It’s been less than a year since Group Nine Media acquired PopSugar — but it’s been a uniquely challenging time in digital media.
Brian Sugar founded the eponymous women’s lifestyle site with his wife Lisa Sugar. Post-acquisition, he’s become president for the entirety of Group Nine (which also owns Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Seeker) and also joined the company’s board.
That job probably looks very different from what he expected last fall. The company had to lay off 7% of its staff back in April, which Sugar described as “one of the worst days of my career.” At the same time, he remains confident about the online advertising business. In his view, it’s TV advertising that’s taken a “huge punch” in the face and will never recover.
“We like to think of ourselves as one of the fastest, most innovative publishers out there,” Sugar told me. “And now’s the time for us to kind of show that off.”
You can read an edited, updated and condensed transcript of our conversation below, in which I talked to Sugar about how his role has evolved, how he motivates the team during difficult times and what gets lost in the shift to remote work.
TechCrunch: Obviously, it’s been a crazy couple of months since we last talked. What does your job look like now?
Brian Sugar: Well, I feel like a data miner, searching for answers. I feel like a hackathon engineer. And I feel like a therapist. You know, we like to think of ourselves as one of the fastest, most innovative publishers out there. And now’s the time for us to kind of show that off.
[We’ve just been] looking at data on how people are consuming our content across platforms. And on our site, we’ve come up with some really interesting ideas that we’ve implemented. We’ve been having these really cool hackathon Fridays to build stuff quickly, because a lot of people feel like they have a little bit more time on their hands — because you don’t have to travel to meetings, you can get more work done. Some people feel they’re more efficient.
We’re extremely optimistic. All our brands are extremely optimistic, and so is [the whole] company.
You mentioned launching some new products to respond to how audience behavior is changing. Are there any examples?
The first one [is] the PopSugar Fitness thing. We were planning on launching a paid workout subscription service in May, but everybody was working from home [in March], and we decided to pull the launch all the way up to as fast as we can launch it. We launched it that following weekend. Since the launch in late March, over the past few months, we’ve had 200,000 people sign up, and we have 50,000 monthly active users on it.
There’s certainly a lot of other fitness content out there. How did you know that there was still room for something new?
PopSugar Fitness is just loved and we’ve been around for quite a while. So we always knew that it was big, you know? But obviously, as soon as coronavirus hit, I remember that first Monday: I exercise and one of my primary things is going to Soulcycle and obviously, I can’t go to those anymore. I was like, “Wow, we need to launch this,” because I just started to see our video views on YouTube start to go up.
We launched it for free, and everybody’s loving it. That was the first and fastest thing that we did, within a week of everybody sort of shutting down. That’s been a huge win for us across the board. We’ve now built this really cool thing where you can actually work out with a friend.
When you talk about the different pieces of the job, to what extent do you feel like you are still in putting-out-fires mode? Do you have any degree of clarity, being able to think about what your strategy looks like for the rest of 2020 and into 2021?
When we first got in lockdown, I think we acted really quickly. From an operator perspective, we put together a 2020 operating plan that took assumed ad revenue down by a significant amount. And then, unfortunately, like many other companies, we furloughed and laid off a whole host of people, which was probably one of the worst days of my career — because you can’t have the personal interactions with people. But I thought we executed that as best as one could in that situation.
I would say we’re not really putting out fires. We put out the huge fire in the beginning, by necessity. I’m still optimistic.
But there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that we did that was kind of cool. We launched a Sparkle product, which is this ad product that’s this mobile-first swipe up, this really cool thing that’s been around before and we added grocery buying to it. So we can now show you a video of a recipe on Instagram and then you can swipe up and it will add all of the items to Walmart or whatever your favorite grocery store is.
One of the big insights we have is, parents want to keep their kids busy, and calm is a big concern for all of us. I don’t want [my daughter] Elle browsing weird slime videos from YouTube. I wanted her to be doing some of her own education, or at least have stuff that I can just play.
So our brand Seeker launched this thing called Seeker Learning, which has this really awesome Health and Science content that really engages Elle, which I’m super excited about. So we just hit play and I know what she’s watching.
How has the transition to remote work been going?
There’s some really positive things, and there’s also some negative things. From a negative perspective, I think people are lonely. There’s different people in all these different circumstances. Some people are just tired and overworked from family life and all that. But the thing that I missed the most that I find super negative is missing the hallway, impromptu conversations. You know, you pass a salesperson: ’Where were you?’ ‘I was just at the Banana Republic, Gap and we talked about X, Y and Z.’ I’ll be like, ‘Oh, did you know we’re working on this?’ That whole impromptu [conversation] is gone.
People have adapted really nicely to Zoom, Google Hangouts and all the other stuff, playing with fun backgrounds, and everybody’s doing various different cocktail hours and all this good stuff. When the Zoom thing clicks on, I think people are pretty happy to see each other. There’s been a lot of fun stuff going on, like people are playing trivia games, the company’s community is surviving and thriving.
I just want to safely get back to work. But, you know, we’re really questioning, do we need more real estate or not? Because we’re going to have to open out, people can’t sit on top of each other like they did, so what are we going to do about that?
How do you get the team excited when there’s just so much uncertainty around advertising and media right now?
I’ll tell you, when you look at our massive audience growth across everything for the last two months, it’s clear that the content that we’re creating, people love and share and engage with and it makes them feel good. You want to stop reading about COVID, so you’re going to go watch an amazing animal video on The Dodo, you’re going to do a workout with PopSugar, you’re going to learn from Seeker, you’re going to read about your favorite restaurants and how they deliver on Thrillist. I think we’re handling all the non-newsy stuff pretty well.
We create good, optimistic content, and people are looking for that. If we were at like a restaurant or travel, I don’t know how you keep people pumped and excited about that.
Has this made you rethink the role that advertising plays in your business for the next few years?
Oh, quite the contrary. I think there’s two industries that are going to be forever hurt, the first one being traditional retail. People with a lot of stores are going to have problems. “Oh, I can buy toilet paper on the internet, maybe I will do that.” So that’s number one.
The second one’s much bigger for us. We’ve been talking for 15 years about how TV ad dollars want to come over to the internet. This is its moment. I mean, the fact that people are home, not watching that much more TV than a year ago, is extremely eye-opening to the advertisers. People that are creating content like us, and the platforms, are just going to see a huge windfall. Group Nine has hit a record 7 billion monthly views last month across its brands.
There’s a short-term issue right now, but as [advertising] slowly comes back, I think when you’re deciding where you’re going to spend an ad dollar, magazines and newspapers are completely dead, this was the huge punch that TV took in the face and it’s never coming back. So I’m feeling glorious about the future of our position as one of the largest video content creators.
How quickly do you think that transition will happen?
I think over the course of the next 12 months, there’s going be really highly quotable data about dollars that moved over. LIke, billions of dollars that were spent on TV is going to move over to digital distribution. We’re already starting to see it now. And I’m sure Snapchat, Facebook, Google, they’re all in a prime position to capture all of that, just like us.
Obviously you had to adjust to a new reality, but in terms of the strategic direction of each of the properties and the overall company, it sounds like you didn’t feel like there was any need for a dramatic change?
The only thing that we have on hold is PopSugar Playground and some of our other event things. I’m pretty hopeful that by next summer when Playground comes back — I mean, I’ve got to believe we’ll be able to have an event like that. We’re actually talking to other event companies to partner with, and working with them on certain things right now, because those event companies are really, really hurting.
But I think that this is an underlying boldface in terms of our focus and dedication to digital media. We thought it was going to take a three-to-five-year horizon for all those dollars to come over, and COVID is only accelerating that to be a 12-month horizon for us.
To what extent do you have to have contingencies for (a) there’s a relatively rapid recovery versus (b) we really have to figure out how to tighten our belts even further, because this is going to be something that goes on for a while?
We plan that this is going to go on throughout this entire year — our plan for each quarter wasn’t like all of a sudden, Q4 is the same as it was. We took all quarters down pretty dramatically. And I’ll tell you that it looks like Q2, we’re going to hit because we obviously planned it right.
So I’m feeling good about that, but I’m not doing any victory laps or we’re not hiring gobs of people and doing stupid things. It really created an environment where we looked under every single desk. It was like: We need to get really fit now. And we did.