Kiki Von Glinow is the Founder & CEO of Toast Media Group. She has started this company and the Norman project, after discovering key insights on how underserving Gen Z audiences and influencer distribution are related, during her time at HuffPost.

In this episode, we explore these themes.

 

Podcast Transcription

Vahe Arabian: Welcome to The State of Digital Publishing Podcast. The State of Digital Publishing is an online publication and community uncovering the latest information and trends in new media subscriptions. This is episode eight and we're speaking with Kiki Von Glinow, CEO of Toast Media Group. Hi Kiki, how are you?

Kiki Von Glinow: I'm good, how are you doing?

Vahe Arabian: I'm not too bad thanks. How is everything in New York with the industry and publishing scene there at the moment?

Kiki Von Glinow: It's very, it's an interesting time right now I think for a lot of digital publishers, Facebook is kind of rocking their world in big ways but I think over the past few years those shake-ups from platforms have always led to innovation from a lot of different publishers. So I think it's an exciting time for sure.

Vahe Arabian: A lot of people are now trying to take a platformless approach, I spoke with someone from India who's doing the same thing, and when I found your website and what you guys are doing it's like your doing something similar, trying to take a platformless approach as well. But I guess for those people who don't know much about you, sorry just before I say that everyone Kiki used to work for Huffington Post for six years and now she started her own company called Toast Media, so now she's taking on another platformless approach as well. I'll just pass it to you to give you the opportunity to give a background about what Toast Media is about.

Kiki Von Glinow: Sure. Toast Media is a contextualized commerce company, serving under served Gen-Z audiences. To put that more simply, we are a network of shopping recommendation apps for niche teen communities. So the one that we're launching with this spring is called Norman, and it serves the gender fluid community. So it's a genderless shopping recommendation app as well as having some enterprise features and feature writing within it, for people who don't believe that gender has a place when it comes to great style. Speaking of that platform approach, Norman is one of many apps that we'll have in the future serving these different audiences. I think we take a platform first approach without reliance on those platforms, which is, I think has gotten a lot of publishers including my previous place of work at HuffPost in trouble with really fully relying on the platforms for distribution. Instead, we are going to really, we're going to an influencer distribution pretty much only. We're not going to have any Norman branded accounts on any social media channels but really take a people first approach on these platforms.

Kiki Von Glinow: I guess one of the reasons we really went that route is because, as I'm sure a lot of you saw, as Instagram became super popular, a lot of publishers who had developed followings on Snapchat were now like, "Okay great, now I have to start all over again on a new platform" whereas people who were switching from Snapchat to Instagram really just took their following with them. You couldn't, there were a lot of celebrities who went from Snapchat to Instagram as a main distribution platform for themselves as well as influencers. We really saw audiences following people across platforms and not brands so much, so Toast Media Group, all of our properties, will have an influencer first, a people first approach to distribution on these platforms.

Vahe Arabian: With this podcast being about Gen-Z publishing, is that why you've seen this trend?