[My views are my own]
In 2013, I joined Time Warner to help lead the spin-off and IPO of it’s publishing division — Time Inc.
The iPhone (which had been launched six years earlier) was rapidly moving up the adoption curve, as was social media. The net result was that our magazine newsstand and subscription businesses were under immense pressure.
Time Warner’s approach (before the IPO) had been to focus Time Inc. on being a print publisher.
This had left us woefully unprepared for a digital future at the time of our IPO.
Sport Illustrated didn’t even have a website. Officially, all of the digital was to be funded, developed and operated by Turner — another division within Time Warner.
We needed to quickly begin developing a pipeline of growth initiatives to extend our brands. Time Inc. was a house of more than a hundred individual magazine brands primarily focused on producing a print product.
However, there were pockets of innovation (e.g., maverick groups that under the radar had quietly launched and self-funded sites, social media, digital video, licensing, products, events). I met with our brand leaders from around the world. We brought those ideas back to the leadership team and cascaded them through the organization.
We also studied what our competitors were doing like Buzzfeed and the New York Times (which was years ahead of us in transitioning into a digital-first news platform). And, we copied them shamelessly.
In the early days of developing our growth pipeline, we funded hundreds of small trials. We called it “planting trial and error seeds” to learn which areas would produce green shoots. We quickly killed ideas that were faltering, and pyramided more funding into areas that were showing promise.
By the time we sold to Meredith in 2018, we’d bought, build and partnered more than $1 billion of digital and adjacent revenue.
We’d positioned the company — and designed a blueprint — to successfully build a bridge to a digital future.
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