And then I would love to introduce our first panel. We have three of the biggest heavy hitters in media publishing that are joining us. We have Jessica Sibi, who is the CEO of Time, one of the oldest publishing brands in America.
Hi Jack. Will Lee, who's the CEO of AdWeek, and as I'm sure you can imagine, this is Will's Super Bowl. And then we have Jim Bankoff, who is the CEO of Vox Media.
And for those of you who may not be familiar with Vox Media, Vox is the parent to every consumer brand that you probably use every single day. So if you think about SB Nation, if you think about New York Magazine or Grub Street or The Verge or Vox.com, Eater, Jim is everybody's boss.
All right, so Joe teed us up really nicely to talk about AI. And all three of these publishers know more about AI and the media landscape than anyone else. Let me start with you, Jess. Time has been very, very aggressive in pursuing opportunities around AI. You have a deal with OpenAI. You have put your own chatbot on some of your stories. The Taylor Swift Person of the Year story had its own sort of AI navigation. So you seem pretty bullish. Do you have any concerns, though, that if we don't get these partnerships right, we can move back into a world of like social media where publishers were taken advantage of?
Well, Axios and Sara, thank you for having me, and you are also a heavy hitter. So congratulations to what you guys have done, seriously crushing it. You introduced me as old Time, as old Jess, not you.
And you're right. Yes, leading a hundred-plus-year-old media brand, and we can't lose that, and we have to stay relevant. And so I think it's a great place to start with what is the biggest concern that is for us of having another hundred years of what is so special about Time and is so important in terms of journalism.
And yes, I will just say quickly because I want to hear just as much from the other panelists, but I think inning one for us was, are we going, we had a guiding principle with AI: are we going to litigate, negotiate, or do nothing? We quickly moved through that stage. We decided we're going to negotiate. Kind of feel like we're in inning two now of our AI journey, which is three sort of other new guiding principles. The first is infrastructure, which is really protecting our IP, not just what we do every day, but our hundred years of archives, our photo journalism, our text journalism, and how do we track that, how do we measure that, how do we verify that from scrape or steal.
Second is content and distribution. So how do we create partnerships? You mentioned a few. And then third is monetization. So how do we, and what we've done for 100 years as Time Magazine, be able to innovate as a business and as a brand in what was a search ecosystem, now an AI-driven ecosystem. So how do we monetize that?
And then lastly, so that's Time AI. We launched a lot of innovative programs with Scale AI, and then we also need to upskill ourselves, you know, leading with me and the entire organization. So AI at Time is sort of the second initiative that we've launched to make sure that we're using all of our partners and getting the best that we can. To know, I don't really know where this is going. You can't predict the future, says Sam Altman. So that's where we're at.
So you guys are doing a lot. Jim, Vox Media has also really leaned in heavily. You have a deal with OpenAI, but there's always a pressure and a tension sometimes between pushing the organization to explore something that you know is the future, but also getting employees excited about it and not feeling threatened about it. You know, you guys have a union, other companies have unions, and this has been a tension sometimes. How are you getting your employees excited about it and not scared about it?
First of all, thank you to Sara and Joe and everyone else. It's great to be here and just like look over there. It's gorgeous. I'm trying to look here, though. Look at the camera. Look at the camera. But, you know, it's right, you have to, let's just state some of the obvious, which is people are concerned about their future, understandably. I get it, not just in our industry, in every industry.
Yet at the same time, those very same people, you mentioned our union, for instance, we just signed a, you know, we kind of continued our CBA where, you know, it's all good, but one of the things that came up was use of AI. And, you know, ultimately what we said and what we agreed to was like, we just don't know where this is going, so we want to treat our people well. So like, you know, we will treat our people well. But the same people are using AI products in their personal life, and, you know, they're very smart people, and they understand that there is opportunity in addition to threat.
So I think Jess articulated really well, like for us, it's about productivity. It's about helping the consumer experience, not through like content creation, not by you having AI voices of our podcasters or things like that. We're not like trying to directly replace the creation process. What we are trying to do, though, is create a better audience experience by helping with discovery.
So for instance, Eater in our app is getting better and better about surfacing the amazing human Eater content by making it just easier to navigate. So I'm looking for a table for four in this neighborhood. My son has a nut allergy. We like fish. And all of a sudden, all the great stuff that the humans made is more accessible and more utility for that.
Another example is with The Strategist. My 12-year-old niece loves soccer. It's her birthday. What should I get her? You can do those searches in other places, but if you know and love The Strategist, which is our shopping brand, you will have their tone, their opinion on those things. And if we do a good job, technology has facilitated that.
And then I can go on and on about how we're making the advertiser experience better as well. Of course, we're doing, you know, kind of the analytics and all the other things that you can use AI for. But, you know, I'm not going to ask for a show of hands because I guarantee I would have 100% participation on like, you know, who is using AI in their lives. It's all of us.
And it's everyone, including people who may, you know, be threatened that like our industry gets a lot of attention, a lot of focus. It should. There are other industries that, you know, there's true, you know, decimation. How I think I saw it, maybe it was an Axios, I don't recall, but Andy Jassy saying that like this is a real thing and it is happening, and people particularly in the coding industries, et cetera, are going to have to ride with the change and there will be displacement because of that. So we're not trying to be naive, but, you know, our job right now is to create great experiences that hopefully create more opportunity.
Yeah, Will, where you sit, Adweek is the authority on all things advertising. Publishers obviously make most of their money on advertising. The concern right now in the publishing space, and this has been the big conversation at Cannes, has been so many publishers get advertising revenue from search traffic, and if we are moving into a world where we don't have traditional clickable search, we are just doing AI chatbots, they're not going to get that traffic and their ad businesses will implode. And so now everyone's trying to do subscriptions and events and other things. My question to you is, is this as existential as people are making it sound?
Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think, you know, when you see Google referrals go down like 30% in a matter of a couple months or two or three months, like that's going to hurt like a lot. I think, you know, this, I mean, I'd like to think Adweek in our sort of narrow niche way does have a beachhead, right, that can drive subs, membership, community, events, like all the things that are more AI-proof than, you know, trying to monetize, you know, 50-cent CPM banner ads against, you know, microwaved content, right? Like, I don't, you know, that's not good.
I mean, I think the fortunate thing for the three of us is that the brands that we represent actually have real fidelity with the, are very high fidelity brands with the consumer. So therefore, when you want to know something, you know, oh, I'm going to go to Eater. I'm not going to put like, you know, where should I go, you know, to get, you know, Northern Italian in the West Village of Manhattan into like ChatGPT, the answers are going to suck. I'm just going to go straight to Eater app because I know I'm going to get a much better curated experience. Or if I want to know about geopolitical climate, you know, the things that Time is so good at, I'm going to go there.
And then for Adweek, it's like, yeah, like we're going to have more information. I'll just use the example, we sort of soft launched an AI agent this week on the site. And you ask it, where should I go to the bathroom at Cannes, right? It's all Cannes-focused. We just said it's going to be about the information, our corpus about Cannes. So it's like, where should I go to the bathroom at Cannes? I'm at this address, and it'll give you a good result.
So, and, you know, fortunately I have a chief of staff who's sitting here, Mike Baum, who has a very high processing GPU in his head to think about all these things. And so we've been pretty aggressive about trying to use it as a tool. I'd say the other thing from our perspective, from a journalistic perspective, is there's a lot of data in what we do, right? We are sort of in the business of, if you think about our model, it's like there's a lot of movement in this industry. It's like people moving, marketers moving, agencies moving, accounts moving, and a lot of our monetization is about monetizing movement, right?
And so if you think about that, then the parsing of the data and the structuring of the data that comes out of all that movement, whether it's money or it's people, that stuff is just so much faster when you apply AI to it. And we're already doing that in a lot of ways to just get better information that people can use, right, every day. So that's kind of how we look at sort of, you know, it's not playing defense. It's really just like building the thing that can't be replaced by another chatbot.
Quick follow-up to that, Will. During the social media era, the feedback that we all realized in hindsight was that the deals that we had struck actually were not constructive to helping the publisher businesses. If you think about Instant Articles on Facebook or some of these Google news carousels, are you concerned that the current set of deals that publishers are striking with AI companies, we will one day look back and say, man, we did not negotiate strong enough?
I mean, these guys will have a much better opinion because we're just not big enough to matter to them. They're like, yeah, sure, fine. We'll make a deal with you for like 10 cents, right? So, great. Good luck.
I mean, I think the hindsight, the history of the last 20 years of digital media is that, yeah, everything that we did, we look back on and say, like, why the f*** did we, like, why did we do that, right? And like, why did we agree to do Instant Articles? And if you guys remember mid-roll in Facebook videos, like, that we thought it was a good idea to create videos that were like gonna, we had to stop them at 25 seconds and put a 15-second mid-roll. And so it's like, yeah, of course we're going to look back.
Now, fortunately, you have people like, you know, Mark and Jess and Jim who are like, have seen it, right? And they lived through it and they lived through the pain of having to suck up to Facebook every two years, right, in some way. And like, move fast and break other people's business.
I mean, if you just think about the power that these like sort of mid-level, and no offense to anybody in the room who does or did this job, these mid-level partner managers at Facebook or Google that you just sucked up to all the YouTube, like, oh man, would you please promote me a little bit more? Or like, oh, can you tell me when the next algo tweak is going to come? It's like, I don't want to live like that, right? So I don't think we should be, we should, yes, we may be beholden to, but it's hopefully we've learned from that.
Wait, so I have so many thoughts. Jess, so your deal, like the deals that you're striking, how do you feel confident that you're not going to put yourself in that position? Is it because they include real-time content capture? Is it because you own the outputs? Like, how do you know that you're not going to be putting your company in that position?
Well, we take a bigger view than just a financial view of the deals. And we are owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff. Marc Benioff, the day ChatGPT launched, texted me and Sam Altman and said, get on the phone and talk about this. And are we on the record here?
Yeah, it's being video recorded.
