Evolving from print looks like designing an experience for consumers who interact with both print and digital products, including harmonising advertisements and separate calls to subscription.

“Moving away from print, evolving from print,” Condé Nast’s product and design leaders Katharine Bailey and Nicola Ryan explained during INMA’s recent Product & Tech Town Hall. 

The pair aim to build beyond the media brand’s ubiquitous print business model.  

Condé Nast is a behemoth in the publishing industry, spanning 24 brands in 12 countries across eight different languages. Titles include Epicurious (a digital food hub for recipes) to well-known fashion and beauty staples including Allure, Glamour, and Vogue.

“Nicola and I are gauged and judged based on how effectively we are creating, designing, launching scalable technology across this sort of immense number of brands, countries, and languages,” Bailey said. 

Bailey and her team continue to work through the dynamic challenges of balancing brand uniqueness and commonness, with a focus on delivering brand ROI. For Condé Nast, scaling is two-fold for its brands and diverse markets, with attention paid to the priorities for each brand. 

The company centers four key areas within its technology:

• Platform: More and more, platform is publishing, which lends itself well to an in-house planning tool for the management of affiliate commerce business and other activities.

• Engagement: a hyper-focus on increasing time spent.

• Revenue: includes commercial and subscription. Condé Nast recently hired a chief revenue officer. The brand’s revenue is still predominantly from advertising.

• Customer data.

At Condé Nast, the online experience is critical, particularly as the media company prioritises its digital footprint and brand UX across its brands. There are five core areas Condé focuses on:

• Decluttering Web sites. 

• Elevating brand identities. 

• Harmonising global ecosystem. 

• Leaning into community, utility, and apps

• Dynamic revenue and user experiences through content. 

In decluttering their digital destinations, Ryan explained that anything on the site that is not the central story acts as a type of clutter. Clutter could include competing messages or multiple calls to action. 

One priority area is the first viewpoint, the initial place a user would find (brand) content, with the caveat that the user has the access to do so: “First of all, we see that the front food of our brand experiences and is the part of our sites that we really want to make our best first impression,” Ryan said.

Condé Nast has a diverse portfolio of brands featuring the components of lifestyle- fashion, beauty, and food to name a few. As Ryan put it, “It’s really a USP.” 

With that said, once decluttering has taken place to allow for a more clean slate, the brand identity can take center stage. This viewpoint comes in the form of design: simple layouts and user-friendly navigation, while also giving way to evolution. For a unique online experience, the media company is experimenting with the development of distinct visual language around commerce, subscriptions, and marketing. 

When it comes to design, there’s a delicate mix of standardisation and brand flexibility, especially considering Condé Nast’s two dozen brands, Ryan explained. It’s a growing pain that will take time to master to scale quickly while accurately reflecting the brand.

In recent years, Condé has migrated to its front-end platform and Copilot, a proprietary CMS that is multi-tenant, multi-market, Bailey shared. The CMS allows for more flexibility on the back-end for editors, including page standardisation for different story types and localised flexibility across language-specific markets as part of the brand’s global content strategy. 

Bailey oversees about 60 different websites across all of Condé Nast’s brands. “We are currently using AI for translation and for audio story generation within our CMS. That will continue to happen globally for us as we continue to roll it out to more markets.” 

One of the ways the media company is leaning into community is recognising and monitoring user patterns by way of comments. For example, Condé Nast’s food brand, Epicurious, is community driven in the form of recipes and user-generated food recommendations, much of which happens off-platform. Ryan explained the comments left on recipes often result in the development of a recipe.

Loyal readers or active users are getting their content from the community. Ryan’s team uses these types of touchpoints to further elevate responses while turning the comments section into its own unique destination. 

Another area of community at the intersection of utility and application is the Vogue contributor network, for example, which is a partnership with the editorial side of the business. 

There are still tweaks and considerations being made relative to engagement and measuring successful KPIs, particularly in terms of overall repeat visitation, retention, etc. In general, the contributor network is a welcomed addition for Vogue community members who seek more opportunities to be involved or associated with the brand via their app.  

As Bailey mentioned toward the end of the presentation, the goal is to build and sustain customer-centric UX while driving enterprise value. Condé Nast’s product and design teams are committed to reducing Web site clutter, capturing customer data, and refining brand identities and the like to ensure the highest level of a personalised user experience.

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