuted “Close Up” which features interviews with the who’s who of Hollywood and releases new episodes on Wednesdays — and is an Emmy-winning video journalist and co-runs a production company that is developing a TV show for Showtime.“A lot of this became an accident. I wasn’t necessarily seeking out to do anything other than what I was doing, which at the time was a newspaper reporter,” Carter said.Her experience at print newspapers also helped to familiarize Carter with the business side of journalism and the often tenuous terms of journalists’ employment statuses. During her time at the Chicago Tribune, she saw other journalists being laid off for the first time. “Because we had some indication that layoffs would be coming to Chicago, ironically I was trying to figure out what my plan would be if I got laid off. I was like, ‘What do I want to do?’” said Carter. The apparent answer: Everything.

Lauren Williams, former editor-in-chief of Vox.com, discusses why she left Vox to create the news nonprofit Capital B. They talk about the challenges of funding and the importance of covering issues like health, criminal justice, politics, and housing for Black people. They also discuss the significance of a local outlet in Atlanta during the midterm elections and the decision to focus on non-entertainment topics for their audience.

Vice Media Group’s digital division, like many digital media outlets, currently generates the majority of its revenue from advertising. And like many media companies, VMG’s digital arm is on a revenue diversification kick.“It is my goal to get into 2024 to have a third of revenue coming from ad-supported, a third [from] commerce and then a third [from] consumer,” VMG chief digital officer Cory Haik said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.She acknowledged the aim “is ambitious for us” but discussed how VMG’s digital division — which is profitable — is already chipping away at the undertaking. Last year the company debuted a new commerce vertical called Rec Room and also introduced a subscription product, Waypoint+, for its gaming publication Waypoint. During the interview, she discussed different ways in which VMG will be building on those initial moves, such as by rolling out affiliate content on new properties like fashion and culture vertical i-D and adding a reader donation option for its news content.“Our revenue is primarily ad-supported, but we’re opening that up. And we’re very, very bullish on diversification and running hard at that,” Haik said.