Condé Nast feeling the heat over native advertising venture
Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend and President Bob Sauerberg Jr. picked a great time to hold the annual publishers meeting in Miami earlier this week: They missed the snowstorm back home.
Unfortunately, they did not miss the firestorm of controversy that erupted around the unveiling of its new native advertising venture, dubbed 23 Stories by Condé Nast.
For the first time, the company announced, it was going to make editors available to work with advertisers to develop “branded content.”
A memo signed by Townsend, Sauerberg and Anna Wintour said that 23 Stories “will leverage the best-in-class talent of the designers, writers and marketers who comprise the 23 stories we now occupy at our new headquarters at 1 World Trade Center to develop proprietary content, videos, insights and experiences for our advertising partners.”
Sources said that the native ad subject, and editors’ roles in it, has been a delicate one for months and that Wintour, the Vogue editor-in-chief and the publishing house’s artistic director, had been tiptoeing around the subject for months.
The trio had high-level meetings with Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter and the New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick.
(A spokeswoman insisted that the high-level meetings were routine and not centered on native ads.)
One insider said that in reality, there is no iron-clad rule that any magazine is automatically included — or automatically excluded. But sources said the New Yorker is not likely to make its editors available to work on ads.
The unit reports to Ed Menicheschi, the former Vanity Fair publisher who is now running the Condé Nast Media Group in charge of pulling in big-ticket advertisers.
Menicheschi told Ad Age that advertisers will have to agree to spend a certain dollar amount before being allowed access to 23 Stories.
Wintour in her statement said, “The industry is evolving and so too is our way of story-telling. “
There is a clear gold rush for native ads. Hearst and Time Inc. already unveiled native ad units within their corporations.
Nylon, the edgy fashion magazine, recently said this week it was going to make Editor-in-Chief Michelle Lee, who came in with the new ownership change last year, in charge of the magazine’s native ad push as well.
“We’re going to help brands tell their stories,” she said in no uncertain terms. “If I’m working on an ad campaign, I don’t think there is any danger I am going to mix it up with editorial. The key here is transparency.”
On Thursday, the Association of National Advertisers, which represents some of the biggest-spending advertisers, acknowledged that “native advertising is one of the hottest and most controversial trends in the industry.”