At INMA, we try to bring you the interesting trends for the future — not simply what’s working now. One trend that we are seeing is the growth of commerce.

Is it double digits on the P&L? Maybe not.

Is it becoming meaningful revenue for those that invest well? Yes. 

So today that’s what we’re focusing on: how you can build commerce into your products in a meaningful way. I spoke to Patrick Gray, executive director of commerce at Condé Nast, for an in-depth discussion on how they have achieved success during their commerce journey, which I wrote about here.

How does this relate to product? 

Building commerce is very much a product process, especially with multi-brand company such as Condé Nast. To start, the organisation must look at customer need and brand alignment.

In what space(s) does it make sense to play? Condé Nast has lifestyle brands, not news brands. However, the same principles can be applied to many of the news adjacent content: cooking, lifestyle, entertainment, and, as I wrote about last year, wine. 

Condé Nast has built commerce in product units that each brand can choose to use — or not. These can be editorial sections, swipeable images, look books, and more. My next newsletter will go through this in more detail.

Product awards

Some Condé Nast brands feature awards, which plays exceptionally well to the commerce strategy as well as lean into heavy brand engagement. Take a look at Allure Best of Beauty Awards and Allure Readers Choice. These are coveted awards for brands, beloved by readers, and now they produce an additional revenue stream by way of commerce revenue. 

In fact, the Allure Awards are so popular that a beauty chain store in the United States has an online section shopping only for products that have won an Allure award, which is part of a wider partnership (more here). Amazon also has an Allure Best of Beauty storefront.

Is commerce for owned and operated platforms?

Commerce works where there is strong relevance and trust in the brand. Most of the Condé Nast commerce happens on owned and operated platforms, which I’ll go into next time. They are experimenting more and more with a channel mix for both editorial and marketing content.  

The company uses different channel mixes for different brands, which includes social, Apple News, TikTok, and Pinterest. For example, Vogue Shopping has features in the daily editorial newsletter as well as a regular, specific newsletter franchises with “Affordable Fashion” on a Wednesday and “New Arrivals” on a Friday. And AD (Architectural Digest) lends itself to Pinterest, meaning Condé Nast makes some content pin-able.

We talked briefly about social commerce (which I wrote about recently here), but Patrick told me this is still at the early testing stages and is not something he considers a proven success at scale — yet.

What does the organisation structure look like? 

Commerce sits in the consumer revenue department. They see this as part of the user journey — if a user sees something they like on site and Condé Nast wants to facilitate that rather than creating a potential frustration where they then spend time looking for it online.  

Commerce works closely with editorial, too, but has its own teams for writing commerce-specific content. This helps keep brand alignment while ensuring there is no conflict of interest.

In total, Condé Nast has around 60 people working on commerce in the United States plus a team of around 20 in Europe. Teams are mostly brand specific, and size depends on the revenue opportunity.

At a department level, they are able to look at trends, share best practices, and work with product to build out solutions that work across all titles. They will test with an individual brand and leverage the portfolio for data, trends, and, of course, affiliate revenue terms.  

As commerce has grown, Condé Nast has hired in e-commerce skills. Patrick worked for Farfetch, and other members of the leadership group workled at Net-A-Porter and Gucci. This has allowed them to ramp up experience and learning across all sides of commerce much more quickly.   

For commerce to work, there is a highly matrixed structure. There is a group that meets every week to discuss commerce and individuals are encouraged to come with hypotheses they want to test: If we do X, it will have Y impact?

In this matrixed team are the following:

• Product: focusing on optimised, high-performance templates that are built into the CMS.

• Editors: define content strategies for their brands covering content, merchandise, audience. There are both producers and writers in this team. 

• Data experts: including financial analysts, audience development, data analysts, and marketing

That’s great for a large organisation, but how can a smaller media organisation get started with commerce? 

All of the above is based on Condé Nast, a powerhouse of brands that has a dedicated team on commerce since 2019. But you don’t need this set of brands to start commerce.

When I asked Patrick about this, he told me almost all publishers can start by adding affiliate links to their existing content. This is actually how Condé Nast started before they set up a dedicated team. 

There are a number of services that can help with affiliate links, such as an industry original Skimlinks. There are also other companies such as Stack Commerce which can help organisations scale their commerce.

If you’d like to subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter, INMA members can do so here.

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