Digiday Live

For millennial-focused publisher Mic, platforms are the future. The media company’s chief strategy officer Cory Haik took the stage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne to share Mic’s multi-platform approach to storytelling. Instagram has been a particular area of growth because of its strong micro-communities of social justice-minded individuals and their followings.

In December 2015, Forbes took an aggressive approach to its ad-blocking visitors. In this episode of Digiday Live, recorded last week at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida, Forbes Media CRO Mark Howard describes the four-stage process that Forbes undertook to better understand its ad-blocking readers, and ultimately reach its sales goals.

The way brands organize for content can vary dramatically. BJ Carretta, vp of digital brand marketing at Fender Instruments, and Nariman Noursalehi, director of SEO at Overstock.com, compared and contrasted how their companies organize for content in the latest episode of Digiday Live, recorded onstage at the Digiday Content Marketing Summit.

It's a truth as old as the hills: people hate talking about money. In this episode of Digiday Live recorded at the Digiday Content Marketing Summit, Lani Hayward, evp of creative strategies for Umpqua Bank, shared how her team started a  conversation about money in a format that hasn't caught on for most brands yet: the podcast.

In 2013, Coca-Cola made a huge content marketing gamble. It replaced the content on its corporate website with "Journey," an online magazine telling brand stories in Coca-Cola's positive brand. Three years later, the website boasts 5 to 6 million views per month - but that's not the site's key indicator of success. Doug Busk, the brand's global group director for digital communications and social media, shares what Coca-Cola has learned by thinking like a publisher.

Quartz aims to be the digital publication of choice for global business professionals. That means creating a premium experience around both content and advertising. Instead of using standard banner ads, Quartz’s publisher Jay Lauf wants to marry the aesthetic of magazine advertising with the data tracking capabilities of digital. The hope is that higher-quality advertising gives readers a better experience and helps marketers break through the clutter.

As the popularity of different platforms shifts across markets, Bloomberg managing director of international Parry Ravindranathan focuses on the two or three that provide the most value. However, even the broadest distribution has little value without monetization. Ravindranathan discusses the challenges of social media, ad blocking and more.

For the FT, building a global media brand means understanding its audience and moving with the trends. The company has shifted to digital, using the data it gets from subscribers to better target advertising. Sacha Bunatyan and Hiroko Hoshino discuss the FT’s digital strategy and acquisition by Nikkei.

Online rental service Rent the Runway's senior vice president of brand strategy, David Page, and Melissa Barnes, the company’s senior director of brand strategy, discuss the journey of building an in-store presence after creating a defined brand and having a strong handle on its customer base through its original online store.