Condé Nast Knows Faded Glory Is Not in Style
Anna Wintour is the embodiment of the glory days of
the magazine dynasty. Now she is pitching its global, digital future.
From left,
Agnes Chu, the president of Condé Nast entertainment; Anna Wintour, the global
chief content officer for Condé Nast and editor of U.S. Vogue; and Roger Lynch,
Condé Nast’s chief executive.Credit...Dana Scruggs for The New York Times
By Katie
Robertson
Dec. 4,
2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/business/media/conde-nast-anna-wintour.html
“I think
what’s so wonderful about working in media is the constant change and seeing
things move,” Ms. Wintour said in an interview in Condé Nast’s largely empty 1
World Trade Center offices in Manhattan. “Particularly today when it moves so
fast. Yeah, it was great then, but what’s happening in the future is greater
still.”
Some Condé
Nast employees weren’t sure Ms. Wintour should be a part of that future. In
June 2020, workers asked at an all-company meeting if she was leaving the
company. She had just apologized for her role in a culture that many said
sidelined people of color, amid a broader reckoning with race and diversity
across the company and the media industry.
Ms. Wintour
was not going anywhere. Since then, she has been promoted to global chief
content officer and is presiding over a sweeping transformation of the company
as executives try to shrug off its legacy as the pre-eminent magazine publisher
of the last century, when it burnished its brand of elitism and spared no
expense on its titles.
On a crisp
fall day, I met with Ms. Wintour (sunglasses on) and Roger Lynch, Condé Nast’s
chief executive, to hear their vision for the New Condé.
The stakes
for getting it right go beyond just the company’s financial survival. As well
as the existential angst for all old media titans of whether it is possible to
remain relevant, there is a bigger question: Can Condé Nast, under pressure,
take real steps to address both a culture that many employees described as a
difficult place for people of color to succeed and content that has in the past
elevated a Eurocentric standard of beauty? Can an institution that thrived on
paying great attention to the superficial make a deeper-than-surface-level
change?
It has
undoubtedly been a tough time for the magazine business. Print advertising has
cratered in the past 15 years, and audiences no longer look primarily to legacy
brands to tell them what is fashionable. In recent years, Condé Nast’s U.S.
business had been losing more than $100 million annually.
In 2018,
Condé Nast announced that it was combining its U.S. business with its sister
company, Condé Nast International, to create a global company. The two
businesses had previously operated almost completely separately from each
other, with Vogue magazines in Europe or GQ editions in Asia having little to
do with their American counterparts. Publications often competed with each
other for the same advertisers and cover stars. Mr. Lynch was appointed the
global chief executive in 2019 to oversee the merger, which would consolidate
back-end operations to save money.
“Roger
faced a company that was in a really difficult revenue situation,” said Steven
Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications,
and a member of the billionaire family that has owned Advance for nearly 100
years.
“Unless we
want to look like a museum, we had to change and change pretty radically,” he
added.
For the
past year, Ms. Wintour has been focused on the next step of the process:
turning seven of Condé Nast’s biggest publications — Vogue, GQ, Wired,
Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler and Glamour — into
global brands, each under one leader, cutting costs and streamlining the
sharing of content across both print magazines and digital platforms.
“Instead of
having 27 Vogues or 10 Vogues go after one story, we have one global Vogue go
after it,” Ms. Wintour said. “So it’s more like a global newsroom with
different hubs.”
The switch
in focus from local to global has not gone down well everywhere. Tina Brown,
the former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, filleted the plan as “suicidal”
in an interview in August with The Times of London.
“Obviously
there are some stories that work, particularly if you think about fashion,
that’s a global language, and music, so there are stories that will work across
all territories and then those that absolutely won’t,” Ms. Wintour said. “We’re
very aware of that.”
Daily
business updates The latest coverage of
business, markets and the economy, sent by email each weekday. Get it sent to
your inbox.
Ms. Wintour
is also ensuring that there are unlikely to be any more Anna Wintours — no more
imperial editors in chief each with their own fiefs, a job Ms. Wintour herself
helped create as a stylish but exacting gatekeeper of fashion and culture. The
brands are now run by “global editorial directors,” most of whom are based in
New York, with regional heads of content reporting to them.
“Before,
you created stories for publication and it came out once a month and that was
great,” she said, describing the old domain of an editor in chief. Now the
global editorial directors and heads of content are working across platforms
that include “digital, video, short and long form, social, events,
philanthropic endeavors, membership, consumer, e-commerce,” Ms. Wintour said.
“You touch
so many different worlds,” she added. “Honestly, who wouldn’t want that job?”
In the
midst of the change at Condé Nast, plenty of people decided they didn’t.
A parade of
veteran Condé Nast editors in chief have departed the company in the past 12
months, including Vogue Paris’s Emmanuelle Alt (10 years), Vogue China’s
Angelica Cheung (16 years), Vogue Germany’s Christiane Arp (17 years) and
British GQ’s Dylan Jones (22 years). Michelle Lee of Allure and Whembley Sewell
of Them, an L.G.B.T.Q.-focused website, both went to jobs at Netflix. Lindsay
Peoples Wagner, the editor in chief of Teen Vogue and a rising star in the
company, left in January for New York Magazine’s The Cut.
“We have
nothing but great respect for the editors that have worked with us for many
years,” Ms. Wintour said when asked about the mass exodus. “Some of them
decided to move on and weren’t as comfortable with the transition as some of
the others, but we — you know, it is time to change the company and to have
modern thinking.”
In large
part, Condé Nast executives are trying desperately to move away from the lavish
glory days of years past. No one wants to dwell on the town cars, or the epic
expense accounts, or the legions of assistants.
Ms. Wintour
professes no lingering wistfulness — leading by example by being the one to bid
Old Condé farewell. But, when getting into the question of the good old days
vs. now, some nostalgia creeps in. She recalled the recent appointment of
Hamish Bowles to the top job at World of Interiors, Condé Nast’s influential
design magazine.
“What
struck me when I was thinking about who we might put in that role is that that
is a title that people archive and keep, it’s the best quality, it’s incredible
paper, it’s like the standard-bearer for that particular world,” she said.
But the
print days are mostly over: Mr. Lynch described the company to me as a
“majority digital business,” with more money coming in from digital ads than
print. But he’s eager to lessen the reliance on advertising of any kind and
grow different revenue streams. Currently, a majority of Condé Nast’s revenue
is from advertising, with consumer revenue (which means subscriptions,
memberships and e-commerce) making up about 25 percent.
And so, the
company has pushed further into video. Last year, it hired Agnes Chu away from
Disney to head its Condé Nast Entertainment division, with a mandate to ramp up
its film and television team and create more digital videos with the global
brands.
Ms. Chu
said her strategy centered on subtitling English-language content for global
distribution and creating or adapting region-specific content that could have
broader appeal. She pointed to the success of Architectural Digest’s “Open
Door” home tour video series, where a recent episode featuring the Indian
actress Sonam Kapoor Ahuja got 12 million views across all social media
platforms, with a third coming from outside of India.
But
production is an expensive business and huge successes from the entertainment
arm have been relatively limited.
The
executives pointed to the coverage of September’s Met Gala as a successful
execution of their strategy: Video of celebrity arrivals at the event, a
fund-raising benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art that has been organized
by Ms. Wintour for nearly 30 years, was live streamed by Vogue for the first
time, thanks to the video-providing capabilities of Condé Nast Entertainment.
It had nearly 15 million viewers on Vogue.com and its Twitter account, the
executives said, while additional Met Gala content got more than 200 million
views across social media.
The
executives also mentioned having the ability to now execute worldwide social
media plans to distribute interviews and fashion shoots with celebrities that
have global appeal, like GQ’s November profile of Will Smith or Adele’s cover
of both the U.S. and U.K. issues of Vogue the same month.
Ultimately,
the new strategy may sound a lot like translating the hits of the past for the
World Wide Web, suggesting the sluggishness with which the company has adapted
its magazines to a digital world.
Janice Min,
a media executive and the former top editor of The Hollywood Reporter and Us
Weekly, said that Condé Nast and similar publications were trying to strike a
balance between having enough scale to compete with Google and Facebook for
advertisers, and having the “right” audience to attract those advertisers.
“I think
without the whiff of elitism, that sort of old-school top-down approach to
telling the world what to wear and think, Condé Nast runs the risk of becoming
just another white-label content farm on the web,” she said. “How do you stay
special and distinct and in a world that demands equity?”
Condé Nast
says it is taking equity seriously. Ms. Wintour pointed to the shake-up in
editorial ranks as an opportunity to promote new leaders with diverse perspectives,
such as Margaret Zhang, who now leads Vogue China, or Adam Baidawi, the deputy
global editorial director of GQ.
“I’m an
Iraqi that grew up in the southern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia,” Mr.
Baidawi said in a video interview. “And how many Iraqi surnames do you think I
saw on the mastheads of brands I loved, or vaguely Middle Eastern surnames
even?”
He was
enthusiastic about the more collaborative way of working, saying diverse
perspectives were “literally baked in” because people from all over the world
were contributing and debating ideas.
“It’s not
said enough that a lack of diversity is boring as hell,” he said. “We’re in a
creative business, and more diversity means better ideas.”
Mr. Baidawi
said Condé Nast was now operating in a much more modern way.
“My entire
career, everywhere I’ve gone, people have told me that I’ve missed this wildly
romanticized golden era of luxury media: ‘Adam, there were town cars, private
jets, and there were reshoot budgets,’” he said, adding, “Frankly, I’m not
interested in chasing ghosts or recreating old glory.”
Leslie Sun,
Vogue’s editorial lead for the Asia Pacific region, said she saw the new Condé
Nast as “almost like a new dynasty,” and a chance for her to draw attention to
her region.
“Of course,
we all know that it is simply not true that culture is born out of the U.S. or
Europe alone, or that one country would define art or fashion or culture for
the rest of the world,” she said.
The company
introduced “The Condé Code” in September 2020, a five-pronged set of values
that states that “diversity is our strength,” as part of its efforts within the
company to address the concerns over racism. Around the same time, a global
chief diversity and inclusion officer, Yashica Olden, was hired and the company
released its first diversity report. (A spokeswoman said a second report would
be released early next year. Nearly 40 percent of the company’s new hires in
2020 and almost half of the top editors in the United States are people of
color, the spokeswoman added.)
At the same
time, employees across the company are pushing for broader change. Four
publications — The New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica and Pitchfork — formed
unions in the last couple of years with the NewsGuild, which also represents
employees at The New York Times and other media organizations. Condé Nast
recently reached a deal on a contract with three of the unions after heated and
public negotiations, which included a protest outside of Ms. Wintour’s
Greenwich Village townhouse.
Now, staff
members at the remaining publications, including Vogue, are organizing and plan
to announce soon that they are forming a union, according to two current Condé
Nast staff members and one former employee.
Condé
Nast’s new strategy is deeply rooted in the financial headwinds the company is
facing. Mr. Lynch says the plan is working, and shared new numbers to prove it.
The company will break even in 2021, a year ahead of schedule, he said, and is
on track to be profitable by 2023. This was partly driven by a spike in digital
advertising revenue, which grew 56 percent year-over-year in the third quarter
this year, he added.
According
to a person familiar with the financial details of the company, U.S. revenue is
expected to exceed $1 billion this year, up nearly $150 million from the
previous year. Mr. Lynch said his plan included a 25 percent increase in
investment in journalism and content production.
“Our plans
have us investing more in content, not less. But the way we fund at least part
of that is we eliminate things that didn’t add value to audiences or
advertisers,” he said. “It was just duplication of costs.”
Mr.
Newhouse, the chairman, said that Advance was excited about the progress Mr.
Lynch had made with his strategy, and that there was no interest in selling
Condé Nast.
“We have a
very thoughtful and compelling plan that takes us to 2026 and we’re prepared to
execute against it,” he said, adding that part of the plan included “looking at
acquisitions, partnerships, all things that require capital.”
As Condé
Nast’s employees start trickling back in to their offices, a return that is
currently voluntary, they’ll encounter a company structured completely
differently than it was before the pandemic. And they will see Ms. Wintour,
who, at 72, has outlasted every rumor of an impending departure from her post,
has consolidated power and is in the office almost every day.
“Right now,
I’m focused on today,” she said, when asked if she planned to leave the company
any time soon.
“She’s not
allowed to retire before me,” Mr. Lynch interrupted, laughing.
Katie
Robertson is a media reporter. She previously worked as an editor and reporter
at Bloomberg and News Corporation Australia. Email:
katie.robertson@nytimes.com @katie_robertson
No comments:
Post a Comment