Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala and His Secret Succession Plan

22:40Peter Kafka:I'll talk to people who run media companies who said they were interested in diversity and now literally can't say that out loud because the FCC might come after them, or they might get some other kind of blowback in the Trump 2.0 era. And they'll say, this is as important to me as it ever was. I just need to phrase it differently. I just can't come out and literally can't say diversity. I can't say any part of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Do you have sympathy for the folks who are running media companies who think they're doing the right thing but can't say that out loud? Look, I think there's a couple of categories of companies that have backed away from the commitments they made.

23:20One is companies that are under threat from our own federal government and the FCC. I certainly have sympathy for the threats that they face. I wish more of them were willing to stand up, because I do believe that the fears that they have are overblown in terms of what the government can really do. There are other companies that just abandoned them because the winds changed. I have no sympathy for them. None whatsoever.

23:50Peter Kafka:Do you feel like you can make that assessment from the outside, go, oh, these people never believed that they were just saying it, and these people do mean it? Chris Hillman Well, I think that companies that aren't under the type of political pressure that you mentioned earlier, who abandoned these, it just says one thing. It was never really a core value. It was a response to a moment. One of the things I'm most proud of with our company is that we've retained it as a core value and we report on our progress every year. Every year we make progress. We have publicly stated goals, and we track ourselves to those goals.

24:25I think our employees really appreciate it. As I said, with fewer and fewer companies doing that, it puts us in a position of, I think, great competitive advantage.

24:34Peter Kafka:I wanted to ask you about this. You brought up this idea that you guys have not been buffeted by the second Trump administration like other media companies. You said, look, we don't have a Warner Brothers deal to get through the FCC. We don't have this issue. We don't have that issue. Certainly, there's an audience of people that I work with who like hearing that. But I'm wondering why you make a point of bringing that up in public. You've talked about it in a couple of different settings. What is the point of you saying that out loud? Who is the audience for that? The audience is our own employees and our future employees.

25:12We have a talent brand that is very important to us. I think if you're a journalist today, I always tell our employees, our journalists, that right now there's fewer and fewer places where you can practice your best work without being either impacted directly by the government or by the ownership group or whatever. This is one of them. That is a source of competitive advantage. In the seven years I've been at the company, not once have our owners or our board come to me and said, hey, don't publish this, don't publish that. Therefore, not once have I done that to our editors. We have the best editors in the world.

25:56The way to keep the best editors in the world is to stay out of their way and support them. I really believe that that is the key to our success. I'm fortunate that were owned by a family that believes in that, too. I talk about it publicly because I want people to know, especially journalists who are maybe at places where they don't feel that they have that freedom, that should there be an opportunity to work at Conde Nast, they'd be welcomed here and they would not be interfered with.

26:26Peter Kafka:Thank you for that. I really was curious about that. It leads me to this question. We talked about this a couple times before, but now it's a bigger deal than ever. Half of my show is spent interviewing people like you who run media companies, and the other half is spent talking to, we'll just call them creatives. Increasingly, they are people who've left big media companies and created their own business. At the time, the last few times we talked about this, it was mostly theoretical. And now it's a real thing, and it's happening a lot of places. And I'm wondering how you think about two different versions of this.

27:01Peter Kafka:One, how do you work with someone like an Emily Sundberg who's been on this show, who has her own center of gravity, but she's very adjacent to a lot of what you guys are doing and very interested in that world? What do you do for either Emily or someone like her to say, hey, you're off on your own and you're successful, but we think you can work with us? What is that pitch like? And the second part of that question is, if you have an Emily Sundberg at Vogue before she becomes Emily Sundberg. How do you keep her there? How do you keep her at Vanity Fair? Yeah. Look, I think that these new outlets for creatives or journalists are very good.

27:43I mean, this is an industry that's been under pressure. There are fewer jobs in it than there were five years ago. That trend you've seen year after year. So, new outlets and new ways for journalists or creatives to be able to develop businesses that can sustain them is only good. For us, it does make us think differently about how we operate and how we work with journalists and creatives. We have to be more creative. We have to say, okay, there may be somebody who's got a sub stack who is in an adjacent field that we can work with in some areas, and they'll have their sub stack, It's not necessarily competitive what we do, but it's not part of our business.

28:30And that's OK. So, I think you'll probably see us do more of that rather than less of that.

28:34Peter Kafka:What does work with them look like? Is that you can freelance for us? Could be, or they could be writing a column for us, as an example. And what is the upside for, I'll just keep saying Emily Sundberg, but she's a generic stand-in here at this point, For them who produce their own content, get paid well for it, and are profiled in the New York Times, what is Condé Nast giving them by saying, you can now publish in our outlet, too? Well, look, I think for most of them, they may have a substatement. Let's take someone like Lachlan Cartwright at Vanity Fair. He has Breaker, which is his own. And he's been on the show.

29:15A publication, yeah. It's great. He does that, but it's a limited audience that he'll reach on his own. Also, working with us at Condé Nast or at Vanity Fair gives him access to a much broader reach audience than he would be able to develop just on his own. To me, it's a pretty good model to have where you can have somebody as talented as he is and connected as he is building his own business, but at the same time collaborating with us in a way that works for both parties.

29:45Peter Kafka:And what about the retention idea? Let's say you've got a Lachlan Cartwright on Vanity Fair, and he goes, oh, wait, I could be making 3x what I make if I go off and do my own sub-stack and podcast, etc. How do you convince them to stick around? Or do you say, go off and do your own thing, but we're going to make some arrangement with you? Look, we haven't had a lot of that happen, But I think that the unfortunate case with Substack is there aren't that many that really can make a good living doing it. And I think those that do find that also it is hard work. It is you are constantly having to produce.

30:25You are constantly having to think about how you grow your business. And for some people, that's exhilarating and can be very successful. And some, it's exhausting. And so, I think there's a limit as to how many people will be able to do that in a way that really supports their lifestyle.

30:46Peter Kafka:Yeah, there's many more than I thought there were going to be five, six years ago, but it's still a limited universe. I think it is. But again, that doesn't mean there's not an opportunity for them to do that and to work with us in certain ways. We'll be right back, but first, a word from a sponsor. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling, and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them.

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31:37Peter Kafka:And we're back. Talk me through how you're thinking about platforms these days. In the old days, I would say, what do you think about Facebook? What do you think about Apple News? I'm still curious about that. But I want to hear you talk about Google and the AI companies. It looks like you are. You tell me, because it kind of seems like you're washing your hands at Google, but I'm not sure if that's the case. And you're definitely doing deals with the AI companies. And it seems like in all these cases, the platforms have something to offer you, and there's a lot of risk of being dependent on the platforms.

32:09The first thing is, start with our audiences. And I've always been a believer in, you have to observe what your audience or your customers are doing, and try to craft your business model around that. And audiences are on these platforms. It's very important for our brands to be where our audiences expect them to be. I think TikTok was a great example of that. When TikTok launched in the U.S., we saw a growth of Vogue on TikTok, but not by us. People were producing content under the Vogue name, putting it on TikTok. That was a really strong indication that audiences expected Vogue to be on there.

32:50We jumped in a big way. There was no revenue. There was no revenue model that we had for this. But it was important, I felt, for us to be there because our audiences expected us to be there. We'd figure out, that's been the history of the internet. It starts with engagement, and then monetization figures itself out later. That's what's happened with us in TikTok, because now we have ways to sell ads around our content, and it's become a good business for us. It starts with, where do our audiences expect our brands to be? Let's make sure we're there. Now, your specific questions around AI...

33:25Peter Kafka:Well, wait, even before we get to AI, though, right? Because it's one thing to say, I want to be on TikTok, or in the old days, it's important for me to be on Facebook, or pick your place, and that makes sense. There's a difference between that and saying, I'm going to do a commercial deal where either I'm going to make stuff for the platform, and they're going to reward me with traffic, or we don't have a commercial deal, but also they're using all my content and not sending me any traffic. I'm wondering how you think through all that. Because you do have to be there, but you can also end up just building a business for someone else and getting very little on the way back.

33:58Always a risk. So, as I mentioned, it starts with the audience. In terms of these platforms, I don't believe that any of these platforms owe us an obligation to send us traffic or customers or audience. I also don't believe that they have the right to use our content to come and compete directly with us. So, if Google wants to change its search algorithms and stop sending traffic to publishers, as we've all seen, the amount of traffic that comes to publishers from search has declined precipitously, that's fine. They can have their business reasons around it. It doesn't give them the right to use our content to then come and compete with us for those audiences.

34:41businesses. That's the rub there. For AI, the risk is these AI companies use the content that our journalists create and use it to compete with our core business model. Now, if they want to negotiate with us and enter into license agreements like OpenAI has done or Amazon or Microsoft or Perplexity, fine. Then we can come to terms on how that will work. Those that don't do that, or worse, frankly, in the case of Google, they tie their scraping of AI content to their search scraping. Google's been found to be dominant in search. They don't let you opt out of scraping your content for AI unless you opt out for search, which is very difficult for a publisher to do.

35:34I think that's anti-competitive. I think it's wrong that they do that. But, look, these companies are also our partners. So, we can have disagreements in some area of our business and strong alignment in other areas. Again, with Google, we're one of the largest publishers on YouTube. We have a very, very good, strong relationship with YouTube. And it's really core to our business and really important for them, too.

35:58Peter Kafka:And you've said Google search is basically going to go to zero or something close to that for you, or basically stop showing up as referral traffic sooner than later because of the AI summaries they're doing. Google Discover is this hugely important product for publishers that I think most regular people don't know about. That isn't often as big a deal or bigger than Google search. Are you still working to get your stuff showing up on Google Discover? We do get traffic from Google Discover, but it is very different traffic than search. Search is intent-driven traffic. Google Discover traffic doesn't convert for subscription, doesn't convert for commerce.

36:41You may be able to sell a few ads around it, but it is far less important. Spell out why it's less important. Jason Moser - If somebody goes to Google and types Vogue shopping recommendations, there is real clear intent with what they're looking for. If they're going to Google to search for something and they see an article promoted that catches their eye and they click on it, it's much less committed. It's great. We love to get traffic from Google Discover, But that person is much less likely to become a Vogue subscriber, a New Yorker subscriber, or even transact in commerce than someone who shows much more intent through search.

37:23So it is not a replacement. Even though we've seen Discover Traffic grow as search traffic has declined, that's a bad trade-off.

37:31Peter Kafka:When we get off this call, I'm going to slack some people I work for, and I'm going to say, here's what Roger Lynch, the CEO of Canada now, says about Google Discover Traffic. I'll let you know how that goes. Jim Bankoff agrees 100 % with me. Jim's one of the people I work for, at least as of today. We're recording this on Tuesday, May 12th. Did you take a look at the Vox Media Podcast Network, which is recording this podcast? It's an asset that is probably going to trade hands very soon. Yeah, I'm not going to comment on that, Peter. Fair enough. I'll take that as a maybe. With the AI deals, given that you've now gone multiple rounds with different platforms, and you've seen all the promise and peril and pitfall, What is most important to get out of the AI companies?

38:15Peter Kafka:Is it straight cash, like you're going to use our stuff? Pay us? It sounds like the referrals aren't really a thing, that most people are not clicking through those footnotes and AI results. What is the best case scenario for you in these AI deals? First and foremost, it is to have a license arrangement, which reflects the fact that this is copyrighted content. You're using our stuff? Pay us. Yeah. Not just pay us, but agree to terms on how you're going to use it. Just like when I was in the music industry or we did film and television, these license deals, you can think about two main components.

38:53There's the money, but there's also the use, the grant of rights. How can you use it? And most importantly, how can you not use it? So as an example, we would never do a deal with an AI company that says, take all of our New Yorker content and just show it verbatim to your customers. That wouldn't be in our interest. We would put conditions around it. So, the terms of the licensed deals are just as important as the money that's generated from them. We don't think that they will refer traffic anywhere near the rate at which search did. But, there's an interesting dynamic that we see. You mentioned that I said search is going to go away.

39:38We chased it for a number of years. Each year we'd do our budget and we'd say, search is going to decline, just because we don't know why, but we know there'll be some algorithm change that'll cause it to decline. Yeah, and each of the last three years or so, we underestimated the decline. And so, last year we said, we're going to take a different approach. I told all of our teams, you need to plan your businesses around there being no search. And if you don't have a plan for that, you may not have a business. We took that approach. I think it was very effective because it caused people to really think about, how do we generate audiences that have strong intent and strong engagement?

40:19Now, as search declined, we saw our direct audiences grow. I think it was in part the work that we were doing, but I think it was also in part because Because if you think about the example I gave, I said Vogue shopping recommendations or something like that. You type that in a search algorithm. If what you get in return is an AI summary or a bunch of Google links to Walmart or whoever the deal is, that's not a satisfactory outcome. You might just type into a search bar Vogue.com and then find it that way. So we've been seeing direct traffic grow dramatically where it's the majority source of our traffic now.

40:57And I think our teams would like to say, oh, it's because we've done such a great job. And I think that is largely true. But I think it is also because people are finding less relevant search results than they used to. And so, where they used to use Google in some ways as a navigation tool, they're finding that navigation. It's very effective, the AI summaries, for answering really simple questions, but less so for things that involve taste. This is one of the big things that I've seen in the discussions that we've had with AI companies. Three or four years ago, when we started negotiating with them, it was a bit surreal.

41:37One company in particular told us, OK, we need to know how many words you have. It's like, OK, do the words matter? Just any words? Can you tell us how many words you have? because we pay by the word. We're like, okay, this is going to be a long discussion. But we got through it, negotiated these deals, and then as these services answer engines started to become used more and more, these companies started to realize that our content was being used in their answers much more significantly. So, they started coming back to us like, oh, okay, we see your content really matters in certain areas. And now there's a whole debate about whether AI has taste or could ever replicate taste.

42:23Perfect. That is our core business. Creativity, taste. I think that creates much more opportunities for us now in how we can work with AI companies.

42:36Peter Kafka:What about the worry that even though you're getting paid today, even though you have restrictions and limits around how you can use your work, that inevitably what you're doing is building up these platforms, making them more and more useful. And certainly one of the products they might come out with one day is not their own version of Vogue, but just things that deliver enough information to people that's tailored the way they want, that they really don't have any need to go somewhere else most of the time. And you're essentially building a thing that will put you out of business, which is a recurring issue with all the platforms, but it seems more likely than ever with AI?

43:14I think it is more likely than ever with AI for brands that don't have the authority that our top brands have. I don't worry about AI putting Vogue or The New Yorker out of business. It just will never replicate what those brands and what the editorial teams can do with those. If you have, and you mentioned some of the companies that have gone by the wayside, Look, I think they were the darlings of these platforms when they were sending them all the traffic. They did a really effective job of arbitrage and taking intent-driven searches or video or whatever and turning it into commerce transactions or ads or things like that.

44:01But they were entirely reliant on that traffic continuing. When that traffic went away, what What they didn't have was brands that had the level of authority that, frankly, our brands have.

44:16Peter Kafka:This is what every publisher tells me, how they're going to survive this. Our brands are meaningful. People have relationships with our brand. We're going to create even more direct relationships with our brand. People will come to us because our thing is special. Let's stipulate that you said seven of your brands make 85 % of your revenue. So, seven of your brands all fit in that category. How many other publishers do you think are going to make it through this era? How many publishers do you think realistically have brands that resonate with enough people that they can stay afloat on their own without being disaggregated by AI?

44:51Well, first of all, I wouldn't want to give the impression that it's only very big brands that can be successful. Because we have some very small brands like Pitchfork. It's less than 1 % of our revenue. You fold it into GQ. But it has a high... We put it under GQ, but it has a separate editorial team and operates under its own brand. And has been very successful. It actually has one of the largest direct audiences. And now has a subscription product, which is doing very, very well. That's a brand that will do well in this era, because it has authority. It is more niche in its content area. It's never going to be as big as Vogue.

45:36But it has a point of view, and it has a loyal, dedicated audience. So it's not just big brand, small brand. It really is, does your brand have authority? Does it have connection with audience that is really deeper than search or discover traffic?

45:51Peter Kafka:Another way of putting my question, what percent of existing publishers do you think survived this era? Well, we've already seen a lot of that damage done today. So, of the publishers that are left, it's a higher percentage that will survive than it was five years ago. But certainly, they're not going to all survive. I think that writing is on the wall, or at least not in the form that they are today. Speaking of the future, one day, Anna Wintour and David Remnick will no longer work for you. They're not young people. They're very good at what they do. and your company seems, I don't know, dependent on them, leans on their authority in a really meaningful way at The New Yorker and then broadly for Anna Wintour.

46:39Peter Kafka:What is the plan when they leave? How are you thinking about who's going to fill those shoes? Well, first of all, for people that are in this field, those are the pinnacle jobs. They really are. and you're talking about two of the most successful editors ever. So it will be very, very difficult to find people who could ever replace them. But guess what? I'm sure the same was said about Grace Mirabella when she ran Vogue for several decades before Anna came in, or Tina Brown, or William Shawn, or any of the great editors that have been attached to these brands over many, many, many decades. Have either of them said, this is who I want to replace me, just don't tell anyone yet?

47:21No, no. It's very funny, because one of the things I also implemented when I joined was succession planning. It was very clear that this had never been done before it got in ass, and it caused people to be very uncomfortable to start talking about who could ever possibly replace them. But we always look to have a broad selection of potential people who could fulfill a role, but you never know whether they're going to be available or what the situation is. We also work to bring in talent specifically with the idea of succession. It's something that we run a really disciplined process every single year.

48:05I report it to my board, we spend time going through, we have our editors.

48:09Peter Kafka:Wait, so what does that look like? You run through a process of, if David Remnick got hit by a bus today, here's who would replace him? Look, the standard process for every company I've run is, you have an emergency successor identified, you have a list of people who could be ready now or in the next year or two, you have a list that could be three to five years, and a list that could be five-plus years. So these lists exist, the files exist, they're on your desk, as Pam Bondi would say. They're not on my desk, they are locked away! And you revise them periodically? We revise them every year. We go through a formal process where we evaluate it every year.

48:48Some names are added and some names drop off.

48:51Peter Kafka:Do Anna and David participate in this process? They do. Okay. All right. Let's find the list, people. Condé and Ask Moules, send me your stuff. Good luck with that one. Last question for you. The biggest movie in the world, I think, is Devil Wears Prada 2. It's about Condé Nast. They don't call it Condé Nast. They don't call it Vogue. It's about your company. It's owned by Disney. Do you participate financially? I know you guys did a lot of marketing for it. You had Anna and Meryl on the cover of Vogue. Do you participate financially in that movie's success? No, that movie is their movie. It's not our movie.

49:31And we have no direct participation in it, but we certainly have a lot of fun with it. I think Anna and Meryl going on the cover of Vogue, and as you may have seen, Chloe, our editor of American Vogue, had to work hard to convince Anna to do that, because that is not who she is, was fabulous. That cover of Vogue with the two of them was iconic. But what I would say is that movie has generated a lot of interest, not just about Vogue, but about Condé Nast. It's been good for our business. It's certainly been good for our business.

50:05Peter Kafka:I know for a while, every publisher, and we talked about this, said, hey, we make all this amazing. We make great stories, et cetera. These things are often turned into movies and television shows. You really got to lean into that and figure out ways to get these things made, either by ourselves or with partners. And for a while, during the streaming boom, the streamers were buying literally anything you guys could make. That does not happen anymore. How have you rethought the business of getting into Hollywood and television and streaming? Well, that business has shrunk as an industry. The number of new shows and films being produced has shrunk, and the time it takes to get something approved has shrunk.

50:48But for us, we had seven shows and movies premiere last year. We sold 11 new ones. So, our team, it's a very small team, but our team does, I think, a really good job punching above their weight with that. All of that starts with the IP of our journalism and our content.

51:08Peter Kafka:What's more important for you to figure that out or to figure out TikTok and short video that more people are consuming more often? Well, short-form video is a much bigger part of our business than film and television. So, in terms of revenue, certainly short-form video is very important for us. Trevor Burrus Roger Lynch, you've been there since 2019. How much longer do you have? When does your succession plan kick in? Roger Lynch I always tell people, I've started a number of companies. Most of the companies I run are companies I've started. And even companies I've started, I've gotten bored after maybe four or five years.

51:43And I know when I get that feeling, like, okay, I'm starting to get bored. Time for me to do something. I never get bored in this job. Honestly, there's, first of all, always really challenging problems to solve, and also the most interesting intellectual people to deal with. So, I have no plans on leaving. I really enjoy it, and I'm definitely not bored.

52:04Peter Kafka:As a bonus, you get to talk to people like me. Roger Lynch, thank you for your time. Thanks, Peter. Thanks again to Roger Lynch. Thanks again to Charlotte Silver, who produces and edits the show. Thanks to our advertisers, who bring it to you for free. thanks to you guys for listening more media bosses coming your way soon see you then

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