Conference Program

It’s no secret that in today’s ecosystem publishers need to do more to generate revenue and elevate their brands. In many cases, publishers also have to face these tough challenges with smaller staffs and smaller budgets. While that may seem daunting, many have overcome the challenge and, in turn, created smarter workflows and more efficient production tactics—without sacrificing quality or appeal. In some cases, technology has played a key role, while in other instances, simple tweaks have made huge impacts.

This workshop is designed to help you think outside the box so you can realistically get the most from your resources. Listen in as industry peers illustrate exactly how they have overcome the challenge. Plus the qualified faculty will work hands on with you to develop a custom workflow for your brand and offer specific tips on analyzing your budget and allocating resources effectively.

Advertising may be veering into a metrics-driven business, but marketers still set aside big budgets for big ideas and publishers are perfectly positioned to deliver. In this workshop, you'll bolster your strategic and consultative selling tactics and receive a game-plan for constructing big, cross-platform packages that include activations across digital, print, events, video, social, native or any combination of these elements.

No matter what size your company or publication is, there are universal truths to approaching and creating packages that span a mix of brand platforms. Our trainers will provide you and your team with the tools to create a state-of-the art integrated proposal for any client and the broader know-how about market trends that influence budgets and brand-side decision-making.

Satirical brand the Onion can be seen as a case study in the evolution of a print product to digital, mobile and a growing custom content services operation. Mike McAvoy, the Onion's president, will discuss the brand's transition from print to digital, the market forces that influenced that trajectory and the brand's new emphasis on its digital content strategy across the main brand site, its entertainment channel, The A.V. Club, and its in-house ad agency Onion Labs.

Many digital publishers have opted to build their own proprietary, cutting-edge content management systems. Their systems allow for maximum creativity in content design, functionality for the editors and a host of custom digital ad formats. Learn directly from these brands how a leading-edge CMS changes the game for both the ad and content-creation sides and why they feel this strategy makes them more competitive.

Once upon a time (like four years ago) consuming magazine media on a portable device seemed exotic. But the velocity of change is increasing, and in the very near future, we’ll be consuming media via devices we wear, complete with real-time visualization and added information about our environment and other relevant factors. It sounds a little like science fiction, but then how would we have felt 25 years ago when people predicted that wireless video, images, maps, real-time traffic and more would stream from anywhere in the world to a handheld device in our hands? Sit in on this session to hear how reaching consumers “whenever and wherever” they are is taken to the next level.

Gone are the days of making massive capital investments in a new tech infrastructure only to watch it become obsolete in 12 months. Now, the approach is to make iterative upgrades and enhancements to a system that supports multiplatform content production and distribution. But all of this depends heavily on a rock-solid understanding of your audience and customers and how you want to deliver your products to them. In this session, a panel of the industry’s most innovative CTOs will help you walk the line between visionary strategy and sensible, proactive and productive investments in media technology.

Listen closely to the multifaceted conversation around native advertising and you’ll find it isn’t uncommon to hear media company executives say native is their best-performing material. This suggests that great content is agnostic. In fact, many media companies have special training programs to help their advertisers create native content. Here, explore case studies in native-advertising partnerships.

The conventional wisdom is that great content creates commensurate traffic and should be rewarded through compensation or recognition. But a growing number of content leaders are saying that writing to stats is unproductive, and that content creators should write to a brand mission and not be slaves to performance metrics. Join in as we invite proponents of both sides of the issue to debate the topic.

With multiplatform content production come new opportunities for building subscription and membership products that are vastly different from the traditional paid/controlled options the industry has grown up with. Site licensing, memberships, all-access and tiered pricing strategies are all finding traction. In this session you'll get an introduction to all of them and valuable insight into what business context each fits best into.

There's an element of disruption that's both universal and fascinating: Established players—the dominant legacy companies—always dismiss disruptors as too small and irrelevant until they recognize the threat. Then it's too late. This is as true in media as it is in technology, beer, alternative packaged goods and every other economic sector. Craig Dubitsky has made a career of disrupting established markets, from cleaning products to snacks to oral hygiene, and watching as nimble newcomers change the nature of their markets. Hear Dubitsky, Founder & CEO of Hello--a line of “seriously friendly” oral care products--talk about building and transforming brands through digital.

Mobile advertising has not yet matched device adoption rates and user engagement—in form, performance and revenue. The latter is growing quickly, but publishers are finding that custom and native approaches to mobile advertising are seeing much better performance. Nevertheless, formats are hard to pin down and plan for. Here, you'll learn what's working now, new ideas that are taking shape and what the mobile advertising landscape will look like in the next 12 to 18 months.

Measuring social media success by counting likes and follows is the old way. Interest is now centered on getting content to surface in feeds to boost engagement with a targeted audience, which allows for transactions across a spectrum of possibilities. Hear how media experts are using this new dynamic to engage and monetize social fans.

The whole world of news and information has changed. You have to change with it. The most successful Web-based media companies aren’t so much as about a given vertical—they’re about a sensibility, and they create a totally new mix of content. It’s about what will resonate on social media, what will be shared. Join in on a discussion about what comprises viral content and how to create it, and hear how smart brands build content in real time that’s designed to exploit viral trends.

Not long ago, we were all primarily focused on optimizing our content for search. Now, optimizing for social has become just as critical. Sit in on this session to soak up a long list of specific tactics for making your content—from stories to images and video—sharable across social.

TV is in its golden era, with shows like Scandal, House of Cards, Mad Men, The Walking Dead and many more. And because of the concepts of “social television” and the second screen, TV has been dominating social media as well. Learn from TV executives how their industry has created an interactive and mutually supportive dynamic between their shows and social media, and leveraged the increased engagement into water cooler moments that drive traffic and viewership, and ultimately, revenue.

The paradigms of design have shifted, online and off. Design was once thought of as an element of form and aesthetics, but now it is principal in function and user experience. Design impacts how your audience interacts and engages with your content, meaning that brands have to rethink the way they use design to tell stories—whether for print, digital, mobile or marketing. Sit in as some of the top design pros from the media world discuss their new visions for design and how they transform the user experience and storytelling practices.

Content marketing in its many forms still confounds publishers who base their sales on standard display formats. Learn how to introduce native ads into your sales arsenal, best practices for executing specific campaign ideas and the keys to making a native campaign succeed.

Some say that UGC is dangerous, that it puts brand equity in the hands of outsiders who don’t have the same voice and vision. Others say this kind of content, as well as contributor networks, are the way of the future. Research shows that UGC is trusted more than even magazines and newspapers, and considered by millennials to be more memorable. In this session you'll learn what goes into creating a vibrant stream of user content as well as how to build a valuable contributor network—from costs to tech and the specific benefits.

With the convergence of digital devices in people's daily lives—think mobile and tablet usage while watching TV—brands and media are are increasingly exploring ways to engage an audience in realtime across platforms. Twitter's Amplify service was borne out of the discovery of a "social soundtrack" happening around major events, whether they're happening on TV (e.g., sports) or in nature (e.g., earthquakes), and allows content providers and brands to leverage realtime events to extend reach beyond organic followers. Join Twitter Amplify co-founder Glenn Brown as he discusses mobile trends around video, advertising and social conversation and the ways media brands, including magazines, can jump across platforms and inject content into a conversation as it's happening.

A major characteristic of the new world of media is speed. You need to post stories, blogs, videos, images, graphics and all of the above in real time simultaneously. Hear how brands are leveraging technology to maximize speed and timeliness. You’ll get an under-the-hood look, but also valuable insight into why efficiency, utility and maximum distribution matter.

It's no secret that on the mobile platform, publisher apps languish next to attention magnets like Flappy Bird or Candy Crush. Game developers have become experts at triggering addictive behavior through in-game features, often boldly corralling players into logic-defying actions just to keep playing. Sit in on this session for a rapid-fire presentation from some of the top game developers for some cross-market intel on how to make an app addictive.

“Print is dead” is a narrative that has been going on for more than a decade, yet print is still alive. Yet the question is really about the role of print—a media channel that will survive, but one that requires a much different outlook than it used to. What are the operational questions around managing and investing in print? Sit in on a rousing debate among media executives from both the print and digital worlds as they look to settle this argument once and for all.

With all the focus on native advertising and content marketing, publishers are creating a ton of custom campaigns that drive new and lucrative business. One of the keys to success is generating entry-level, custom ad products that also have some standardization. In this session we'll present you with specific ideas you can take back to your team and implement immediately.

As media has moved to multiple platforms, legacy companies have been challenged to distribute to other channels. From posting to layout to workflows, there are ways to make the production process more efficient for content creators. Listen in as a panel of content strategists and CTOs discuss content agility.

Most media companies now have significant in-house development teams—and view themselves in a fundamental way as technology companies. This is a recent phenomenon, and corporate cultures have not caught up with reality. In this session hear how pioneers are getting developers, designers, content creators and salespeople into the same room and speaking the same language—and how it’s driving new product development and revenue.

For some brands, content marketing has been so successful that they’ve become just as well known for their media as they are for their products. And that’s the point. Content-led advertising campaigns can have a dramatic impact on branding, while also bumping into what traditional publishers have been doing all along. Join us as we sit down with a brand marketer to get an inside view of their content marketing strategy and why they’ve doubled-down on their own media operation.

Ad agencies remain at the center of the advertising economy, but even for them ad technology is rapidly changing the world of ad sales—and the media world along with it. Where do premium buying, great relationships and premium brands factor in these days? Join a panel of agency and brand execs as they share their views and counsel.

Even as programmatic grows, it doesn’t diminish the importance of strategic media buying. Everyone is collecting data, but in order to make numbers actionable you need a human touch. Here, media brands explain how they use data as a stepping stone to a conversation about bigger, integrated strategic marketing campaigns.

Face-to-face events are an excellent way to bring your brand live and in-person to your audience, and there are a host of formats publishers are launching to great success. Sit in for a fast-paced introduction to some favorites that you can start up right away, including guidance on cost structure, margins and an insider’s look at what goes into producing an event.

How well are you set up to execute on a mobile strategy, really? The mobile platform has taken off with astonishing speed—many publishers now find that more than a third of their audience accesses their content via mobile. In this session we'll break down the infrastructure needed to capitalize on a robust mobile strategy, from personnel, to tech, to outsourcing and how your business model impacts your top and bottom lines.

Media companies are succeeding with premium content and more brands continue to roll out new models. Yet the approach has to be defensible and not a
knee-jerk reaction to dwindling revenues elsewhere in the portfolio―especially when you consider the social dynamics of the Web and skittish digital advertisers that are so dependent on scale and volume. Here from brands that have not only found success with a new take on premium/paid models, but how these models work and how they've been able to quell concerns from advertisers and customers alike.

Video content products are proving to be a CPM equalizer and publishers willing to invest are seeing large dividends. Still, what makes video attractive to advertisers, how can brands capitalize, what kinds of custom video solutions are advertisers seeking and what kind of infrastructure is required to house all of this? Get the
answers to these questions and more to determine if video is right for your brand.

Too often, we discount older content as obsolete. Smart media companies have for decades viewed already-published material as a goldmine, building new revenue streams by mixing and matching according to topic and selling stories, special issues, art and paid-tier memberships. We’ll dig deep into the business model with a few of the industry’s best practitioners.

Demo Session on Main Stage Exhibit Hall
#1 - 3:30 PM - 3:50 PM MSG
#2 - 4:00 PM - 4:20 PM TalkPoint
#3 - 4:30 PM - 4:50 PM Wright's Media
#4 - 5:00 PM - 5:20 PM Blanchard Systems, Inc.

There are countless tales about how an article becomes an epic piece of journalism that’s as famous for how it was reported as the impact of the story itself. Beyond that, there are the ways that smart publishers leverage those mythic qualities into more impact, more readers and more scale. Listen as Journalist Steven Brill and Michael Duffy, executive editor of TIME, describe how “Bitter Pill” went from an idea to a 36-page exposé on the state of healthcare costs.

A major part of digital content strategy, even more so than in traditional media, is the ability to determine what content is going to be a hit, both in realtime and ahead of time. At CBS Interactive Media–which includes brands such as TV.com, TV Guide, Metacritic, and CHOW—virality, shareability and predictability are crucial for the group to keep its 55 million monthly uniques engaged. Here, Christy Tanner, CBS Interactive Media's senior vice president and general manager, offers an inside peek at how her brands stay on top of fast-moving trends in entertainment media by developing content partnerships and digital and mobile products that harness the power of audience participation and engagement.

Digital media technologies are being built all the time and having profound impacts on the way content and advertising are created and distributed across the web. The companies behind this development are using it to their strategic advantage—both as a competitive differentiator and as a new licensing opportunity. The MediaNext Demo Day is a fast-paced, entertaining showcase of under-the-hood presentations of these publisher-built technologies. The show-within-a-show will be modeled after VC-led demo events that showcase disruptive technologies in rapid-fire, five-minute pitches. Following the presentations, mingle and hob-nob with the developers of these ground-breaking technology platforms.