Month: September 2021

Google said Monday that it will switch its default measurement method for its search, shopping, display and YouTube ads starting in October from last-click attribution to a technique that estimates what led someone to convert based on information it does not observe directly. Conversions might include making a purchase or signing up for a subscription, for example.

The company calls this “data-driven” or modeled conversion tracking. It argues that, when combined with its automated bidding process, it can actually deliver more conversions at the same cost to advertisers than its old way because it takes into consideration various interactions people have with a brand before the last click, and employs Google’s special predictive analytics and ad targeting optimization sauce. The plan is to use the modeled attribution approach for all Google Ads accounts by early 2022, the company said.

Clients at Tinuiti have been testing Google’s modeled approaches to automated bidding and measuring ad conversions for the past year or so, said Andrew Richardson, svp analytics and marketing sciences at the agency, which focuses on running campaigns for advertisers on the big digital and social platforms. “If you can put 10% of your marketing budget against testing, you need to get to understanding what those signals are,” he said, but cautioned against a drastic move to use the modeled methods entirely without initial testing.

Last-click holdouts

There are long-held concerns about the inability of last-click attribution to reflect all the media that may have contributed to a purchase or some other conversion, so many advertisers could consider Google’s shift away from the method as a good thing. “Last-click attribution gives an extremely siloed view of performance marketing, that in most cases is just not true. Humans don’t live in online silos, so it doesn’t make sense for our marketing to pretend that we did,” said Farhad Divecha, managing director and founder of digital marketing agency AccuraCast. “The challenge for marketers is being able to compare competing platforms [such as] Google, Facebook and TikTok when each of their data-driven attribution models will be different from the others,” he said.

However, Richardson said a lot of brands that are not digital natives and are accustomed to using last-click attribution might be reluctant to make the change. “I’ve sat in meetings where the CMO is talking to the CEO and they’re trying to get away from last-click attribution,” he said, noting that when companies have used that method to assess their marketing performance, execs may worry it will be tough to explain that their marketing results may be in flux as they use a new system of measurement. “It’s a really difficult thing to explain to your board of directors, a really difficult thing to explain to Wall Street if you’re publicly traded, that there’s a new way they’ll have to measure their business,” he said.

Feeding Google’s data beast

Google’s vp and gm, buying, analytics and measurement for Google Ads, Vidhya Srinivasan wrote in a Sept. 27 blog post that the modeled measurement technique it aims to use to replace last-click attribution “uses advanced machine learning to more accurately understand how each marketing touchpoint contributed to a conversion, all while respecting user privacy.” But Google relies on the identifiable data it has about its vast user base to help improve the accuracy of its modeled measurement approach. “Our high signed-in user base allows our sophisticated modeling techniques to operate independent of cookies or other identifiers since we can infer a rich set of behavioral dataset[s] across a representative set of opted-in users,” the company notes in documentation about how modeled conversion tracking works.

Meanwhile like Facebook and other companies, Google is trying to maintain advertisers’ ability to track and retarget people across websites and directly measure campaign performance as third-party cookies die out and Apple implements stricter data privacy controls. So, while Google touts the privacy-related aspects of its modeled measurement, it aims to gobble up more and more customer data from advertisers, not only to directly measure logged-in users, but to feed its bidding and measurement models. Indeed, the company itself says in its conversion tracking documentation that “The more observable data, the better the model quality,” and it is encouraging advertisers to help it get that observable data. One way is through its “enhanced conversions” measurement process, which requires advertisers to supply first-party customer data such as email addresses, names, home addresses, and phone numbers.

A Google spokesperson told Digiday its enhanced conversions method only uses data that has been consented and provided to the advertiser and is in line with the company’s commitment to privacy-centric measurement solutions. 

But others question the privacy commitment. “Historically, you couldn’t quite share user data with Google in such a manner,” said Divecha, who added, “‘Enhanced’ conversions almost feel like a step backwards from a privacy point of view.”

Google’s modeled approach helps simplify measurement, “particularly for smaller advertisers who may not have enough data to build reliable data-driven models,” said Steve Zisk, senior product marketing manager at customer data platform firm Redpoint Global. “But this ‘simplicity’ serves Google itself as much as the customer, providing a larger set of data for Google’s algorithms.”

And, as advertisers rely on Google to build accurate models to measure their ads, they also have to trust those modeled numbers. Advertisers should use caution and consider even some basic means of validating them using other information when looking to Google as the be-all-end-all performance barometer, said Richardson.

“Ideally,” said Zisk, “Google would increase transparency by showing how different aspects of customer journeys contribute to conversions, and how their models can accurately reflect actual journeys and conversions.”

Shontell served as editor in chief of Insider’s business vertical since 2016. She was the sixth person to join Insider, back in 2008. During her EIC tenure, Shontell doubled newsroom staff to 200, and helped launch its paywall in 2017. She will be in charge of Fortune’s content across the magazine, website, conferences, newsletters, videos, and podcasts, as well as the Fortune Connect platform, an online community for executives. Fortune launched a digital paywall in March 2020, and last year debuted a redesigned print magazine, website and app. Total circulation for the flagship print edition is 653,000, while paying digital subscribers stands at 40,000, according to a spokesperson. The company says it expects a 74% increase in digital revenue in 2021, compared to last year.

Digiday spoke with Shontell about what attracted her to Fortune and what she wants to prioritize there, as well as her thoughts on being the first female editor in chief at the company.

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

What attracted you to this role at Fortune?

I have really enjoyed building a media company from the ground up. I was on the frontlines of building a digital subscription business from scratch. Fortune is a powerful legacy brand that’s been around for 92 years. Now I can apply what I’ve learned over the last 13 years about how to build a digital media company, how to make journalism go even farther and reach people even farther, and fully turbo-charge a legacy newsroom. We need to be nimble. We need to be open-minded and try a lot of things. We have a lot of data at our fingertips, about what readers should care about and what topics we should go deeper in.

What are your first orders of business when you start your new job?

I want to put some systems in place to turbo-charge the subscriptions business even farther at Fortune. I need to know what people are subscribing to and why — what about Fortune makes readers feel like they need to subscribe, that they have to read, when there are a million other publications to choose from? We could define that a bit more, and make that a really obvious answer for people. I want to bring some clarity to that. Part of that is picking areas we want to go deep on for readers, so we don’t boil the business ocean. What can readers come to us for that we are known for that they can’t get anywhere else? That can be tech or finance or investing or markets.

We can also put more data into the hands of the newsroom to inform them, guide them and help them pick the stories that have the most impact and that people care about. More visibility with data is important. It helps the newsroom measure success in a way where they feel what they’re writing about is sustainable. KPIs for a features writer for the magazine is going to be different from what a breaking news reporter is looking at.

Do you plan on keeping the print magazine?

Yes. Having a magazine is a powerful differentiator and something you can really use to your advantage. It’s just a different format for you to reach readers in. It’s a great branding exercise, to be in people’s mailboxes and on their nightstands. It can further amplify a story, and is just another tool that we have under our arsenal that a lot of other publications don’t have. But it can mean getting pulled in a lot of different directions, with different deadlines. It’s an exciting challenge. I always wanted to work with magazines. Fortune is in a really good place with theirs, with its number of subscriptions.

What’s it like to know you’re the first female editor in chief at Fortune?

It’s a complete honor. While some people might think, “Why did it take 92 years for you to be here?” on the flipside, one of the really cool things about being a woman in business is that you can have a historic career. You can have these firsts, and what you do with your career can have a big impact. Other women might think: how can I be in one of those seats? It hopefully encourages more young women to strive for giant business careers. I have that in my mom. She was a business executive at Fannie Mae for 27 years. I saw that you can have a great family, and you can have a great career. I’m technically still on maternity leave! My baby is three months old and I have a son who is three, and an awesome husband. If I can just show other women that you don’t have to choose, that you can have both, I hope it helps other people.

It feels like there’s been a lot of attention on business publishers recently, with the way Insider has grown and with Forbes announcing plans to go public via a SPAC. Does this impact Fortune at all?

It’s a very competitive landscape. It’s a very exciting one. There’s no better time to be a business journalist, with tech eating the world and no shortage of things to be explained. It’s a tough time to be a leader of any business right now. People are grappling with lots of different things, like how to motivate their teams in a pandemic, how to work remotely — it’s all very complicated. We can help people make decisions in this complicated world, and what they need to know to help them be better at their jobs. 

As traditional sports fields lay fallow, many schools managed to keep their esports programs alive, a contrast that Gaffney says generated attention for collegiate esports and helped maintain school spirit. “Your school still feels like a school if you have something to watch and cheer for,” she said.

But the collegiate esports space is not as streamlined as traditional college sports, which is administered by the all-powerful and overarching NCAA. Collegiate esports has a wide range of stakeholders, including the schools, competing leagues and the game developers themselves, each of which have their own goals and motivations.

Here’s a look at the current state — and potential future — of collegiate esports. 

The stakeholders

• The schools. Collegiate esports wouldn’t exist at all without a critical mass of colleges and universities interested in competitive gaming. After Robert Morris University announced the country’s first varsity esports program in late 2014, other schools quickly followed suit, and partial and full scholarships are now widespread in American collegiate esports. Though some traditional-sports powerhouses such as Clemson and the University of Alabama boast strong esports programs, esports is also an avenue for smaller schools, such as Missouri’s Maryville University, to make a name for themselves. “There really isn’t a correlation” when it comes to traditional sports and esports, said Rick Barakat, evp of media and partnerships at Learfield, which runs the collegiate esports league LevelNext.

• The leagues. A number of companies have emerged to administer collegiate esports leagues, each with its own unique flavor. LevelNext focuses on sports-adjacent games, such as Madden NFL and Rocket League; PlayVS, which also administers high school leagues, allows for competition in Madden, FIFA, Overwatch and SMITE. Collegiate Starleague is one of the few leagues to run tournaments in bloodier first-person shooters such as Counter-Strike and Call of Duty. Aakash Ranavat, svp of operations at PlayVS, views the company as less of a tournament organizer and more of a framework to help schools get involved in esports. “We built the most robust platform to be able to essentially run esports seasons and competitions across the various IPs on our platform,” Ranavat said. “And we’ve done that with schools in mind — you know, onboarding schools, allowing schools to essentially set their rosters.”

• The game development firms. Unlike traditional sports, esports titles such as League of Legends and Overwatch are products for sale, and a bustling collegiate esports industry is fantastic marketing. All of the large collegiate esports leagues work in conjunction with corporate game developers such as EA, Riot Games and Activision Blizzard to help promote and administer their competitions. Riot Games has even formed its own governing body specifically for League of Legends: the Riot Scholastic Association of America (RSAA). According to RSAA head Matt Nausha, the organization has doled out over $4 million in player scholarships since 2014, with the collegiate scene acting as a minor league of sorts for professional League of Legends. Some collegiate players have ascended to the Academy tier of organized competition, the second-highest level in competitive League. “It’s just a byproduct of us creating more opportunities for these players to hone their skills, really,” Nausha said. “And if they have the opportunities to move upwards into our professional ecosystem, we’d love to see that, too.”

• The governing bodies. In 2019, the NCAA’s Board of Governors voted against getting involved in esports on an organizational level, citing concerns over the male-dominated nature of esports and the extreme violence of some titles. This left the door open for esports-specific governing bodies, such as the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE), which was founded in 2016, to expand. Gaffney believes that paying NACE dues helps legitimize collegiate esports in the eyes of skeptical or inexperienced university administrators. “There’s validation in saying, ‘hey, my program will be a member of NACE,’” Gaffney said. Other governing bodies in the collegiate esports space include the Electronic Gaming Federation, the American Collegiate Esports League and the Riot-Games-owned RSAA.

Growing pains and potential futures

As professional gaming becomes a viable career, increasing numbers of students are taking schools’ esports programs into consideration while applying to college, and NACE counts over 170 schools among its ranks. “It actually brings students in,” Gaffney said, “so I think that’s solid enough for colleges to keep going.”

But that doesn’t mean every popular esport is set to make waves in the collegiate space. Though Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of the most prominent esports, few collegiate leagues run Counter-Strike events. “We would likely never do a red-blood shooting title,” Barakat said. “Maybe some blue-blood titles, like a Fortnite or an Overwatch can make sense — they’re more animated — but without naming names, I don’t see us taking on the first-person shooter titles that are violent, with red blood.”

Recently, the shooter title Valorant has experienced some success in collegiate competitions. The Riot Games shooter builds on the more palatable combat of Overwatch, with magical weapons that stay far away from the realistic firearms and violence of games like Call of Duty. “We’re seeing a lot of voices in the scholastic space, both on the college and high school front, asking for Valorant,” Nausha said. “So we are actively looking into that.”

One reason why schools may have expressed skepticism about fielding teams in shooter titles is the NCAA’s aforementioned concerns over violent content. But with first-person shooters such as Overwatch now a standard element of college esports programs — and the number of female competitors on the rise — the moment seems as ripe as ever for the NCAA to make its presence in esports known. 

This could cause friction among the governing bodies that already exist in the space, but Nausha is confident that his organization will be able to work in tandem with the NCAA, if and when it dips its toes into esports. “If they were to ever come back, they know that they have to be working with the publishers, because of IP — it’s not traditional sports, it’s not a direct one-to-one,” Nausha said. “We’d absolutely be interested in having a collaborative working relationship with them, and that is true for others in the ecosystem currently.”

Regardless of how the collegiate esports landscape takes shape, each of the 10 organizations, schools and governing bodies that Digiday contacted for this rundown was confident that competitive gaming will — or has already — become a core element of the college experience. The rise in interest sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic simply accelerated an expansion that was already underway. “By hook or by crook, esports has proven it’s a valid presence on these campuses,” Gaffney said. “Students will play and will gladly give up their time, just like we used to do 10 years ago. That passion is still there.”

“I came in at the moment where we felt like our growth was not necessarily the place where we wanted to put our resources,” said Rosenblum during the Digiday Publishing Summit this month. “We had figured out SEO, we had figured out scale. [I was given the job of] maintaining our enormous audience while improving the editorial the look, the feel, the writing, the editing, and the quality overall.”

Rosenblum and her team created a blueprint for converting mass audiences into fans of the brands she oversees and below is a look into how they executed that plan.

One of the first steps of updating the lifestyle portfolio was figuring out which audience Rosenblum’s team wanted for each brand, and also, what the competitor set was doing.

Prior to BDG, Rosenblum held various editor roles at several fashion and lifestyle magazines including Elle and Glamour — legacy publications that had qualities she wanted to emulate in BDG’s lifestyle brands.

“When I was at Glamour, [there] was always this idea that there were Glamour girls — specific people who loved Glamour and always would buy it every month. We didn’t necessarily have that as much for [BDG’s] brands,” she said. “We want people to be coming to the homepage,” not just arriving to an article via an internet search.

To rectify this, the editorial teams added more writers, developed franchises around certain coverage areas, and prioritized quality in the writing and art. This includes producing digital cover shoots and features to attract more celebrities like Demi Lovato, Janelle Monáe and Camila Cabello in the hopes that it would become viral.

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From Bustle’s August digital cover featuring singer and actor Camila Cabello

Migrating all of BDG’s sites onto one centralized operating system was a significant step in modernizing and updating the lifestyle portfolio.

In May 2019, BDG acquired Joshua Topolsky’s site The Outline. While the online magazine was shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, its tech stack, which the company acquired along with the website, was adopted and fused with BDG’s existing system to be used by all of the core BDG brands. The Some Spider Studio brands will be migrated to the tech stack in the next year as well.

So far, this move has given the sales team a streamlined way to sell advertising campaigns across all of the brands. Additionally, because all of the brands have the same building blocks behind them, the teams have been able to easily manage site redesigns, newsletter launches and e-commerce tie-ins.

The more that the BDG brands produce these high-caliber content packages, the more big advertising packages are sold.

While Rosenblum does not personally track the revenue from these brands, she said anecdotally there are more themed campaigns sold that are attached to the editorial calendar compared to before the brands were sold as a collective. “It’s also great for our advertising team who can bring up Bustle and put it next to Glamour or Vogue,” said Rosenblum.

With updated websites and more cohesive editorial coverage, the brands can also implement other revenue-generating products, like newsletters and embedded e-commerce shopping.

Over the past six months, BDG began relaunching its newsletters, along with some new ones with benefits leadership hopes will create habit-forming behaviors among subscribers like referral programs and reward benefits for reading the email and sharing it with a friend. And now, several of the lifestyle brands are using the content itself to sell products to their readers, by integrating shopping carousels, featured product pop-outs and branded shoppable elements into articles that tie into the content, rather than sitting separately in a shop tab.

Steer clear of print for both brand building and revenue growth. 

BDG’s only print product belongs to W Magazine, which the company acquired in August 2020. The print product is a way to showcase the brand to some sponsors and super fans of the brand, but Rosenblum said she’s focused on growing the digital sites.

Since joining BDG, the company claims that W has increased its digital revenue by 199% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020, partly due to access to the company’s branded content studio, which has enabled luxury advertisers, like Celine and Bottega Veneta to buy their first-ever branded content campaigns to run on W’s site.

“Our biggest clients for our other brands are more mass retailers [and] they don’t care about print. All they care about is scale. They care about how cool your brand is and how it looks online, but they’re not looking for print product advertising,” said Rosenblum. “They are old-school companies that are tied to this idea of print and who knows maybe in 10 years that won’t be the case anymore.”

For Rosenblum, the goal is to make this a “step and repeat” model that can be used to quickly and effectively onboard new acquisitions in the future.

It is no surprise that BDG wants to pursue additional m&a opportunities down the road. Earlier this year, the company’s CEO Bryan Goldberg announced that he was pursuing going public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which would open BDG up to more money to buy media companies. 

“I think that our company’s strategy of creating great websites that have traffic and not deviating a million times from that has actually been really successful for us. My plan is just to make these sites grade over the next year, see what else we can and want to acquire, and then kind of do the same thing,” said Rosenblum.

• Doja Cat remixed the Grease hit “You’re the One That I Want” for a Pepsi spot at the VMAs
• Tag Team retooled “Whoomp, There It Is” to be “Scoop, There It Is” for the Geico
• Guy Fieri helped bring back Chevy’s former jingle
• Goldfish (the snack brand partnered with popular ‘90s brand JNCO jeans for the launch of a new flavor earlier this month

With the continued pandemic due to the variants, marketers and agency execs expect nostalgia marketing to continue as people want to harken back to simpler times. That being said, agency execs caution overinvesting in this strategy lest a brand get lost in the fray.

“In times of uncertainty, we crave familiarity so this shift towards nostalgia-based marketing simply reflects the psychological needs most of us have right now: comfort and stability,” said Andrew Quay, vp and group strategy director at Deutsch NY. “It’s the same reason why we’ve seen a rise in consumer spending on comfort foods, home improvement supplies, pet adoption, and athleisure apparel over the last year. Brands that are shaping their creative around nostalgic references are injecting us with a dose of serotonin to appeal to that happy place that has been buried inside of us far too long.”

Kari Shimmel, chief strategy officer at Campbell Ewald echoed that sentiment. “The pandemic created the ‘quarantine reflection’ giving us the time to remember and be comforted by familiar things,” said Shimmel, adding that the shop was behind the classic Chevy ad reinvented by Fieri. “For marketers, it’s less about tapping into the simple and more about connecting to the familiar in a new way. For legacy brands, this helps reinforce their stability, while also framing their core values to be relevant for today.”

Finding ways to connect with older — and younger — generations could also be driving the latest wave of nostalgia marketing, according to agency execs. “By-gone pop culture references also resonate with much younger audiences as well thanks to new mediums like TikTok,” noted Martin’s vp and creative director, Justin Harris; the shop is behind the Geico nostalgia spots. “Everyone’s searching for fresh content and sometimes that means looking backwards, as generations past have done as well.”

Brands still have to be genuine, though, which will be easy to spot if they take on nostalgia as a marketing strategy just to fit in.

“Nostalgia works when it strikes a chord in culture and is in service of a good idea,” said Danny Price, associate creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi; the shop is behind the recent nostalgia-infused campaign from Goldfish. “But nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake probably won’t lead to a memorable campaign. People have so much nostalgia coming at them from TV and movie reboots and social media content that tapping into that trend could easily get lost in the mix. But when it feels connected to a product or brand, taps into a cultural trend and is specific enough to stand out from the nostalgia crowd, it can still be a powerful tool.” 

3 Questions with Thumbtack’s head of marketing, Amanda Reierson

A lot is being asked of marketing leaders in 2021. As head of marketing, how do you show (or plan to show) the c-suite the importance of marketing strategy?

My goal at Thumbtack is to build a household brand that delivers a delightful customer experience — which will ultimately win homeowners’ loyalty. As the new head marketer, it’s important to show our c-suite the value of investing in the brand, building off of all of the great work that has been done to date, to positively impact the bottom line. I believe in this company, the people, and the mission and can’t wait to tell the world more about it. With that said, in an environment where every dollar counts, senior leaders need to see a strong business case around big initiatives on the marketing roadmap. Transparency and accountability are key with a clear learning agenda around measuring success as well as understanding near and long-term business impact.

With brand purpose becoming front and center again, how do you balance it with business goals?

I look at brand purpose and business goals as two sides of the same coin. When setting business objectives in marketing, you have to be relentless about prioritizing your customer’s needs and preferences as it relates to your larger purpose. If a marketer is successful at building a strong brand and has a product or service that solves a major pain point for customers, business results should naturally follow. Marketing leaders need to be aware of reaching the right customer with the right message at the right time and infusing a brand’s purpose into every touchpoint and interaction.

More than ever before, we now have the technology to experiment with different messaging and experiences at scale — driving correlations that will help us to prioritize the initiatives with the highest return. It’s all about creating that emotional connection that keeps customers coming back for more. We’ve seen brands do it well in digital shopping as well as other categories, and you will be hearing a lot more from Thumbtack — which makes life easier for homeowners and is the fastest-growing company in this space.

As the role of a marketing leader changes, what has become a primary responsibility?

The primary responsibility of a marketing leader — and one of the biggest challenges of marketing — is to really understand the customer mindset so that you can cut through the clutter and create authentic connections. Marketing leaders must balance brand awareness and customer experience with business growth strategy, and wear all of those hats well. Additionally, it’s crucial for a marketing leader to set a clear vision and roadmap for their team, where everyone understands how their contributions ladder up to both marketing goals and broader company objectives. An invested team is one of the most important ingredients to success. — Kimeko McCoy

By the numbers

As more marketers look for authentic ways to engage online shoppers, influencer marketing is becoming a key part of their strategy. As the space continues to grow and digital shopping habits change, studies show that e-commerce sites that leverage not just influencers, but user-generated content from people who actually use the product are more likely to land a sale. A new study from Stackla, a content marketing platform, reveals online shoppers are more likely to purchase after seeing reviews and other content produced by social media users. Find the breakdown below: 

• 72% of people say photos and videos from real customers is the content they most want to see on e-commerce sites when making purchasing decisions
• 59% of respondents say content created by other consumers (i.e. UGC) is the most authentic type of content
• Only 10% of consumers say influencer content resonates as authentic — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the week

“We see a world where publisher data replaces third-party data to a large extent, particularly at the premium end where we would typically operate with other larger publisher brands looking to drive mid to upper-funnel impacts for marketers.”

— Ben Walmsley, commercial director for publishing at News U.K., told news editor Seb Joseph of its effort to retool its approach to data for a world without the third-party cookie.

What we’ve covered

• Here’s how Peloton CMO Dara Treseder is guiding the brand to be more community-focused in its marketing.
• A data rule could change what health apps have access to, but privacy experts say the FTC maybe overreaching.
• Talent wars are changing the way some tech companies are paying employees.

When the bankrupt Gawker shut its doors in 2016, it seemed unlikely that the site known for snarky opinions, celebrity gossip and haughty critiques would return. But rumblings of the site’s return — and its snippy attitude — came in July 2018 when BDG CEO Bryan Goldberg paid just under $1.5 million for the defunct website.

Three years later, Gawker is back up and running (after an initial false start with a different cast of characters) under editor-in-chief Leah Finnegan.

Finnegan isn’t new to the brand — or BDG. She was formerly the features editor during Gawker’s heyday (when it published notable pieces like “Billionaire Pervert Jeffrey Epstein and His Famous Friends: A Primer” and “People Keep Telling Us About Kevin Spacey’s Aggressive Love for Men“). About a year after it shut down, she led one of BDG’s newly acquired sites The Outline before that too was shuttered in 2020.

Then after a year of unemployment that began at the start of the pandemic, she jumped at the chance to return and relaunch the new Gawker under BDG’s ownership. This time, however, she is determined to right the wrongs of the past, which she considers to be internal factors including misogyny and bro culture as well as misguided editorial decisions, such as publishing illicit sex tapes.

Her work is cut out for her: Gawker ended its run after a lawsuit was brought against its founder Nick Denton for publishing those tapes.

“[Gawker is] such a loaded place and the time I was there was so dramatic and tumultuous. It was an earlier iteration of the way digital media worked and I didn’t want to go back to that Gawker,” said Finnegan on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

This is the third episode of a four-part series called “The Modern Newsroom Leader,” which features newly appointed editors-in-chief as they navigate industry challenges including staffers dealing with burnout, unsteady financial businesses and prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring practices.

In this conversation, Finnegan discusses how she’s crafted her management style to addresses these issues while also building Gawker 2.0 into a brand that she and her team is proud of.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

The Gawker 2.0 mission

An important thing to know and to realize about old Gawker is that the lawsuits and the really incendiary stuff, and, you know, the misogyny that was only about — not to minimize it — 20% of what Gawker was. And then the rest of Gawker was funny and smart and provocative. And I edited some of my favorite pieces I ever did at Gawker. My mission statement going into this Gawker was to take the parts I really loved about the time I work there that don’t really get remembered because they’re not a sex tape, and make those into the cornerstone of the new Gawker.

Building a team of writers she admires

​​It probably was a subconscious thing going into this Gawker that I hired mostly all women because the misogyny was such a powerful and noxious force when I was there. Those were always the decisions where the women on the staff felt like they really weren’t involved with them or [had] to kind of look the other way, because there’s this macho energy that was behind them. When I was hiring people for Gawker, I wanted to hire people I really respected because I was afraid of people kind of stepping into the firing line of the internet by signing up for new Gawker. So I was like, “OK, if I hire this person, no one would come after them and they all happen to be these great women.” And if you build a site of really smart women, I feel like there’s less of a chance that people are going to be like, this totally sucks.

Getting advertisers on board 

One [sponsor] did ask if we’re ever going to run anything positive, which I think the answer is “yes, and if you can’t find those, you’re looking in the wrong places.” But one of the great advantages we have is that Gawker [has] such a strong brand identity already. It’s Gawker, it’s not going to be nice, it’s not going to be a place where nervous advertisers are gonna go.

It’s not like The Outline, [which] was a very niche site and I understood that a lot of people didn’t know what The Outline was, but it was a new site that had like 40,000 followers on Twitter so I understand that that would be hard to sell. Gawker is like a much more widely understood thing, and it might take a braver advertiser, but I think that there are people out there who see Gawker’s reach and realize its value.