Mr. Magazine

“Given what our print circulation is right now and the revenue that comes from it, which to me suggests that there is an audience who wants it, I don’t think it’s anytime soon. My biggest concern is the post office problems at this point. (Laughs) It’s not the audience; we have the audience. We’re doing really well with renewal rates and like I said, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we have this dialogue with the consumer that lets us give them what they want.” Scott Omelianuk (on if he can ever envision This Old House without the print component)

From television to print, from digital to an all-new Spanish-speaking television show; This Old House has been binding its many platforms together almost from the beginning to bring its audience the best of what the brand has to offer. The renovation champion of the space is one legacy brand that knows how to adapt to change while continuing to provide outstanding content on each and every platform it masters.

Scott Omelianuk is editor-in-chief of This Old House brand and is a man who knows his way around a hammer himself, since he was working after school as a carpenter’s gopher at the age of 15. I spoke with Scott recently and we talked about the brand in all of its many formats. From the print product to the new TheSnug.com, the mobile-first site that was built on a next generation digital publishing platform, that delivers premium, highly functional sites with sophisticated community participation and native advertising built in, the brand is moving forward to grow its audience with the latest technology and quality print content possible.

TheSnug.com is the first independent website developed by Time Inc. to appeal to millennials and is projected to have a combined social reach of more than 30 million across its partners. It will be driven by community participation and syndicated content with original content, including video, being rolled out in the near future.

It’s an exciting time for This Old House and an exciting time for its Editor-In-Chief, Scott Omelianuk. So I hope you enjoy this interesting interview and if you feel the urge to redo a room in your house, grab a copy of This Old House, I’m sure you’ll find all the help you need between its covers.

But first, the sound-bites:

On whether he’s seeing a change in his audience for the better or worse: Overall our audience has grown pretty significantly over the last couple of years. I’d like to verify these numbers before I actually commit to them of course, but I think MRI put the print audience at 6.6 million and our television audience is up a little bit; our digital audience is growing, particularly on mobile obviously. And the new things that we’ve done have also grown the audience.

On any duplication of the brand’s print and digital audience: Yes, there definitely is and we’ve made a significant effort to do value-added content digitally, things that we can’t get in the print pages, everything from more photos of a house, which we might also include in our tablet edition, to downloadable or printable templates to help with a craft or a DIY project.

On reaching a new audience with a legacy brand like This Old House without removing the word “old” from the title: We’re reaching out with new efforts such as The Snug.com, which is looking at a younger audience and in this case, a female millennial audience, showing them content that comes from This Old House as well as other places, but essentially stripped of its legacy branding. Say, the byline is This Old House, but that’ll be about it. And it’s done in a much more contemporary, mobile-first responsive design, hyper-social interface platform that they’re looking at the content on.

On when there might be a printed issue of The Snug.com: There’s no question that as soon as we started filling the buckets with content on The Snug we realized that there was a print opportunity. When it happens, I’m not so sure. It’s a matter of just making sure the economics word out and I think The Snug’s audience could be a little bit larger before we do that. The plan isn’t immediate, but it’s there.

On being the first legacy brand to utilize user-generated content for a magazine and why they haven’t done it again: We have actually, when I reference the reader remodel contest, that’s also the user-generated issue. The recognition for that was I’m very fortunate to have had a multimedia background before I arrived at This Old House; I worked in magazines at GQ and Esquire and other places. I’ve done web and television work and it was very clear to me that the boundaries we liked and the hierarchy of our industry liked wasn’t nearly as important to the consumer. (Laughs) They didn’t care whether someone on a web team or a print team was producing content for either of those things; they wanted good content period.

On whether he thinks a brand can survive without all of its extensions: The damaging thing for a brand to do is not to look at the new opportunities because you don’t know where the audience is going to go. Every place the audience goes, they do need good content. At a certain point you might decide this or that program or this or that utility, whatever the offering is, doesn’t provide enough of an ROI. And I don’t even mean that financially; I just mean in terms of audience engagement. So, you might let tings drop off at a certain point. But I think to not explore where we’re going with technology at every opportunity is a troubling thing.

On being one of the first legacy brands to integrate their staff and platforms and why others haven’t followed their example: (Laughs) I don’t know. I guess I’m not a good evangelist. (Laughs again) I think that part of what you just said is the answer and that is that we’re the most creative people in the world, right? There’s a difference between being very passionate and very creative about the way you design this feature story. Or you write this 7,000-word profile, which is going to be art when you’re done with it. And having editors who are passionate enough about what you do to help you achieve those things. And then having people who are able to take a step back and look broadly at what’s happening.

On if he can ever envision a day there won’t be a print component of This Old House: Given what our print circulation is right now and the revenue that comes from it, which to me suggests that there is an audience who wants it, I don’t think it’s anytime soon.

On what keeps him up at night: No one likes change and I don’t particularly like it either, but we don’t have a choice. The pace of change that we’re experiencing now is as slow as it will ever be in our lifetimes. It’s about making sure I stay ahead and have that next thing. I want to keep being first for my brand. I want us to keep having those firsts.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Scott Omelianuk, Editor-In-Chief, This Old House…

Samir Husni: It’s amazing to see how many of the younger generation are interested in the subject of renovation and see it as more of a challenge and a great experience. Are you seeing a change in the audience with This Old House and the entire brand and if so, is it a change for the better or a change for the worse?

Scott Omelianuk: Overall our audience has grown pretty significantly over the last couple of years. I’d like to verify these numbers before I actually commit to them of course, but I think MRI put the print audience at 6.6 million and our television audience is up a little bit; our digital audience is growing, particularly on mobile obviously. And the new things that we’ve done have also grown the audience.

But I think one of the interesting stories is the amount of attention we receive on social and how that audience is sometimes very different from what you would imagine. We do really well on two opposite ends of what I think the social spectrum is in some respects. One is Google+ where you would think more male, nerdy, tech-savvy kind of people are and we have a really significant resize, I think maybe a 600,000 Goggle+ audience. And then on the opposite end of the scale is Pinterest where we have the same size audience, almost 600,000.

To me, the exciting thing about that is it proves the value of the content that we’re doing and that’s what it all comes back to is creating content that consumers want, whether they buy a subscription or they’re going to find us on social media and then find their way back to one of our digital properties.

Samir Husni: Do you see any duplication between the print and digital audiences?

Scott Omelianuk: Yes, there definitely is and we’ve made a significant effort to do value-added content digitally, things that we can’t get in the print pages, everything from more photos of a house, which we might also include in our tablet edition, to downloadable or printable templates to help with a craft or a DIY project.

In that respect, we really make an effort to drive back and forth between the two platforms; most of our large franchises are in both print and digital, such as our reader remodel contest. In print, you can use your Smartphone with a Blippar app on it to enter the sweepstakes or you can go to the website and enter that way. So these are all things that we’ve made an effort to do to keep the audience in both places.

Now a huge amount of our online traffic comes from Search regardless. And those folks we presume to be new to the brand and if we can make them repeat customers, that’s great. I think that’s one of the reasons that the footprint has grown a little bit is because people search for a problem and they actually find good content that’s trustworthy and vetted for them and they know that they can come back to us next time.

Samir Husni: How are you benefiting from the power of the brand, while at the same time having to respond to some people who might say how can you have a powerful brand today with the word “old” in it?

Scott Omelianuk: (Laughs) Well, there’s no question that the greatest strength, which is this very recognizable name that started with the television show 35 years ago and has people watching it today with their children who watched it themselves with their parents, which in some cases gives us three generations of viewers; there’s no question that “old” is a little bit of a liability, but we’ve done a number of things I think to minimize the impact.

One is not to be embarrassed by it; that is who we are. We fully know that not all of our readership, viewers or online users live in old houses. And so the content we present to them I would describe as Americana and that might be the kind of thing you imagine in a 100-year-old farmhouse, but would also be something in a newly-constructed cottage somewhere.

We try to remove age or remove any date at all from any of the content we present. We always talk about new technology. The story of the home really matches to the story of broader technology, in many ways.

We have a Smart Home issue, our second, coming out in September. I don’t think anyone wants to live in a museum, so for us we want to take these houses, houses that are of quality; houses that were nicely made, and make them useful for people who live in them today.

That’s one thing. Another is reaching out with new efforts like we are with The Snug.com and that is looking at a younger audience and in this case, a female millennial audience, showing them content that comes from This Old House as well as other places, but essentially stripped of its legacy branding. Say, the byline is This Old House, but that’ll be about it. And it’s done in a much more contemporary, mobile-first responsive design, hyper-social interface platform that they’re looking at the content on.

So, again it comes back to what I said about social; it’s the content that’s really what’s valuable, not a particular delivery. All of the deliveries are valuable.

At The Snug.com we see us reaching a much younger audience, a much more female audience; our general audience by the way is about 50/50, male/female. The Snug.com is more female and younger. And it echoes a little bit of something that we see when we run things like the user-generated contest, which is that the most active group of people generally for us is on the younger side of our median and that makes sense, right? You’re buying your first house or you’re upgrading to your second house that’s big enough for the family or just whatever. So you’ve not really settled in yet or thought about downsizing. You’re not doing any of those things; you’re much more active in the space.

So even though we have readers who span from 18 to 80, I think the most active portion of our audience is the younger half.

Samir Husni: When are we going to see the first printed issue of Snug?

Scott Omelianuk: (Laughs) When we set about creating The Snug.com our first intention was to put a stake in the ground for reaching a millennial audience in a way that we could extend the franchise basically beyond that particular content. So, you could imagine that there would be a Snug Table and that would be about entertaining or food or cooking, or a Snug Buddy would be about pets; a Snug Dollar might be a finance site that you could extend this franchise into an ecosystem but move traffic back and forth across it and provide a broad ad opportunity.

There’s no question that as soon as we started filling the buckets with content on The Snug we realized that there was a print opportunity. When it happens, I’m not so sure. It’s a matter of just making sure the economics word out and I think The Snug’s audience could be a little bit larger before we do that. The plan isn’t immediate, but it’s there.

I think the really interesting thing about The Snug is the engagement of the audience. We’ve been live for four full months and in that first four months we’ve registered 13,000 contributors of all stripes: blogger, individuals, brands, and altogether they’ve contributed more than 40,000 pieces of content to the platform. And that’s pretty astonishing to me and really exciting.

We’re building on that. We want to make sure that the platform is a stable and viable entity basically, but then I do think that there’s an opportunity for a slick SIP model for the content on there.

Samir Husni: You were one of the early legacy magazines that adapted to user-generated content; you published, if I’m not mistaken, the very first user-generated content magazine in the states.

Scott Omelianuk: Yes, that’s true.

Samir Husni: Why haven’t you done it again?

Scott Omelianuk: We have actually, when I reference the reader remodel contest, that’s also the user-generated issue. The recognition for that was I’m very fortunate to have had a multimedia background before I arrived at This Old House; I worked in magazines at GQ and Esquire and other places. I’ve done web and television work and it was very clear to me that the boundaries we liked and the hierarchy of our industry liked wasn’t nearly as important to the consumer. (Laughs) They didn’t care whether someone on a web team or a print team was producing content for either of those things; they wanted good content period.

So, very early on I tried to integrate the staff of This Old House so that there were no significant silos between who was contributing content to what platform. And as we did that, one of the responsibilities was to participate in the TOH.com community and we realized what a vibrant community we had and how much good information users were exchanging. That’s when we decided that it was valuable and that we should take advantage of it and use the content in print. And we did that; it was Ad Age’s idea of the year, I think it was 2008.

And we’ve done it every year since and it’s been a little bit different, but I think the thing that’s really terrific about having done it is every year it creates an ongoing multi-month, as we ask users to upload content; we create sort of a dialogue between the editors and those people. I think we have a profound understanding of who our consumer is in a way that a lot of other places don’t because they’re showing us what they’ve done; they’re showing us how we may have influenced or inspired them in their own projects. They’re calling and telling us or mailing and telling us what their challenges have been or what their proudest moments are.

And we include those and not just in the user-created issue, which is a sort of wholesale slab of that content, but in every issue there are two or three stories that had their genesis in conversations with our consumer.

So I believe that binds them more tightly to us. It also allows us to give them the kind of content that they want even better. It’s something that I would encourage everyone to do, particularly as research dollars get tighter and tighter, it’s just a really great way to have a dialogue with your consumer and create content. And it’s almost a little distasteful to say consumer at that point, because really what you’ve done is created a community with them. And that’s really important and that’s something that magazine media, whether it’s print or not, can do really well with, if we keep that in mind.

And to be perfectly frank, that’s what we’ve done in extending the idea of home improvement to this all new Spanish-language television show. The stuff we learned such as the emotional connections of the home, the importance of creating this safe place for people and a comfortable place.

We’ve extended to the Hispanic market now and so instead of being purely DIY kind of content on “SOS: Salva Mi Casa” there are family stories as well because; the fact of the matter is that’s why we do these things anyway.

Now we might not go back and change the flagship This Old House show from what it is, but we have new opportunities with new audiences on new platforms to do that, to recognize our ongoing realization of how people interact with our content. So, when you see “SOS: Salva Mi Casa” on Telemundo, you don’t have to speak Spanish to recognize it. You will see that there’s a family component, an emotional component, something really strong and primal about making the simplest improvements to the house that make a huge difference to people.

Samir Husni: Television and magazines have been with us for a long time, magazines longer than television. We now have social media and digital; do you think a brand can survive if we lose any of the brand extensions?

Scott Omelianuk: I honestly think, I don’t know about losing, but I think you have to take the opportunity. Whenever a new platform comes out and people start talking about it, we have a discussion here at our brand about how we might take advantage of it.

We had a Tumblr best-of pick in 2014 for This Old Apartment Tumblr, which actually influenced our creation of The Snug, because it performed so well for itself. We’re also talking about Meerkat and Periscope now; who knows what’s next. We’re talking about how to reinvent the tablet edition of the magazine, so that maybe it’s not the same linear experience that the print edition of the magazine is, even if it has the same content because I want to take advantage of the habits and native technology that’s in the tablet, more than I want to recreate a print edition.

The damaging thing for a brand to do is not to look at the new opportunities because you don’t know where the audience is going to go. Every place the audience goes, they do need good content. At a certain point you might decide this or that program or this or that utility, whatever the offering is, doesn’t provide enough of an ROI. And I don’t even mean that financially; I just mean in terms of audience engagement. So, you might let tings drop off at a certain point. But I think to not explore where we’re going with technology at every opportunity is a troubling thing.

And I do think that for us television is really important because it’s a very cost-effective way of creating digital video. You basically have assets that are paid for and then exploited again digitally at low cost. Whenever we can get the opportunity to create a new television show it allows us to augment our video library, which is already quite large and does really well for us. I think we total about a million plays a month in video and that’s not so bad.

Samir Husni: With the whole integrated staff and integrated creation of what you’ve done; your brand was one of the first to learn that print and digital can and do work together and complement each other very well. Why do you think it took the industry at least five years, six years now, to learn that? To go from print is dead to print is in decline to, who knows five years from now, maybe it will be the power of print again. If we are the most creative people on the face of the earth, why did it take us so long to learn that the two integrated is the only thing that makes sense? Why didn’t people learn from your example?

Scott Omelianuk: (Laughs) I don’t know. I guess I’m not a good evangelist. (Laughs again) I think that part of what you just said is the answer and that is that we’re the most creative people in the world, right? There’s a difference between being very passionate and very creative about the way you design this feature story. Or you write this 7,000-word profile, which is going to be art when you’re done with it. And having editors who are passionate enough about what you do to help you achieve those things. And then having people who are able to take a step back and look broadly at what’s happening.

But then you’re running a business too, so it becomes the founder’s dilemma. You see that the audience is changing and that they might be going in this direction, but you’re making your money here. So how do you find the time to band with the resources or investments to carve out and move when the vast majority of revenue is coming from that other spot.

I think we benefit from the fact that we’re a mid-sized brand and when we dip into a new technology, it’s not devastating to our bottom line. We don’t risk a lot by taking the time to explore that new opportunity.

It’s actually quite hard for people to get out of their swing lanes and take a broader look and to not just be afraid because no one likes change. Or to not be afraid because you don’t know what these things are going to do to the P&L. And to not be afraid because it just might be a waste of time and you’ll embarrass yourself. You know, there are things we’ve done that we stopped doing because we thought they were going to be great, but didn’t work. And that’s OK, but it all depends on the stage you’re on I think. If you’re on a quieter stage you can get away with more, I guess. (Laughs)

I really think that’s the answer and again, I was fortunate in that I had for better or worse a career experience, and I think it was ultimately for the better, where I bounced between a couple of different jobs in media. And that allowed me to see the connections between the people who might have been in one place at a time, and they couldn’t see them. And that made it a little easier.

Samir Husni: Being this, and as much as I hate the phrase I’m going to use it, this multimedia practitioner, do you envision a day when we will not have a print edition from This Old House?

Scott Omelianuk: Given what our print circulation is right now and the revenue that comes from it, which to me suggests that there is an audience who wants it, I don’t think it’s anytime soon. My biggest concern is the post office problems at this point. (Laughs) It’s not the audience; we have the audience. We’re doing really well with renewal rates and like I said, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we have this dialogue with the consumer that lets us give them what they want.

I think we’ll be in print for some time; I don’t know about forever, because to say that is just foolish. Given our financials for now, there will be a print edition of This Old House continued, yes. And maybe Snug too, at least quarterly. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Scott Omelianuk: (Laughs) I have a four-year-old that doesn’t always sleep. So, that’s one thing. Just thinking about what’s next and having the bandwidth to do all of the exciting things that are coming and trying to be there when they are.

No one likes change and I don’t particularly like it either, but we don’t have a choice. The pace of change that we’re experiencing now is as slow as it will ever be in our lifetimes. It’s about making sure I stay ahead and have that next thing. I want to keep being first for my brand. I want us to keep having those firsts. And that’s what makes it exciting and that’s what makes it exciting for people to come to work here. And why I get the opportunity to talk to people like you.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“I think the path to victory these days is opening your mind to what kind of businesses you can be in that may be obvious or not so obvious. And I also think to not being overly fixated quite honestly on digital as the singular path to prosperity for, call it, traditional media companies. I’ve seen a lot of people overspend and over-focus on digital and it’s grown their audience and in some case may have grown their revenue, but I haven’t seen a company transformed by just basically saying we’re going to go from print to print plus digital.” Andrew Clurman

“In our world we’ve got a lot of incredible loyalists and people of all ages who like the aesthetic of print, they like the print medium. And our print is profitable, it’s not the highest margin business that we have, but it’s profitable. I would say that it would be hard for me to imagine us getting out of print and just being event services and digital.” Andrew Clurman

Active Interest Media is a company that is as diversified as it is innovative when it comes to its business model and approach. With more than 50 internationally distinguished print, digital and social media brands, a video production company and first-in-class events, AIM is keeping its finger on the pulse of what’s important to today’s magazine audience.

In an exclusive survey published in 2014 and conducted by AIM’s Research Insights on the two types of newsstand buyers: Newsstand-Only Buyers, and Newsstand Buyers Who Also Subscribe to Magazines, there were some very interesting preliminary results, one showing that print magazines were the #1 choice of media formats that AIM readers said they would still be reading 2-3 years from now, bringing the company to conclude that print is clearly a magazine’s brand identity, and all other platforms build from the magic of print. A conclusion Mr. Magazine™ definitely agrees with.

Recently I spoke with Andrew Clurman, CEO and President of AIM, about how magazine-making had changed over the years and how the focus had changed from the traditional advertising-driven business model. We looked back to the infancy of AIM, checked in with today’s adult-aged business and also perused the company’s future seasoned years; from past, present and to its future, AIM’s evolvement has been and will continue to be highly innovative and interesting.

So, if you’re wondering where to ‘AIM’ your next ten or fifteen minutes, try sitting down, relaxing and enjoying the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Andrew Clurman, CEO & President, Active Interest Media.

But first, the sound-bites:

On how he thinks magazine-making has changed over the years: It used to be the way that you monetized an audience was by selling ads to people who wanted to, in turn, sell their products to that audience. That’s still true today, but to a smaller degree. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. But relying on advertising as a way to build a business around that audience, and particularly a growing business, isn’t that viable anymore, in terms of any scale.

On how AIM actually brings forth magazines from ideas: First we start with the traditional filter of who’s the audience; how big is it; who’s the competition; what’s unique about this idea that’s going to win in the marketplace. It’s very, very rare that you have an idea for a magazine in an unserved market. The magazine that we launched, The Box, really had no competition and we thought fine, that’s pretty unique.

On whether he believes a magazine today can’t be created and stand-alone without the benefits of other platforms: I would say that we can survive; I don’t however think we will necessarily thrive. Launching a magazine is a lot easier than sustaining a magazine. The first issue sometimes is the easiest because everyone is all excited by this great story you have to tell. But by the second issue or the sixth issue or the 24th issue; you settle into some kind of normal state.

On the major stumbling block that he’s had to face over the years and how he overcame it: When it came to seeing all the changes in the marketplace and how we needed to create a much more diversified business, some of it was just keeping a very open mind about what is interesting and possible and what fits.

On his most pleasant moment: We opened our Boulder office in December 2013 with about 200 people. We have offices elsewhere, but we brought almost 50 magazine brands, other parts of the company and everybody here and we had a celebration of that. It was gratifying to see it and to say we’ve built a great company with incredibly passionate people and great brands and really interesting and different lines of businesses that we’re in, with a clear path to grow in the future, after struggling through the really challenging parts of getting up to a decent size and the incredibly challenging years of 2008 through 2010.

On whether he believes traditional media companies can exist without print: In our world we’ve got a lot of incredible loyalists and people of all ages, who like the aesthetic of print, they like the print medium. And our print is profitable, it’s not the highest margin business that we have, but it’s profitable. I would say that it would be hard for me to imagine us getting out of print and just being event services and digital.

On where he sees the company one year from now: We have three things that we launched this year and we’re hoping that they will become even bigger and more important next year.

On what motivates him to get out of bed in the mornings and say it’s going to be a great day: I’ve always been excited by ideas, whether they’re mine or someone else’s. And I love the power of taking an idea and bringing it to life and building a team and a business around it. So, I’m constantly thinking about the great ideas we have and how we can turn them into something real

On what keeps him up at night: (Laughs) It’s not coffee; I gave up drinking coffee. We’ve worked very hard to build a diversified, defensible, growing business, but you still just have to acknowledge at the end of the day that there are many things beyond your control. And not obsess about those things that may go bump-in-the-night.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ conversation with Andrew Clurman, CEO & President, Active Interest Media.

Samir Husni: Based on your experience, how do you think magazine-making has changed over the years?

Andrew Clurman: I think it starts with a much broader view of what is possible and necessary. At the core of magazine media and magazine-making, as you call it, is the fact that you still have to find a sizeable audience of people, a category of people, who share an interest, a passion and a pastime. People are always amazed at the number of magazines out there and they ask why there are so many sometimes. Just like they might ask, why there are so many gas stations or banks; as long as you can find a viable market and an audience then you deserve a place in magazine land.

It’s amazing that there are always people who find a different point of view or find an emerging interest and the best way to serve that interest and point of view is with a magazine. It’s hard to find a better medium that artfully combines the visual, aesthetic and written experience, or intellectual experience, that people get from the way that they consume magazines. It’s all the good things about magazines; the immersive way that people consume them, which is very different from almost any other media. It’s really hard to think of something other than a long-form or even some kind of service piece where you’re packaging information about complex subjects that works better than a magazine.

I think the basic form exists and has its own powerful place. It isn’t easily substituted, for certain genres of things, with any other media. And that’s what we look to do with our brand.

Samir Husni: Technically though, that’s the same way that we’ve always created magazines. Without an audience; there would be no magazines. So, how is today’s magazine-making different? One of your quotes from the presentation you gave at the IMAG conference in Boulder was: “We used to produce magazines for the advertisers.” How has this focus changed?

Andrew Clurman: All of the things that I just said speaks to the audience product and the way that you can command an audience. It used to be the way that you monetized an audience was by selling ads to people who wanted to, in turn, sell their products to that audience. That’s still true today, but to a smaller degree. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. But relying on advertising as a way to build a business around that audience, and particularly a growing business, isn’t that viable anymore, in terms of any scale.

At this point when we look at a new magazine or an existing magazine, and ask what other things do the people who are in this audience need or want, and what can we deliver that is compatible with what we do and is complementary to what we do, so that those things would seem like a natural extension of our brand? And they have to be things that would be sizeable enough and able to rise above what used to be your ancillary revenue streams.

It could be that, and there have been cases of this over the years, you may have an event business that is powered by the magazine that’s actually financially bigger than the magazine, even if the magazine from a brand and audience standpoint is larger.

Samir Husni: You’ve been publishing new magazines, launching new titles, whether it’s about the practice of CrossFit with The Box magazine or Anglers Journal. When one of your team members comes to you and says that they have an idea for a magazine, do you have any criteria or any set of rules such as, if it meets A, B and C you go ahead with it? How do you actually bring forth a magazine from ideas?

Andrew Clurman: First we start with the traditional filter of who’s the audience; how big is it; who’s the competition; what’s unique about this idea that’s going to win in the marketplace. It’s very, very rare that you have an idea for a magazine in an unserved market. The magazine that we launched, The Box, really had no competition and we thought fine, that’s pretty unique.

With Anglers Journal, there are probably hundreds of fishing magazines, if you count every local, regional and national one. I think the more crowded the marketplace, the more compelling the idea has to be, in terms of its uniqueness.

So, we start with that and then we ask the second question: what is the business model for this and how do we build a business around it? For example, with Anglers Journal we said there are legions of fishing magazines out there; this is a great idea for something that is about the art of fishing and why people fish, not about how to fish, so that carves out a unique place in that category. But we said none of these look like they’re really growing. The magazine business is not a really growth business for that category, so what else can we do?

Then we looked at the fishing tournament business. There is actually a very big fishing tournament business across a lot of different species of fish and we just bought a four-leg fishing tournament in the Bahamas called the Bahamas Billfish Tournament, and that business is already bigger than the magazine economically. We’re also now looking at a television show around the brand.

I think the difference is if I go back many, many years; we’re always looking for ways to build events, television or whatever, as extensions of the brand, but in this case we start with saying it has to be core to what we do because there is just not enough advertising as there was in the old days to grow and continue to grow something like this in the magazine business.

Samir Husni: Are you saying then that without these other extensions such as events and television, that technically we can’t just create a magazine that can survive on just being a magazine?

Andrew Clurman: I would say that we can survive; I don’t however think we will necessarily thrive. Launching a magazine is a lot easier than sustaining a magazine. The first issue sometimes is the easiest because everyone is all excited by this great story you have to tell. But by the second issue or the sixth issue or the 24th issue; you settle into some kind of normal state.

We do have quite a few magazines that stand alone as a print product, but very few of those are growing or have a very exciting growth path if they don’t have some other avenue that they’re actively chasing.

For example, we have a magazine called The Trail Rider, which is a nice little magazine that speaks for itself; it’s about people who trail ride their horses and the majority of ways that they participate in riding those trails. And for a while it was nicely profitable, with a specifically-focused audience. The advertising is made up of small, Mom & Pop outfitters and products. But it hasn’t really grown in spite of everything they’ve tried. And the cost side continues to creep up ever so slightly, so you look at the P&L and you find it’s on a downward trajectory. So, we went through this big discussion around what else we could do with it.

We looked at whether there was a Trail Riding Association that we could buy. Or could we start one. We own this program called USRider, which is our Triple-A program for horse-people and we have about 40,000 members. So, we came up with this obvious or maybe not too obvious idea.

People who are USRider members for the most part are people who go trail riding and they’re paying about $150 per year to be a member so they have towing insurance for their truck and their trailer. So let’s make The Trail Rider the official magazine of USRider, raise the price of the membership and everybody gets a subscription to the magazine and we increase the content to include some more information about their membership and benefits.

We did that going through a full year renewal cycle and it appears that’s going to really transform The Trail Rider magazine to a much, much better business.

Samir Husni: You’ve been in the business a long time and technically, with almost the same team, which is one of those rare things in the industry. As the business transformed, what was the major stumbling block that faced you and how did you overcome it?

Andrew Clurman: I give Skip (Efrem “Skip” Zimbalist III) a lot of credit in this and I give Brian (Brian Sellstrom) who’s one of my other partners, credit as well; neither of them came from magazine publishing the way that I did. Literally, my second job out of college was in special interest media, but they came from different arenas. Skip worked at McKinsey & Company in strategic planning and Brian had different experiences, so they were not as steeped in the traditional business model of magazine publishing.

When it came to seeing all the changes in the marketplace and how we needed to create a much more diversified business, some of it was just keeping a very open mind about what is interesting and possible and what fits.

For example, when we were looking at USRider; we have private equity partners who have been fantastic, great and incredibly supportive and have given us all the capital we’ve needed to build the business. When we brought this one forward and said we want to buy this towing company, we don’t own the tow trucks, we have a service bureau that does it, but our partner’s reactions were that doesn’t fit with your business. You guys are publishers and that just doesn’t make any sense.

It took a fair amount of convincing and us saying just trust us and it does make sense; it’s a subscription business and a membership business. And it’s been wildly successful.

I think the path to victory these days is opening your mind to what kind of businesses you can be in that may be obvious or not so obvious. And I also think to not being overly fixated quite honestly on digital as the singular path to prosperity for, call it, traditional media companies. I’ve seen a lot of people overspend and over-focus on digital and it’s grown their audience and in some case may have grown their revenue, but I haven’t seen a company transformed by just basically saying we’re going to go from print to print plus digital.

Samir Husni: That’s why I refer to digital as the seductive, beautiful mistress roaming the streets looking for her next victim. (Laughs)

Andrew Clurman: (Laughs too). That’s a bit darker view, but there are a lot of false prophets out there of digital.

Samir Husni: Do you think traditional media companies can exist without print?

Andrew Clurman: As in phasing out their print?

Samir Husni: Yes. Phasing it out and saying that they’re saving so much money on ink, paper, distribution and mail that they’re just going to go full-blown digital.

Andrew Clurman: I think it depends on what kind of print they have. There are certainly many cases in the B to B world of B to B print businesses that have gone completely digital or mostly digital. In our world we’ve got a lot of incredible loyalists and people of all ages who like the aesthetic of print, they like the print medium. And our print is profitable, it’s not the highest margin business that we have, but it’s profitable.

I would say that it would be hard for me to imagine us getting out of print and just being event services and digital.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant moment in your career that you can recall?

Andrew Clurman: When we started AIM and we literally came up with the idea in Skip Zimbalist’s kitchen, talking about what it might be and we started with a small acquisition of five, very disparate small magazines and it seemed a long, long way from our previous company which had world famous national special interest brands, so it felt like we kind of stepped way off the track.

We opened our Boulder office in December 2013 with about 200 people. We have offices elsewhere, but we brought almost 50 magazine brands, other parts of the company and everybody here and we had a celebration of that. It was gratifying to see it and to say we’ve built a great company with incredibly passionate people and great brands and really interesting and different lines of businesses that we’re in, with a clear path to grow in the future, after struggling through the really challenging parts of getting up to a decent size and the incredibly challenging years of 2008 through 2010. And sort of hitting a point where we had created what we thought was a great business; we had a great team and an exciting plan to go forward.

Samir Husni: Talking about going forward; if you would put your futuristic cap on for just a second and take us one year into the future, what would you expect to tell me different from today?

Andrew Clurman: We have three things that we launched this year and we’re hoping that they will become even bigger and more important next year and they fall into the category of one is film, video, production and sales. You were at the IMAG conference, so you heard Scott (Schulman) from Rodale talking about their ‘Rodale U’ and we have our own AIM Healthy U, so we have launched an online education platform where we’re producing and selling classes right now for everything from the business of yoga for people who are opening their own yoga studios, to gluten-free cooking and eating.

We do a lot of seminars and classes now in different categories; we’re doing Log Home University, where people come for a full day to hear about how to build and manage a log home’ we have a TrawlerFest University, where people come for two or three days to learn about boat maintenance and management.

I think we have a lot of class curriculum content that we can move to an online education format and sell it, frankly, for at least what we’re charging offline, if not in some cases, more because we can add more elements to the curriculum. So, that’s number one.

Number two is we’re growing our event business and have acquired a couple of event businesses this year and are looking at acquiring more. I expect that to be meaningfully bigger than it is right now and broader, in terms of a couple of exciting new categories.

And the third is that we’ve kind of taken a page out of the business to business generation model, which B to B companies have been doing that for years, which is content marketing to drive customer acquisition and we’ve launched a program to do that in our home category very successfully and we see that working in some of the other verticals where we have big-ticket items like boats, horses and ski vacations. Those are three things that I think we have good momentum on and I can see them as drivers across a lot of our categories next year.

Samir Husni: What motivates you to get up in the morning and say it’s going to be a great day?

Andrew Clurman: I’ve always been excited by ideas, whether they’re mine or someone else’s. And I love the power of taking an idea and bringing it to life and building a team and a business around it. So, I’m constantly thinking about the great ideas we have and how we can turn them into something real. That’s what has kept me in this business and also keeps me going.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Andrew Clurman: (Laughs) It’s not coffee; I gave up drinking coffee. We’ve worked very hard to build a diversified, defensible, growing business, but you still just have to acknowledge at the end of the day that there are many things beyond your control. And not obsess about those things that may go bump-in-the-night.

But even given that, you’re constantly worrying or on the lookout for anything that can go wrong. I guess it’s like the old Spiro Agnew or Richard Nixon quote: if you’re not paranoid, you just don’t know whose out to get you. Just trying to live in an enlightened state of paranoia, I’d say, would be what keeps me up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“I think the bigger surprise is that in this day and age there’s so much of the world that somehow believes that the rise of digital media has undermined the importance of print media and I think we’ve proven that not only is that false, but it’s really the exact opposite. If you harness it correctly, digital media only enhances the power of print media because it gives you so many different pipes to tell the story.” Chris Mitchell

“I’m a believer in the power of beautiful production quality and in telling that story, especially where there is a visual element, as only ink on paper can do.” Chris Mitchell

From “Deep Throat” to a pregnant Demi Moore; Vanity Fair covers have given us much to talk about and consider over the years. The magazine’s impactful way of presenting its stories through masterful writing and spectacular visuals has always left its audience breathless and sometimes speechless with intriguing wonder at the artful and articulate way the magazine reflects society.

And with the latest Caitlyn Jenner cover and breaking story; Vanity Fair carefully and meticulously unfolded the content and visuals through a combined and consummate print and digital effort that was nothing short of a masterpiece.

Chris Mitchell came onboard as publisher of Vanity Fair in September 2014 from GQ and has proven he is as adept as the brand at staying on top of the game when it comes to innovation in advertising and execution of the brand’s many facets. With over 20 years of magazine experience, Chris is no stranger to the intricacies of magazine media and guides the legacy brand with a succinct and steady hand.

I spoke to Chris recently about the dynamic effect Vanity Fair, across all its platforms, and especially print, has on its audience and his belief that digital doesn’t undermine print, that in fact, it only reinforces it. His unwavering deference to the power of a magazine cover and how it can still, even in this digital age, have a gripping and moving reaction on all who see it, in fact more so than any other form of media, is something that he takes very seriously. The conversation was inspiring and riveting as we talked about the brand’s past, present and future and the lasting and memorable impression that good storytelling can still leave with readers. It was a fascinating discussion.

So, please enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with a man who believes in the power of the printed page and the importance of digital to keep it flourishing, Chris Mitchell, Publisher, Vanity Fair.

But first, the sound-bites:

On the impact of Vanity Fair covers: Vanity Fair has a track record for impactful covers. No one else is in its league when it comes to finding those cultural moments that become iconic or the subject matter that everyone is talking about; what we used to call the “watercooler moments” as it related to TV.

On what he believes makes Vanity Fair stand out from the rest of the magazines out there: I’ve been an avid reader and subscriber for 20-plus years. And like you, in some respects, I’ve been a student of magazines for much longer than that. To me what has always been the uniqueness of Vanity Fair, and I think that this applies especially to the 20-something-years that Graydon Carter has been at the helm, is that it’s the perfect mix of being an incredibly commercial vehicle and incredibly intelligent; it’s the perfect mix of art and commerce.

On what he would say to the doubters and media critics out there who believe print is in decline or dying: These misnomers are ultimately created by even our own industry. Many times entities like Women’s Wear Daily want to talk about ad pages alone as an indication of a brand’s relevance and that’s perpetuating an outdated metric, in my opinion.

On how the magazine-making business model has changed before 2007 and after 2007: With a story such as the Caitlyn Jenner piece; the way that we harnessed the website as well as our social media partners and outlets to make the story even bigger than it would have been in 2007 is not a small thing. With a story this big in 2007, even in 2010 frankly, we would have had a very different press and social media case. We would have released the issue on the newsstands and there would have been a lot of press that followed. But it wouldn’t have received anywhere near the “watercooler moment” that we achieved because we used our site to feed stories over a period of time.

On what he would like to say a year from now about Vanity Fair’s accomplishments: I don’t think it’ll even take a year because when I look at the type of projects we have in the pipeline in front of our advertisers now, I know one thing to be true; if we can change the nature of the conversation with our advertisers to be one of a marketing partnership and if they can see us as someone who can deliver content for them; what I know is that increases the size of the advertising deals that you do with these partners; it increases it because they get excited about the work and the more excited they get about the work, the more that they want to run it in bigger quantities and the more that they want to see it live on all of these different platforms.

On the power and ability of a magazine cover to sustain the audience’s attention long after other media platforms: We have all these formats to increase video and that makes us a more interesting and robust way to tell the story across all platforms. And then we get that beautiful synergy that shows how the print product enforces or memorializes a story in a very different way than you’re telling it socially or in video.

On whether he can ever envision a day without a printed Vanity Fair: No. I’m a believer in the power of beautiful production quality and in telling that story, especially where there is a visual element, as only ink on paper can do.

On the major stumbling block he’s had to overcome during his career: There was a point where I was debating about whether I should be on the editorial side or the business side. And I saw that as a real fork in the road and it was only as the business became more dynamic and I learned a lot along the way that I realized that our job and the editor’s job are wonderfully cooperative and collaborative. And that makes it more fun for us and I think it makes it more successful for them. And I think it can be done in a way that doesn’t violate the quality or the ethics of great journalism.

On his most pleasant moment: I found a home at Condé Nast a long time ago and I’m incredibly fortunate to have had that home for as long as I have and to have experienced so many different, great brands and properties that Condé Nast owns. To be able to work at one company, but have eight or nine different jobs over 20 years is really a lucky thing.

On what keeps him up at night: What keeps me up at night has always been the same thing: we have the blessing and the curse of being a periodical. And with that comes the fact that you have a goal that you have to hit and when you finish one month, or a day, or a quarter of your digital or however you measure it, there’s always another one right behind that you have to hit. So you’re never done.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ conversation with Chris Mitchell, Publisher, Vanity Fair.

Samir Husni: When you were appointed publisher at Vanity Fair from GQ in September 2014; did you ever expect something as impactful as the Caitlyn Jenner cover to happen?

Chris Mitchell: I didn’t and I should have if you look at it in one way. Vanity Fair has a track record for impactful covers. No one else is in its league when it comes to finding those cultural moments that become iconic or the subject matter that everyone is talking about; what we used to call the “watercooler moments” as it related to TV.

And so breaking the Watergate “Deep Throat” story, having the first pictures of Tom Cruise’s daughter; obviously, the Demi Moore cover when she was pregnant; these are amazing watershed moments.

But I didn’t expect this because you don’t quite know when they’re going to find another one.

Samir Husni: When Bob Sauerberg made the announcement that you were being appointed publisher, he said, “Vanity Fair is one of Condé Nast’s – if not the industry’s – most significant and profitable brands.” Why do you think the entire American psyche, if not the world’s, has been impacted so heavily by Vanity Fair? In your opinion, what’s Vanity Fair’s uniqueness among all the other magazines out there?

Chris Mitchell: I’ve been an avid reader and subscriber for 20-plus years. And like you, in some respects, I’ve been a student of magazines for much longer than that. To me what has always been the uniqueness of Vanity Fair, and I think that this applies especially to the 20-something-years that Graydon Carter has been at the helm, is that it’s the perfect mix of being an incredibly commercial vehicle and incredibly intelligent; it’s the perfect mix of art and commerce.

It doesn’t shy away from the commercial side, as is evidenced in each and every cover, and it does it in a way that makes it such a wonderful business. That’s true in terms of its circulation too; it provides that home for advertisers and makes it special for them. Advertisers can see themselves in this environment.

As publishers we’re always selling the quality of our audience and the uniqueness of our demographics, but the reality is we all have something unique and that’s something that everybody has. But Vanity Fair has created an environment for advertising that makes the advertisers easily see themselves and their brands in the pages. And that’s made it super-successful.

Then it also has the depth of reporting and the depth of writing that gives it the engagement factor that to me is the perfect mix. It’s no surprise that the magazine is so tremendously successful.

I think the bigger surprise is that in this day and age there’s so much of the world that somehow believes that the rise of digital media has undermined the importance of print media and I think we’ve proven that not only is that false, but it’s really the exact opposite. If you harness it correctly, digital media only enhances the power of print media because it gives you so many different pipes to tell the story.

And it’s something that we’ve been preaching to advertisers for years. We’ve said the bigger your website gets, the bigger your magazine circulation gets and the more opportunities you have to go to advertisers and really be marketing partners because you have so many more strong platforms to harness and do that.

To me that’s the greater story. I think hopefully after the impact of the Caitlyn Jenner story, people will realize that magazines become even more powerful because of their digital counterparts.

Samir Husni: As you reign in and gather the responses from all over the world regarding the Caitlyn Jenner cover; what could you still relate to those prophets of doom and gloom, those doubters, the ones that keep telling us that the power of magazines, the power of engagement is in decline? “Print is dead” isn’t as prevalent as before, but now, instead, they’re saying it’s in decline.

Chris Mitchell: I was in Europe maybe four weeks ago. It was soon after Women’s Wear Daily had come out with yet another article, which they do, I think every spring and fall, that says here’s what the magazine sold on the newsstand and they made their sort of ritualized prediction that newsstand circulation was going to fall.

And what was interesting was I found myself having to explain to a lot of clients, because the story was picked up in some of the papers, that it was not an indication of the health or vitality of magazine companies as a business, because of the obviously shrinking importance of the newsstand and the small percentage of an overall circulation level that the newsstand has. And that’s a larger issue that has more to do with newsstand distribution, wholesalers and points of sale, than it does the desirability or vitality of magazines. And in fact, the overall circulations are maintaining record high levels or growing, in most cases. At the same time, the digital audiences are also growing.

What this says to me is these misnomers are ultimately created by even our own industry. Many times entities like Women’s Wear Daily want to talk about ad pages alone as an indication of a brand’s relevance and that’s perpetuating an outdated metric, in my opinion.

Obviously, we run a business today where our digital revenue becomes a bigger piece of our overall revenue every year, which becomes a bigger percentage of the revenue. And I for one, never wanted to be a publisher who was trying to push pages on someone, instead of selling them a bigger partnership in whatever advertising form factor it takes. And I believe most publishers think like I think that my job is to bring you my audience and create a program or a partnership that works for you, the advertiser. And I don’t care if you buy 100% print or 100% digital or put it somewhere in the middle. But that’s at odds still to this day with some of these outlets that just want to record ad pages or that are using newsstands’ increase or decline as an indication of how healthy your magazine is. And these things are so silly and outdated and don’t reflect the way the business and the world has changed.

Samir Husni: Talking about change; if you were to compare and contrast magazine-making pre-2007 to after 2007, how do you think the business-making model has changed?

Chris Mitchell: I think in two really important ways. With a story such as the Caitlyn Jenner piece; the way that we harnessed the website as well as our social media partners and outlets to make the story even bigger than it would have been in 2007 is not a small thing. With a story this big in 2007, even in 2010 frankly, we would have had a very different press and social media case. We would have released the issue on the newsstands and there would have been a lot of press that followed.

But it wouldn’t have received anywhere near the “watercooler moment” that we achieved because we used our site to feed stories over a period of time. We had a very deliberate strategy for how we released additional parts of the story over time using our website and even through the press and helped to make it the story that it became.

From an advertising standpoint, and this is another one where you’re running contrary to what the naysayers say, but there has never been a more exciting time for us to be in the advertising business with our advertisers because we have so many ways that we can help them tell their story.

And when I look back at what we did in 2007, it was easier in the sense that people made a greater percentage of their pledges to print, but it was also less interesting because that’s all you had really was to sell someone advertising pages. And today we fully see ourselves more like an agency than anything else. And I impress this to people on our team, that I don’t want to be in the media-selling business; I don’t want the relationship that I have with my client to be primarily a media-selling relationship. I want to be really an idea-driven, access-driven agency partner of theirs, who can deliver them an idea and deliver them custom content that they can use across their platforms, our platforms and frankly if it’s a big enough idea; it’ll be bigger than just what I can sell them in the media. That’s the new model that I’m really excited about.

Samir Husni: I can feel the passion and intrigue that these new changes bring to you, so if you and I were talking again a year from now and I asked you what you had accomplished in that year; what would you tell me?

Chris Mitchell: I don’t think it’ll even take a year because when I look at the type of projects we have in the pipeline in front of our advertisers now, I know one thing to be true; if we can change the nature of the conversation with our advertisers to be one of a marketing partnership and if they can see us as someone who can deliver content for them; what I know is that increases the size of the advertising deals that you do with these partners; it increases it because they get excited about the work and the more excited they get about the work, the more that they want to run it in bigger quantities and the more that they want to see it live on all of these different platforms.

So the best way that you can achieve a marketing partnership where you have a print component and a digital component and a shared social component and a mobile component is to create something for these advertisers that they want to see living on all those platforms. The selfish part of it is, and to your point, in 12 months or six months, what you’re going to see is even more of these multifaceted, multiplatform deals that we’re doing where we have a significant stake in the game and are using our assets to create the content and that advertiser feels like they’re an engaged part of the process and in true partnership with a brand like Vanity Fair, which in many ways I think, is a money-can’t-buy opportunity.

Samir Husni: What do you think it will take to change the minds of some of the media reporters or critics, and as you stated so well, these outdated ways of predicting the future for the magazine industry? When Caitlyn Jenner appeared on ABC, there was talk about it for maybe an hour or two or three on social media and then it was over. Yet when Vanity Fair ran the cover; the story stayed on the tongues of everyone as though it had just been broke. What more evidence do media critics need to see to believe magazines are not a dying industry?

Chris Mitchell: Half-kidding and half-seriously, I think the up fronts this year changed that conversation for us. Most people acknowledged, thanks to the rise of Internet video and thanks to what I think you see companies like ours at the forefront doing, which is getting very ambitious about creating that kind of video content; we become magazines in less the traditional sense and more magazines in the broader sense. We become magazines in the way that TV news magazines are magazines. We have all these formats to increase video and that makes us a more interesting and robust way to tell the story across all platforms. And then we get that beautiful synergy that shows how the print product enforces or memorializes a story in a very different way than you’re telling it socially or in video.

The short answer to your question is we don’t become the story that people are talking about being irrelevant anymore; I think that traditional television has become the story that people are jumping on as being a lot less interesting, sexy and probably as relevant as it used to be and that’s a good thing. Let them take some of the brunt of that. Now people are questioning its relevance and let them figure it out just like we did. In all fairness, we had to figure out in the changing media landscape how we ourselves could change so that we were taking advantage and leaning into the use of these different platforms, instead of simply going with the flow.

I don’t think we will ever win by insisting that traditional magazines done in traditional ways can remain unchanged and our business factors can’t remain unchanged either. It’s when we adapt to the new landscape, both in how we go to market the client, which is what I’m focused on, and how we roll out a story or tell a story beautifully, that you win.

Samir Husni: Has anyone ever approached Vanity Fair and said I would like my picture to be on your website or do most want to be featured on the cover of the magazine?

Chris Mitchell: I honestly think that conversation is changing. And that’s even true with regards to our writers and photographers now. That has been an education process for all of us. In the past, it was certainly the cover that gleaned all of the prestige and I think that there is something wonderful about the fact that that will always be a hugely significant thing. But I think the more that we all see the power of the website, the more a writer wants to break his/her story there.

Certainly, Graydon is at that place where he believes the power to break a story on Vanity Fair.com, maybe it’s a different kind of story than you would break in the magazine, or you would do it in a different way or you might do it in conjunction with both print and digital, the way we did the Caitlyn Jenner story.

So it’s educating every one of the stakeholders in that process, from the photographer to the writer to even the editors themselves, the importance of using different mediums and that one is not subservient to the other. Breaking Caitlyn online showed that.

Think back to the days when Internet place was shovel-ware or brochure-ware and what we proved was that by breaking the story online and really telling the story for a full week online did something really powerful that the magazine then reinforced and it wasn’t the other way around.

Samir Husni: Can you ever imagine a day when there isn’t a printed Vanity Fair?

Chris Mitchell: No. I’m a believer in the power of beautiful production quality and in telling that story, especially where there is a visual element, as only ink on paper can do.

I think that there will certainly be some magazines that will have frequency changes. I think that there were some magazines who tried some circulation changes. I can see a day, whether this is 10 years or 50 years down the road, where your subscription cost is a lot higher, your production values are even higher than they are today. Your size; your form factors may be higher; my wife is editor of Condé Nast Traveler and it’s a great example of that, I think.

And if that means you end up with a more expensive, smaller circulation magazine, you’ll just have to see what the economics of that magazine will be. But I don’t think you’ll ever see a world where beautiful, glossy magazines that are telling a lifestyle story or telling a visual story the way we do will ever go away.

Samir Husni: What has been the major stumbling block that you’ve had to face during your career of magazine-making and how did you overcome it?

Chris Mitchell: I’ve worked in magazines my entire career and I’ve been following you the whole time and I knew that I wanted to work in magazines when I started one in college. So, I never did anything else and I never looked back. I don’t really have a huge stumbling block.

But I’ll tell you there was a point where I was debating about whether I should be on the editorial side or the business side. And I saw that as a real fork in the road and it was only as the business became more dynamic and I learned a lot along the way that I realized that our job and the editor’s job are wonderfully cooperative and collaborative. And that makes it more fun for us and I think it makes it more successful for them. And I think it can be done in a way that doesn’t violate the quality or the ethics of great journalism.

Samir Husni: And what has been the most pleasant moment?

Chris Mitchell: I found a home at Condé Nast a long time ago and I’m incredibly fortunate to have had that home for as long as I have and to have experienced so many different, great brands and properties that Condé Nast owns. To be able to work at one company, but have eight or nine different jobs over 20 years is really a lucky thing. And I get to do it working for the same great, bright people and with the same bright colleagues, but I’ve had a wonderful time reinventing myself when it comes to the way in which we go to market with these brands.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Chris Mitchell: What keeps me up at night has always been the same thing: we have the blessing and the curse of being a periodical. And with that comes the fact that you have a goal that you have to hit and when you finish one month, or a day, or a quarter of your digital or however you measure it, there’s always another one right behind that you have to hit. So you’re never done. And what keeps me up at night is the same thing that kept me up 20 years ago; how are you going to make your numbers, your day, your week, your month, your quarter, your year. But that’s the business we’ve chosen. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“We’ve never believed print is dead. We hope to launch in the U.S., as I said, new print magazines every 24 months.” David Carey

“First and foremost our print is a very good business all around the world. We have profits that we want to generate for our parent company and we’re good at publishing magazines. And so we believe in them; we have a portfolio of titles. In any given year we’ll have brands like Town & Country and Woman’s Day that are having terrific years and then sometimes you have others that have an off year.” David Carey

What do you say about a man whose leadership has brought about so much tremendous organic growth through acquisitions and launches that his company is now twice the size it was five years ago when he first came onboard, and yet, he genuinely gives all the credit to his creative staff and senior leadership teams for their hard work and dedication? You would most likely say: if we had more David’s, we could conquer more Goliath’s.

David Carey is a man who believes that through a true team camaraderie and aggregation of experience and wisdom, any problem that arises can be resolved. And these words aren’t lightly-spoken; they are powerfully succinct. While David Carey may be at the helm of Hearst Magazines; he reiterates strongly that it’s himself and a host of hundreds that have brought the company to the forefront of the magazine media industry and helped to prove that print is alive and kicking in New York, the United States and globally as well and that the Hearst brand, across all its platforms, is very much hale and hearty.

I spoke with David recently about his upcoming fifth anniversary as president of Hearst Magazines and we talked about some of his most important successes, which he shared totally with his team, and about a particular failure that he assumed complete responsibility for. It was a conversation that looked back on his early years at Hearst, checked in with his present situation, and also expanded into the future of the globally-growing company. His focus is clear; while he’s very proud of his team’s accomplishments over the last five years, he’s also ready to move forward and see them meet and exceed more expectations.

Get ready to meet a man who is as dedicated to his brand and his teams as he is humble about his own accomplishments – get ready to enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with David Carey, President, Hearst Magazines.

But first-the sound-bites:

David Carey, president, Hearst Magazines.

On a brief overview of his first five years at Hearst: Keep in mind, and I want to be very clear about this; when I say “my” most successful accomplishments, the hard work is done by a great leadership team. The things that we’re most proud of have been done by a group of very talented individuals. By no means did David Carey do these things alone. It was David Carey and a cast of hundreds. There are many things that Hearst Magazines can be proud of over the last five years. At the top of the list I would certainly put our global acquisition four years ago of Hachette.

On any particular failure he encountered over the years: This one was my idea, so I’ll take full responsibility for this failure. About three or four years ago, thinking about the strength of our Super brand in Cosmo and how it could be extended, we thought we would create a digital-only magazine called Cosmo for Guys.

On his strategy of keeping print at the forefront while exploring the digital possibilities: It’s obvious; first and foremost our print is a very good business all around the world. We have profits that we want to generate for our parent company and we’re good at publishing magazines. And so we believe in them; we have a portfolio of titles. In any given year we’ll have brands like Town & Country and Woman’s Day that are having terrific years and then sometimes you have others that have an off year. We talked about being unbound and we live those words and the way we think of unbound is a deep commitment to print, but a deep commitment to the other businesses we are developing off of these legendary print titles.

On any doubts he may have had regarding the “unbound” formula: We never had any doubts in totality. At any given time we might have a brand or two around the world, but that’s fine; that’s a different decision. That would be a brand business decision, but we never had any doubts about the medium itself. I sleep very well at night running a company that has substantial print revenues and growing digital revenues. We have to execute well, but we never had any core doubts about the business. We’ll be publishing our fashion brands ten years from now, twenty years from now and thirty years from now without a doubt.

On why he believes Hearst magazines, such as Dr. Oz The Good Life, HGTV and Food Network are still defying the odds on newsstands: The newsstand is a very complex environment and you have multi layers of issues affecting the channel. I’m not surprised that our new brands have done so well; people like new media brands. There’s obviously a strong interest in the new. People like new TV shows, new films, new books and new recorded music. And magazines are all a part of that.

On whether he can ever envision the United States without newsstands: In airports and bookstores and places like that, absolutely not. However with the bookstores, I’m not going to make a prediction about them; I’ll let you do that. But especially in transportation areas; people find that magazines are a very popular way of entertaining themselves while traveling. So certainly, magazine-buying will always be a part of the travel experience.

On Hearst’s bookazine future: I can say our bookazine strategy has probably been the least developed. That said, give us another 90 days and you will see an announcement of our bookazine strategy which will be more ambitious going forward than it has been in the last couple of years. Stay tuned.

On the reasoning behind the freemium magazine TrendingNY: As you know we have a global business and in the U.K. these freemium magazines occupy a really lively part of the marketplace, where they have ShortList, Stylist, and Time Out New York is in that space. And these are handsome products that are well-supported by advertisers. Trending is our way of winging into that and getting a sense of how that market operates. And how we can build ad support and physically get magazines out into people’s hands. So, we’re very happy with it.

On whether he believes the advertising pendulum is swinging back toward print: I think it goes by category and if you look at the PIB data, you’ll find some categories that have done very well and have been strong, but then some that have been weak. I would say that we do find areas for our print business where our titles have done great year over year.

On the power of the magazine cover: There’s no denying the power of a magazine cover. They are coveted by newsmakers, film stars and others that have important stories to share. We think the Vanity Fair, Caitlyn Jenner coup is a triumph for the entire magazine industry. I’m pleased for my former colleagues at Condè Nast, but it’s a genius move for the whole business by showing the power of a single magazine cover which convened a very large audience. It’s nice to see this validated in such a public way.

On the major stumbling block he’s faced in the last five years: The only thing that frustrates me is we are blessed with having a broad, complex global business and time is extremely valuable. By the end of the week, I’ve probably only gotten 70% completed of what I wanted to get done in any given week. What is my frustration? It’s that we have greater ambitions and more things that we want to do than our senior leadership has time to get done in any given week or month.

On his most pleasant moment: I’m blessed. For me, working with our creative staff is the very best part of my job. Being close to the creative process and watching what they do, supporting what they do and protecting what they do, that’s what I get the most satisfaction from.

On anything else he’d like to add: I’m just so grateful for everything the organization has done in a relatively short period of time. Doing a billion dollar acquisition, buying two business-to-business companies; we have both our iCrossing digital marketing agency, as well as in September 2014 we added an adjacency to our CDS business called Kubra, another payments company, and the magazines that we’ve launched, along with the digital innovations that we’ve done; I’m just very grateful for our growth. While I’m part of the process; it is brought about by the people who implement these great moves and I couldn’t be happier with them.

On what keeps him up at night: I don’t want to come across as cavalier, but nothing. It’s not that in any given day or week we’re not without our problems, of course we have them. But my experience has shown that a group of executives, aggregating their experience and wisdom have a pretty good track record when it comes to solving problems.

And now the lightly edited transcription of the Mr. Magazine™ exclusive conversation with David Carey, President of Hearst Magazines.

The Hearst Tower (Headquarters of Hearst Magazines) on 8th Ave. in New York City.

David Carey: Keep in mind, and I want to be very clear about this; when I say “my” most successful accomplishments, the hard work is done by a great leadership team. The things that we’re most proud of have been done by a group of very talented individuals. By no means did David Carey do these things alone. It was David Carey and a cast of hundreds. I always hate it when I hear senior executives say, “I did this” or “I did that,” the right answer here is “we” with our senior leadership team. We are partners in the great innovation of this business.

There are many things that Hearst Magazines can be proud of over the last five years. At the top of the list I would certainly put our global acquisition four years ago of Hachette. We acquired 100 businesses in ten countries with 5,000 employees. So, you talk about a real Herculean integration task, integrating them into the Hearst culture to add value to their businesses. Our global team did simply an amazing job of that. I would say 90 days in everyone was just totally a part of the group.

If you would have asked me the day before we closed about what was ahead of us, I would have admitted to some anxiety. All over the world it was lots of people that we didn’t know and we just leaped headfirst into that first 100 days and I have to say, not only in terms of the cultural integration, but the business performance with the businesses that we acquired when Hachette owned them, were lackluster within the U.S. structure. These businesses now are just doing great; I can’t share the financials, but I can tell you it has been a grand slam homerun with these businesses. And that’s at the top of the list. And really, great credit to our integration teams all over the world, because there is a certain style at Hearst where we respect the individuals, so going through that was quite tricky.

I am very proud of what the team and our organization have done with our digital strategy, of course. We operate now with a single, global digital strategy. We’ve seen explosive audience growth; we’ve launched new digital businesses in Nigeria and other places that we’ve never existed before. And we’re very proud of that.

And of course, our continued commitment to new magazines, which during the five years, Food Network was launched by Cathie (Black) and Michael (Clinton) and is of course a great star. HGTV has been a terrific business, and we’re a year or so into Dr. Oz; now we’re thinking about what comes next. All of those we’re very proud of and the teams have done a spectacular job with them.

But not everything has worked. As you’ve reported before, we believe in failing fast. We’ve tried things and we don‘t go out of our way to publicize our failures, but there have been some and there should be some.

This one was my idea, so I’ll take full responsibility for this failure. About three or four years ago, thinking about the strength of our Super brand in Cosmo and how it could be extended, we thought we would create a digital-only magazine called Cosmo for Guys, Kate White had created it; you subscribed to it online. Where a guy would never go up and buy Cosmo on the newsstand, if there was a magazine that kind of explained women that would be very appealing to men.

So, we must have published either seven or eight editions and I thought it was a great, creative product, but it failed to find an audience. Then we shut it down. We failed fast; we had an interesting concept; we thought it was going to win and we did some clever promotion around it, but it didn’t scale and by its first anniversary we shut it down. And I can tell you, my clever idea did not work.

Samir Husni: (Laughs) I think they actually published the whole year, otherwise they would have refunded my money. They published 12 issues; I still have them on my iPad. (Laughs again)

David Carey: (Laughs too) Maybe they did. Sadly, you were among the small population of people who subscribed to it.

Samir Husni: (Laughs) I really wasn’t the audience, but…

David Carey: Our audience was under 10,000. It was not enough to have a business. It was clever and fun and it was also a part of the experimentation that we did within the ad space, so I’m proud we did it; we lost a little bit of money, but that also credits our ability to shut something down that isn’t working and move on. Not everything you’ll do within a company is going to work, so I certainly don’t mind talking about that being a miss.

Samir Husni: You and the team are investing in print, but still exploring digital by entering and creating so many digital initiatives. Five or six years ago everyone in our business was saying print is dead and the future is digital or the future is the tablet. Now we’re hearing the reverse; we’re hearing tablets are dead; the homepage is dead and now everything is mobile. But you and your team had the foresight to never ignore print, instead you continued to enhance print and continued to launch new magazines, all the while keeping digital in the forefront as well. What made you and your team go with that strategy?

David Carey: It’s obvious; first and foremost our print is a very good business all around the world. We have profits that we want to generate for our parent company and we’re good at publishing magazines. And so we believe in them; we have a portfolio of titles. In any given year we’ll have brands like Town & Country and Woman’s Day that are having terrific years and then sometimes you have others that have an off year.

We like our portfolio approach across geographies, across audiences and across ad categories. So we recognize, as I say, the key to being a successful publisher today is to have a great deal of dexterity. And so we know that we have to be incredibly skilled at digital publishing and incredibly skilled at print publishing and to do so simultaneously. And that requires having the right teams in place.

Our print teams on the new magazines are led by Ellen Levine, who’s such a genius at creating these new products and then we brought in a group of digital entrepreneurs like Troy Young to lead our digital efforts. We don’t see these two platforms as opposing, we see them as complimentary businesses and they require the right executives to be in charge of them.

We’ve never believed print is dead. We hope to launch in the U.S., as I said, new print magazines every 24 months. And we have ideas that we could do it more often, but we want to make sure that we can devote sufficient corporate attention for at least two years before we bring on the next business, so we pace ourselves to make sure that our management focus isn’t diluted. And we’re looking at new print magazines all over the world.

I know that it’s easy for a pundit to write the “Print is Dead” headline, but we love the fact that you’re reading and you’ve been reporting a number of digital brands that are now launching print components, such as C/Net and others. We recognize for marketers and for these brands the value of this physical media that lives alongside television and digital and other forms of communication. So, we get it. Our strategy is as committed as it can be and we refer to it, and you saw the debut of this position four years ago when we bought Hachette. We talked about being unbound and we live those words and the way we think of unbound is a deep commitment to print, but a deep commitment to the other businesses we are developing off of these legendary print titles.

Samir Husni: Did you ever have any doubts that the “unbound” formula would work as opposed to what other media companies were doing by placing all their bets on digital?

David Carey: We never had any doubts in totality. At any given time we might have a brand or two around the world, but that’s fine; that’s a different decision. That would be a brand business decision, but we never had any doubts about the medium itself. I sleep very well at night running a company that has substantial print revenues and growing digital revenues. We have to execute well, but we never had any core doubts about the business. We’ll be publishing our fashion brands ten years from now, twenty years from now and thirty years from now without a doubt.

Samir Husni: Even on the newsstands, David, with the three new titles from the last five years, Food Network, HGTV and Dr. Oz The Good Life, your newsstand sales are bucking the trends. When we hear that there’s a decline of 50%, yet Dr. Oz The Good Life sold out on the newsstands, and Food Network and HGTV when they were launched and until now, I think Food Network is presently the second largest-selling monthly magazine on the newsstands; why do you think those magazines did so well and are still doing well and also why do you think the industry doesn’t promote these success stories?

David Carey: The newsstand is a very complex environment and you have multi layers of issues affecting the channel. I’m not surprised that our new brands have done so well; people like new media brands. There’s obviously a strong interest in the new. People like new TV shows, new films, new books and new recorded music. And magazines are all a part of that.

We’re not surprised in any way to see these brands go from zero to two or 300,000 virtually overnight. The consumer appetite for new magazines is high. And we’ve certainly built nice businesses against that.

Samir Husni: And all of these new businesses that you’ve started were actually begun on the newsstands.

David Carey: In some cases, it’s a hybrid. For Oz, we had some issues that were bagged with First magazines, but the newsstands are a very important piece of it. We were testing direct mail solicitations at the same time, so that we could get a wide census.

For all of our new magazines we publish two issues and these are live tests; we put copies out on the newsstands and we also do a lot of direct mail. So that we can replicate what it might look like as a real business. We only budget two issues and then we stop, look at the results and go from there.

Samir Husni: Can you ever envision America without newsstands?

David Carey: In airports and bookstores and places like that, absolutely not. However with the bookstores, I’m not going to make a prediction about them; I’ll let you do that. But especially in transportation areas; people find that magazines are a very popular way of entertaining themselves while traveling. So certainly, magazine-buying will always be a part of the travel experience.

Samir Husni: What about bookazines? I interviewed Tony Romando of Topix Media Lab recently and of course all he publishes are bookazines. He’s putting three bookazines on the newsstands every week; Time Inc. is putting three to four bookazines each week; Meredith is also doing that; are we going to see Hearst jumping onto the bookazine bandwagon en masse?

David Carey: I can say our bookazine strategy has probably been the least developed. That said, give us another 90 days and you will see an announcement of our bookazine strategy which will be more ambitious going forward than it has been in the last couple of years. Stay tuned. We have several that are underway, but I can’t reveal yet how we’re going to launch them.

Samir Husni: After testing four issues, your latest launch is TrendingNY, the freemium magazine. Can you tell me a little bit about the reasoning behind the magazine?

David Carey: As you know we have a global business and in the U.K. these freemium magazines occupy a really lively part of the marketplace, where they have ShortList, Stylist, and Time Out New York is in that space. And these are handsome products that are well-supported by advertisers.

Trending is our way of winging into that and getting a sense of how that market operates. And how we can build ad support and physically get magazines out into people’s hands. So, we’re very happy with it.

It is an R&D project for us, let’s be clear, but we like the way we’re learning the physical street distribution. It’s really developing new skills for the whole company. And it’s skills that we see in other markets. In the U.S., this freemium market isn’t as well-developed, but in the U.K. in a matter of years, it became a really acknowledged and normal part of the media ecosystem. We’re hoping to explore Trending and it’s our way of playing in that space.

Samir Husni: We hear about advertisers leaving print and that you can’t depend on advertising anymore to support your print product, yet we see Hearst launching Trending where all the revenue is strictly coming from advertising. If we visualize advertising as the pendulum of a clock; is the pendulum swinging back toward print a little bit or it’s still stuck in the digital time warp?

David Carey: I think it goes by category and if you look at the PIB data, you’ll find some categories that have done very well and have been strong, but then some that have been weak. I would say that we do find areas for our print business where our titles have done great year over year. Luxury and high-end have been especially robust in every way. And that’s a category that has strongly supported print and our product business is much stronger now than it has been. So, we’re happy about that.

But there are other categories where we have faced questions where magazines have struggled in the media mix, sometimes the digital and sometimes the television. I think you have to break it down into different ad categories overall. So we have ad categories that we think are performing great and then we have others that we think we can still improve.

Samir Husni: We all have seen what happened recently with the Caitlyn Jenner story.

David Carey: Yes and what a great endorsement for the power of a magazine cover.

Samir Husni: And that’s my next question to you, David; in this day and age where everybody tells us that we live in a digital age, and believe me I know it too, my Apple watch is around my wrist now; why do you think her being on the cover of a print magazine, Vanity Fair, created such a powerful impact, as opposed to the interview she gave on ABC?

David Carey: Well, there’s no denying the power of a magazine cover. They are coveted by newsmakers, film stars and others that have important stories to share. We think the Vanity Fair, Caitlyn Jenner coup is a triumph for the entire magazine industry. I’m pleased for my former colleagues at Condè Nast, but it’s a genius move for the whole business by showing the power of a single magazine cover which convened a very large audience. It’s nice to see this validated in such a public way.

Samir Husni: What has been the major stumbling block for you in the last five years and how did you overcome it?

David Carey: The only thing that frustrates me is we are blessed with having a broad, complex global business and time is extremely valuable. By the end of the week, I’ve probably only gotten 70% completed of what I wanted to get done in any given week. What is my frustration? It’s that we have greater ambitions and more things that we want to do than our senior leadership has time to get done in any given week or month. So that’s always our focus; how do we manage that to our resources?

We, the organization, have accomplished a great deal in five years. We’ve doubled the size of the magazine company through organic growth, through acquisitions and launches. The company is twice the size today than it was five years ago.

But we have a long list of things that we want to accomplish, so that’s the only stumbling block. If I look back over the last five years, I’m very proud of what we’ve gotten done, but we know we still have so much more to do.

Samir Husni: And if you could pen the most pleasant moment in those five years; what would it be?

David Carey: I’m blessed. For me, working with our creative staff is the very best part of my job. When I see one of our teams, editorial teams, create a new product or create an issue, these are kind of like TV shows; they have 10 or 12 times per year that they get to enter their creativity. And I love it when people take creative risks and they’re validated by the marketplace and they get a real hit.

Being close to the creative process and watching what they do, supporting what they do and protecting what they do, that’s what I get the most satisfaction from.

Samir Husni: Anything else that you’d like to add?

David Carey: I’m just so grateful for everything the organization has done in a relatively short period of time. Doing a billion dollar acquisition, buying two business-to-business companies; we have both our iCrossing digital marketing agency, as well as in September 2014 we added an adjacency to our CDS business called Kubra, another payments company, and the magazines that we’ve launched, along with the digital innovations that we’ve done; I’m just very grateful for our growth. While I’m part of the process; it is brought about by the people who implement these great moves and I couldn’t be happier with them.

Samir Husni: And my typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

David Carey: I don’t want to come across as cavalier, but nothing. It’s not that in any given day or week we’re not without our problems, of course we have them. But my experience has shown that a group of executives, aggregating their experience and wisdom have a pretty good track record when it comes to solving problems.

I know sometimes if we do have a challenge, we don’t get it solved in one day, but given enough time, you get it to the right place in the majority of situations. Again, I sleep well at night because I know that there’s always an answer there some place, sometimes it’s not as immediately inherent as you’d like it to be, but it’s always there. I’m just lucky to be a part of a team that has accomplished so much.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“The types of content pieces that are created in the magazine, the opportunities that it affords us from an editorial perspective to continue to celebrate the entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial capitalism around the world that the world is increasingly moving to a place where those are the types of people that do tell the stories of business; it gives us access in a way that we would not have with just digital.” Mark Howard

Before native advertising, product placement and content marketing were terms that some holier-than-thou media critics and magazine pontiffs were using to cast aspersions and judgements on those that were practicing the model, Forbes Media was busy perfecting it. From content stories that were brand-produced, with their highly successful BrandVoice business model, to custom publishing done to an art form, Forbes has been leading the way in honoring their reader’s intelligence to know the difference between editorial and advertorial, with the act of transparency at the forefront of everything they do.

Mark Howard is chief revenue officer of Forbes and knows better than anyone that innovation and creative thinking when it comes to the execution of ideas is critical to the survival of any magazine media company in today’s digital world.

I recently spoke with Mark about the success of BrandVoice, the future of Forbes and where he saw the company heading. It was a very open and honest discussion about the idea of native advertising and content marketing that may have some rethinking their position on the subject. The transparent and highly savvy execution of Forbes’ business model presents another alternative to the revenues of legacies and offers a vision for the future many could use.

So, I hope you enjoy this illuminating conversation with Mark Howard, CRO, Forbes Media. And if you keep an open mind when it comes to something other mediums have been doing for generations; you may be surprised at the possibilities.

But first, the sound-bites:

On anything negative he can visualize from the BrandVoice concept of telling different brand stories from the business world on Forbes’ covers: We do not and I’ll explain why. For many, many years we’ve believed that the cover of the magazine is the front door of the brand. For five years now, we’ve been embracing a people-centric cover strategy where individuals grace the cover of our magazine. And coinciding with that philosophy, five years ago we also launched the concept of BrandVoice, where brands tell stories through their lenses and from their points of view from the business world.

On why there seems to be a different set of rules for magazine media from other platforms when it comes to native advertising and product placement: I think for many years there were a set of rules that people for the most part followed, in terms of best practices for the industry. And quite frankly, I think that the times progressed faster than those rules, so we lived in an interim period where the way consumers behaved and certainly the way that those other mediums evolved was just quicker when it came to best business practices.

On the fact the Forbes’ model has been leading the way in programmatic buying and native advertising before anyone else was even talking about it: You know I think the driving force behind all of this was really when the Forbes family took a chance and acquired True/Slant, which was of course created by Lewis DVorkin, who has since stayed on and really transformed the overall vision for Forbes media.

On whether he thinks other media companies may replicate the Forbes model: In various forms there have been a lot of other companies that have replicated either digitally or in print the expansion of contributor-based content creation. I don’t think very many of them, certainly none that have the brand cache of a Forbes; none of the other brands at our level necessarily tout it the way that we do, where we put it front and center and we talk about the fact that the economics of content creation were broken and disruptions like digital media and programmatic media and social media were changing the way that you had to think about your business.

On whether he believes Forbes could have reached its present 70% digital revenue without a print component: When you think about the Forbes brand and you think about our history and the equity that the Forbes name carries in the marketplace; that has absolutely given us an opportunity to build our digital business in a way that we would not have been able to do otherwise without it.

On whether he can ever envision Forbes media without a printed Forbes magazine: Today, no, and in the near future, no, absolutely not. The types of content pieces that are created in the magazine, the opportunities that it affords us from an editorial perspective to continue to celebrate the entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial capitalism around the world that the world is increasingly moving to a place where those are the types of people that do tell the stories of business; it gives us access in a way that we would not have with just digital.

On the fear that a smaller company will look at Forbes business model and start selling their covers as cover stories: It’s always possible. I think what it will come down to is what value do readers place on that brand? If they’re starting from scratch, they don’t have the equity in the marketplace that a Forbes does. They certainly don’t have the cache.

On the definition of the term BrandVoice in the world of advertising today: It’s content that’s told in the voice of the brand, not something that’s been created necessarily in the Forbes voice on behalf of a brand.

On the difference between BrandVoice and the whole genre of content marketing and custom publishing: Obviously, custom publishing still represents a lot of business for us as well. That’s actually doing particularly well, which is exciting for us. But I think the big difference is the content is intended to read more like an article or be presented as an infographic or an online post in the same sort of format and read the same way that editorial content would be presented.

On the major stumbling block he’s had to face: I inherited the business at a time when the digital revenue had just, at that point, equaled print revenue. And of course, digital was continuing to grow. The big challenges in the marketplace surrounding the plateauing or slight decline overall of print advertising of course is something that we addressed as well as the continued migration of digital ad dollars in the programmatic.

On the fact that everything Forbes has done to improve their model and digital business has been with an eye on their print component as well: You’re absolutely right. We have tremendous readership; in fact, we’re at our all-time high in terms of average issue readership, according to MRI, with essentially seven million readers per issue. We actually had with our Billionaire’s issue, which was the last issue that was reported on; we had 7.4 million readers, which was the largest readership of an issue since 2009.

On media critic’s reactions, on a scale from one to ten, on Forbes’ BrandVoice model – ten being the opinion that Forbes sold out: In 2010 when we first launched this, I would say the reaction was a 10. There are articles online about how Forbes had officially sold itself out and this was the beginning of the end of premiere journalism. And the reaction was pretty intense.

On what he would tell Mr. Magazine™ a year from now about Forbes if they were having a conversation: I would tell you that the way in which we’ve used technology and design in both print and digital could further expand the way that brands are telling stories and creating content on Forbes.com and in Forbes magazine.

On anything else he’d like to add: All of these partners are looking at us as cross platforms, integrated partnerships for them. And I think that that’s really where we’re going to continue to see high value for our ability to work with which ever brands; when we can leverage live events featuring the content or at least content ideas; where we can use the magazine to beautifully lay out data that a brand is able to provide for our readership, in context with the flow of the book.

On what keeps him up at night: The biggest thing that I’m thinking about is mobile. It’s mobile and it’s also how do we continue to make sure that we’re quantifying value of the print product.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Mark Howard, Chief Revenue Officer, Forbes Media.

Samir Husni: Lately, magazine covers seem to have become very hot, most recently the Vanity Fair cover with Caitlyn Jenner comes to mind. No other medium that I can think of can deliver a topic with the same impact as a magazine cover. And when it comes to the cover of Forbes and what you’ve done with the NorthWestern Mutual voice; do you see anything negative that can result from that move?

Mark Howard: We do not and I’ll explain why. For many, many years we’ve believed that the cover of the magazine is the front door of the brand. For five years now, we’ve been embracing a people-centric cover strategy where individuals grace the cover of our magazine. And we think that it’s reflective of the way that we tell the stories of business through the lens of individuals who are doing interesting and amazing things in the world.

And coinciding with that philosophy, five years ago we also launched the concept of BrandVoice, where brands tell stories through their lenses and from their points of view from the business world. And because we’ve been consistent, in terms of the way that we’ve been presenting our content, labeling our content and calling out that material on the table of contents, as we’ve moved into this year and we had the second cover of the magazine, which was an AT&T BrandVoice, then in the following issue, the retirement guide; Fidelity actually got called out as part of our retirement package on the cover with their BrandVoice.

And now the execution with NorthWestern Mutual, which was a content experience that was very consistent with our Top Women’s issue; we feel that there’s a consistency here, in terms of the way that we’ve developed this program over the last few years and then their inclusion on the cover we believe fits with that concept of being fully transparent, connected with the issue seen, but also separated and identified so that the consumer knows that it’s different from a Forbes editorial product.

Samir Husni: For years other platforms such as television and movies have used the brand voice, have put product placement, native advertising, you name it, into their different environments; why is it when it comes to magazines, and anytime I refer to the word magazine I mean the printed product, why are we treated differently do you think?

Mark Howard: I think for many years there were a set of rules that people for the most part followed, in terms of best practices for the industry. And quite frankly, I think that the times progressed faster than those rules, so we lived in an interim period where the way consumers behaved and certainly the way that those other mediums evolved was just quicker when it came to best business practices.

And so I think it took a number of different executions and publishers to break beyond the governing rules that had existed for many decades and do things that weren’t necessarily accepted as being something the industry as a whole was comfortable with, but like any change I think somebody has got to go first and do things that are reflective of the times that we live in and the fact that consumers are able to comprehend the difference between an ad and editorial.

Samir Husni: For five years now you and Forbes have been leading that revenue strategy based on programmatic buying and native advertising even before anybody else was talking about it. What prepared you from your background to take this leading role and do you think it would have worked at any other media company other than Forbes?

Mark Howard: That’s a great question. You know I think the driving force behind all of this was really when the Forbes family took a chance and acquired True/Slant, which was of course created by Lewis DVorkin, who has since stayed on and really transformed the overall vision for Forbes media.

He really set out with this notion that he’s going to disrupt business journalism and that the tools of the web and the behaviors of consumers as a result of living their lives on the web, increasingly the social web, were capable of experiencing a different type of content-based media company.

Lewis came and shared that vision and at that time, 2009 and 2010, with all the challenges businesses were facing, but especially the business press. The market was right for disruption and Forbes being an independent, at that time family-owned business, we always celebrated that concept of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurism, so it was time for us to also embrace it ourselves, in terms of our own business. That was something that inspired a lot of people. It really did take somebody like Lewis who had a vision, understood where he wanted to go with it and could very clearly articulate that.

I think if you look at all of his posts dating back to 2010; he published our blueprint for what we were doing, not just what we had already done, but also looking forward. And he was fully transparent to anyone who read him about where we were going and that form of communication for the individuals, myself included, who were part of it at Forbes, was very inspiring. We really were a part of a change that was happening with a model that had yet to be proven, but it was absolutely a model that was differentiated.

Samir Husni: Do you expect that model to now be replicated by other magazine companies?

Mark Howard: In various forms there have been a lot of other companies that have replicated either digitally or in print the expansion of contributor-based content creation. I don’t think very many of them, certainly none that have the brand cache of a Forbes; none of the other brands at our level necessarily tout it the way that we do, where we put it front and center and we talk about the fact that the economics of content creation were broken and disruptions like digital media and programmatic media and social media were changing the way that you had to think about your business.

But I think that you see varying degrees of it and I think you see with a lot of the new media that they’re building similar types of businesses knowing that they’re not tied to some of the legacy infrastructure that exists with a lot of traditional companies.

The model has proven itself in that our print business has really stabilized, which is exciting. We’ve been able to hold where we are, and yet the digital business now represents about 70% of our revenue and we’re not in the situation some of the other traditional media companies and traditional publishers are, where they’re trying to make the lead to sustainable growth business; we’ve already made that transition and are profitable and are continuing to grow at a significant clip every year.

Samir Husni: Do you think you could have reached 70% digital revenue without the print component of Forbes as the brand’s cornerstone?

Mark Howard: When you think about the Forbes brand and you think about our history and the equity that the Forbes name carries in the marketplace; that has absolutely given us an opportunity to build our digital business in a way that we would not have been able to do otherwise without it. There is absolutely an expectation around quality of content, quality of organization and quality of audience that comes when you have a background like we do. And that does not necessarily exit with the new media startup companies. So, yes, I think it played a significant part in what we’ve been able to accomplish.

Samir Husni: Can you imagine Forbes media without a printed Forbes magazine?

Mark Howard: Today, no, and in the near future, no, absolutely not. The types of content pieces that are created in the magazine, the opportunities that it affords us from an editorial perspective to continue to celebrate the entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial capitalism around the world that the world is increasingly moving to a place where those are the types of people that do tell the stories of business; it gives us access in a way that we would not have with just digital.

And I also think that it gives us access to editorial talent that we might not necessarily get if we only had a digital property.

Samir Husni: One CEO of a media company was telling me that with the legacy brands it’s so hard to change. His thoughts were it’s easier to kill a legacy brand than start something new because with something new you can do so many different things that you can’t do with a legacy. But when you look at Forbes and what you’ve done; in fact, investing in the print editions and launching international editions all over the world; do you think that there’s a fear that a smaller company or an entrepreneur will look at your model and start actually selling their covers for cover stories?

Mark Howard: It’s always possible. I think what it will come down to is what value do readers place on that brand? If they’re starting from scratch, they don’t have the equity in the marketplace that a Forbes does. They certainly don’t have the cache.

From a reader’s perspective, I think the notion of being on the cover of Forbes magazine can carry such great weight from a business and cultural perspective that it would be very hard for somebody else to be able to replicate that. Now, would I see a place where other startups would take that approach and offer that? Certainly. But would consumers be accepting of that? Probably, as long as they understood that that’s why that individual or that company was placed there. Then it would come down to the merits of the story and if the story behind it was something that was relevant to whatever brand was telling that story, then you’re on to something.

But the worst thing is when your integration of the advertiser isn’t authentic to the way that your brand is positioned in the expectations of your readers.

Samir Husni: Define for me the term BrandVoice in the world of advertising today.

Mark Howard: The quick history is when we launched it as a product in 2010 it was called AdVoice, but AdVoice wasn’t an accurate description of what it is. It wasn’t intended to be an advertisement or advertorial; it was intended to be content told through the voice of a brand.

Almost three years ago there was a team: Lewis DVorkin, myself, Meredith Levien, when she was still at Forbes, Andrea Stegall, who was on Lewis’s team and then of course, with the guidance of Mike Perlis, our CEO, we decided in order to more accurately describe what the product is we were going to change the name from AdVoice to BrandVoice, which has been a tremendous success for us.

To boil it all down and answer your question, it’s content that’s told in the voice of the brand, not something that’s been created necessarily in the Forbes voice on behalf of a brand. And we believe that more and more brands are looking to tell good stories and connect with consumers through the content, but we really want the stories that are being told to feel like they’re coming from that brand, but they need to be nuanced so that’s it’s very appropriate to be consumed on Forbes or in Forbes magazine.

Samir Husni: I know this is a very obvious question and I know what you’re going to tell me, but how is this different from the whole genre of content marketing and custom publishing?

Mark Howard: Obviously, custom publishing still represents a lot of business for us as well. That’s actually doing particularly well, which is exciting for us. But I think the big difference is the content is intended to read more like an article or be presented as an infographic or an online post in the same sort of format and read the same way that editorial content would be presented.

The custom content still reads very much brand-centric, whereas the BrandVoice tells the story of the brand and its products. The BrandVoice is telling the story of the business marketplace or finance marketplace through the lens of the brand, but not necessarily about them.

It’s a nuance thing and sort of in the eyes of the beholder, but I think the other big difference is within context. So, a BrandVoice program, if you look at it in the magazine, always runs within relevant editorial content. An advertorial or a special section is its own thing that’s siloed in the magazine and is not really working to the flow of the content.

Same thing on the website; each of the brands select which editorial stream they want their content to flow through. So, if it’s an article by SAP on cloud computing, they would select something in our cloud computing stream; NorthWestern Mutual would select retirement or one of the other relevant investing streams.

It’s all about the contextual discovery of the content as well as the nuance approach to how it reads more about a topic as opposed to about a brand, if it’s going to be BrandVoice.

Samir Husni: Mark, since you assumed the job as chief revenue officer; what has been the major stumbling block that you’ve had to face and how did you overcome it?

Mark Howard: I inherited the business at a time when the digital revenue had just, at that point, equaled print revenue. And of course, digital was continuing to grow. The big challenges in the marketplace surrounding the plateauing or slight decline overall of print advertising of course is something that we addressed as well as the continued migration of digital ad dollars in the programmatic.

And then increasingly the biggest issue for all publishers is how consumers are now finding and consuming content more and more on mobile devices and yet, a brand advertising marketplace does not yet fully exist to capitalize on that traffic. So, there is very much a macro of factors that are weighing in on us that we’re addressing.

But to your point; we were very aggressive in 2010 on building out the BrandVoice product and creating a new revenue stream, even very aggressive since 2012 in the first quarter and hyper-aggressive with programmatic. And both of those debts have paid off and have continued to stay the course for the rest of our business and helped us to achieve the gross success that we have.

Samir Husni: One of Lewis’s famous quotes when I interviewed him when he was visiting with us here at the University of Mississippi was: “We do not have a magazine problem; we have an advertising problem,” when referring to the print product. And looking at what Forbes has done; it seems to me that you’ve also enhanced the print product; that all of this digital growth didn’t come at the expense of your print entity, but rather, it’s finding ways to ensure that there will be a future for print in this digital age. Am I right or am I wrong?

Mark Howard: You’re absolutely right. There are two things; one is that quote is absolutely correct. We have tremendous readership; in fact, we’re at our all-time high in terms of average issue readership, according to MRI, with essentially seven million readers per issue. We actually had with our Billionaire’s issue, which was the last issue that was reported on; we had 7.4 million readers, which was the largest readership of an issue since 2009.

So, the readership is strong and certainly if you look at the MPA 360 data to look at our overall brand footprint, depending on the given month, we’re either the 4th or 5th largest brand in the entire study, that’s with all magazine brands included. Certainly, the digital has given us exposure to a new audience.

We also think that the unwavering commitment that we’ve had to always represent entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial capitalism and the business world that we live in today, which is all about that, plays true to us as we’ve never had to chase trends or try and reinvent ourselves.

In terms of the print commitment to the product, I think that what’s been spectacular is that the editor of the magazine, Randall Lane, has been very methodical in terms of how he’s evolved the look, feel and flow of the magazine. And while we haven’t done any form of a full-fledged redesign, I think what you would notice is if you laid out an issue from April 2015 to April 2014 and April, the year before that; it’s a very, very different looking product and he puts it together very differently than he used to, but he’s been doing that through a series of small integral changes as opposed to any dramatic shifts, which has resulted in a completely differentiated product that we’re working with right now.

So, it’s been exciting to see that and yet we haven’t necessarily done the things that get some of the big splashes of attention like a full-fledged redesign. But to your point, we have been making very significant investments in photography and design that makes a big difference for the business.

Samir Husni: Since BrandVoice has been in the marketplace; how would you gauge the media critic’s reactions? What has it been on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the opinion that Forbes has sold out and journalism is dead and what in the world is Forbes doing? From your connections, what do you think the reaction has been?

Mark Howard: In 2010 when we first launched this, I would say the reaction was a 10. There are articles online about how Forbes had officially sold itself out and this was the beginning of the end of premiere journalism. And the reaction was pretty intense.

Just a couple of years ago in 2012 when native advertising really came onto the scene, all of those same publications and many of the same reporters were writing stories about how Forbes had created a new line of business understanding the new opportunities of the digital world. And then because everybody, every publisher at that point, had essentially built some form of a native content business; I think that the media world has gotten very comfortable with the various forms that native content comes in, but certainly in January and February, when we did the AT&T and Fidelity covers, people popped back up again. I would put it at a five on that go-round because it involved the cover.

But at the same time, there are also a number of phenomenal posts that said we don’t understand what all this reaction is about; it’s logical and transparent and Forbes has been consistent in the way that they’ve presented themselves over the years. So, that’s why I would put it at a five with this cover, because of the recent cover treatment.

Samir Husni: If you and I are engaged in a conversation one year from now, what would you tell me?

Mark Howard: I would tell you that the way in which we’ve used technology and design in both print and digital could further expand the way that brands are telling stories and creating content on Forbes.com and in Forbes magazine. It’s been very exciting in that a number of very interesting approaches and concepts have been released in the last year.

Samir Husni: Anything else that you’d like to add?

Mark Howard: What’s really exciting for us is that if you look at a partner who has participated in the BrandVoice spread so far this year; you have AT&T, Fidelty, NorthWestern Mutual and ADP in the last issue; we’re taking new approaches to how we’re having their content and usually their data presented.

But more importantly is that all of these partners are looking at us as cross platforms, integrated partnerships for them. And I think that that’s really where we’re going to continue to see high value for our ability to work with which ever brands; when we can leverage live events featuring the content or at least content ideas; where we can use the magazine to beautifully lay out data that a brand is able to provide for our readership, in context with the flow of the book.

We’re starting to see a lot more interest in brands in that level of equal partnerships and that’s very promising for media overall, especially print. And these high impact executions are important. We’re very excited. We have a whole queue of content now that we’re working on and I think you’re going to continue to see the evolution of what you have with BrandVoice, especially in print today, but digital as well. And you’re going to continue to see us push through with creative concepts that hopefully will be very interesting to the readers and will allow us to bring it forward with different advertisers.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Mark Howard: The biggest thing that I’m thinking about is mobile. It’s mobile and it’s also how do we continue to make sure that we’re quantifying value of the print product. If we can continue to build more data stats per print and our current readership, then that’s helpful and really the big frontier is a mobile world where most of the monetization takes place with apps and direct response. How do brands break through and use the medium as a brand-building platform and how do we as a publisher continue to create opportunity to do so.

And certainly, BrandVoice, because it’s optimized for mobile and it’s the first step in that process, but I really think that we’re at the first stages of figuring all of that out.

Samir Husni: Thank you.