In my last newsletter, I looked at Condé Nast and their commerce strategy following in-depth conversations with Patrick Gray, executive director of commerce there. Today, I am breaking this down with a practical case study, using men’s magazine GQ as a base. If you missed my newsletter last week, you can catch up online here and here.

There are two things that are on my mind right now, which I would love to hear from you on: 

• How you use widgets and whether they drive significant traffic/are trending in the right direction.

• And what product looks like with the likely collapse of discovery in the new world of AI personal assistants. 

If you have comments, views, questions, or anything else you’d like to share, please drop me a note or book time with me. I’m at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org and www.calendly.com/jodiehop.

If you use wordpress as a CMS, please could you take a few minutes to do this quick survey? 

If you are, like me, in the northern hemisphere, I hope you are getting some down time to relax and reflect over the summer months. I’ll be at our CEO roundtable in Vail next month and Media Innovation Week in Helsinki in September, so please look me up if you will be attending either.

Best, Jodie  

GQ as an example of the Condé Nast commerce playbook

Press Gazette in the UK published an article which points to how GQ UK is focusing on brand engagement rather than traffic. In reality, this means the overall traffic is down, but they have actually grown their total minutes spent from year to year. 

Their efforts are working. There is more brand loyalty and engagement.  

As I wrote recently, commerce plays into this brand engagement goal: “[Readers] are interacting with the brand, taking their recommendations, and often bringing physical products into their lives.”

Today I am going to focus on GQ USA, where Patrick Gray told me that “50% of GQ’s audience engages with content on GQ Recommends.” 

That’s huge. 

Let’s breakdown what commerce looks like for this Condé Nast brand in the United States. 

Navigation

Condé Nast has tabs for commerce in the main navigation on each Web site, some with slightly different wording based on the audience: GQ has “Recommends,” Vogue and Allure have “Shopping.”

This is what the main navigation and hover-over sub head looks like on GQ in the United States:

Note that Vogue, another Condé Nast brand, has a much more extensive sub navigation for its “Shopping” tab: 

Once you click through on the GQ U.S. site, a sub header appears:

I noticed this sub header changed as I looked at the sites on different days. Below is the subhead that appeared a couple of days before the big Amazon Prime Day sale in the U.S.:

These are full sites in themselves. In Patrick’s words, “the GQ Recommends shopping experience uses Condé Nast’s Commerce toolkit, which is the underlying product across all brands in the portfolio, including Vogue Shopping. The toolkit allows teams to present each brand’s unique proposition whilst allowing the business to optimise at scale.”

In other words, each module is built and tried on a single site and then the templates are optimised for high performance by product and technology teams. These are constantly being tweaked as consumers change and as more data becomes available. 

Here are a few of the modules:

A new module: editors’ picks

A recently introduced module is the “editor wish list.” This takes brand engagement even deeper as readers are following specific editors and writers. This drives the personal relationship. And from what I can gather, the newsrooms that have adopted this so far have enjoyed doing so.

Offline: newsletters 

GQ is also utilising newsletters for commerce. When visiting the “Recommended” page for the first time, a user is prompted to sign up for the newsletter. And the “GQ Recommends” newsletter is one of only six that appears under the main “newsletter” navigation. 

When I asked Patrick about newsletters, he told me: “We are actively working to drive our newsletter business as a qualified and loyal audience. The Vogue Shopping newsletter continues to drive significant triple digit revenue growth in 2024.”

GQ commerce as a subscription

Last but not least, GQ Recommends has its own subscription product. Most of you will be familiar with the subscription boxes that companies such as Ipsy pioneered. This is now coming to GQ. It’s managed by a separate team. 

Conclusion

Condé Nast has built a solid commerce product that enables it to optimise for readers, share learnings between brands, and generate (an increasing) revenue stream while staying true to the brands. There is a lot that news organisations can learn from their approach. 

Date for the diary: July 31, INMA member Webinar on commenting and fostering civil online debate

Most news organisations have faced challenges with commenting, including toxicity, trolls, and sometimes even hate speech. This has led some organisations to turn off commenting entirely. 

Der Spiegel decided to take on the challenge, completely rethinking commenting online, and creating a new product within existing platforms: Spiegel Debatte. Join Dr. Dr. Laura Badura and myself to discuss their approach, what decisions they have needed to make, and how they have built a healthy space for conversation. Sign up here.

New York Times brings commerce to it’s cooking app

Of course it’s not just Condé Nast that is looking at commerce to integrate with its offerings. Last month, The New York Times announced a partnership with grocery app Instacart. Again, this stays true to its brand and will likely improve brand engagement with the NYT cooking app.  

In their words: 

“This collaboration provides consumers the ability to discover delicious New York Times Cooking recipes, shop the ingredients easily with Instacart, and have dinner on the table in as fast as 30 minutes. Whether it’s skipping the grocery trip to get delicious weeknight meals on the table quickly or making a recipe with ingredients not on hand, this new feature makes it effortless to browse, decide, shop, and cook in a short span of time.”

In other words, this is offering their readers a utility. And it’s something that will make money for the brand. 

This is also expanding The New York Times’ reach, as the press release states: “All existing and new Instacart+ members will also be offered one year of access to New York Times Cooking, gaining access to all of Cooking’s expertly crafted recipes via its app and Web site.”

This seems like a genius partnership that works for every constituent. I’ll be interested to see the take-up and ongoing usage from Times readers and whether this picks up any new subscribers for them. 

If you are working on anything like this, I’d love to hear about it.

About this newsletter 

Today’s newsletter is written by Jodie Hopperton, based in Los Angeles and lead for the INMA Product and Tech Initiative. Jodie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global news media product.

This newsletter is a public face of the Product and Tech Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Jodie at jodie.hopperton@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Sign up to our Slack channel.

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