Vogue. GQ. Bon Appétit. Wired. Vanity Fair.
Condé Nast may be a publishing giant, but when it comes to its content efforts, it’s all about the brands, and the culture.
“We’re drafting off of our IP and just getting smarter about getting our IP out into the world, and then building product strategy around that,” says Pam Drucker Mann, Condé Nast’s global chief revenue officer. “The way that we engage consumers is not on one platform, right? We’re not a walled garden, we’re a creator. Our job is to meet consumers where they are. I think what shifted over the last three years is we’ve been able to work with intentional partners and own our sales rights.”
A critical piece of that is live events (like this week’s Met Gala), of which Vogue had exclusive access and live video coverage. But there are other events as well, like Vanity Fair‘s Oscars party, and GQ events around the Super Bowl and other sporting events. And those leverage the larger pop culture, and the company’s brands, to create new franchises.
The next big event franchise is Vogue World, which the company rolled out in New York last year, but which will expand dramatically in London this year. The event, set for September will be “a theatrical production, directed by Stephen Daldry, celebrating the performing arts — theatre, dance, opera, classical and contemporary music, and of course fashion,” per the company. And it will stream live.
“Vogue World is like a multi-hyphenate version of Vogue and it’s legitimately what it sounds like. It’s dimensionalizing what the September Issue used to be into this bewildered Vogue experience,” Drucker Mann says. “And kinda like the Olympics, the intention is to move somewhere in the world every year, and the experience will kind of embody the location.”
“From the very beginning, we thought that it would be a global project,” added Anna Wintour, speaking at the company’s Newfront presentation Thursday morning on the 65th floor of a glistening tower in Hudson Yards. “Our editors, including all of us, has spent so much time at fashion shows over the years and around the world. Our idea was, why not make one with Vogue‘s footprint? And at the same time, give our audiences a different way to think about shopping. It would also be a companion to our September global content, but most importantly, a new way for us to look at creating content with Vogue‘s same editorial sensibility and our particular point of view.”
But Condé Nast is also seeking to carve out a bigger piece of the entertainment pie through Agnes Chu’s Condé Nast Entertainment division.
And it, too, is making sure that the company’s brands are front and center. At the Newfront on Thursday, the company announced a slate of programming, each program connected to one of its brands.
Among the shows are A List with Franklin Leonard, a Vanity Fair series hosted by The Black List creator featuring celebrity interviews; Vogue Final Fitting, following brides-to-be as they get their final wedding dress fittings; Home At Last, an AD series which will see Queer Eye’s Tan France building his dream home; Street Eats, from Bon Appétit, and featuring chef Lucas Sin exploring Hong Kong street food; and The Mort Report, featuring street style influencer Mister Mort exploring street fashion for GQ.
“It’s really identifying the key attributes of each brand. What makes them distinctive, what’s the authority that they have,” Chu says of the process that goes into figuring out which programming is appropriate for which brand.
Leonard outlined his vision for A List at the Newfront:
“Vanity Fair lives at the nexus of culture in all of its forms, and if we’ve learned anything over the last few years its that everything lives downstream from culture,,” Leonard said. “Basically, I give our guests a category and they make a list of their favorite things, influences and/or choices that help us dive deeper into a conversation about their life, work, and there’s that word again, culture. Put another way, it’s a way for me to have interesting conversations with interesting people about interesting things.”
CNE will also bring back new seasons of shows like WIRED’s Autocomplete Interview, Vogue’s Beauty Secrets, GQ’s 10 Essentials and AD’s Open Door.
The company also plans to lean into connected TV sets, expanding its lifestyle programming to fill a void that some think has been lacking on free, ad-supported streaming platforms.
“We are leaning into FAST formats for Bon Appétit, lifestyle content, AD and Condé Nast Traveler,” Chu says. “Whereas with the other brands, some of the the attributes that make them so exciting and help them break through the din are often celebrity access, very timely zeitgeist formats, and because of that, that’s less of that lean back or that beautiful, large screen experience and maybe something that works better for TikTok or for YouTube or for for whatever new social platform that appears in the next year.”
