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Mark Ford and Terry McDonell from Time Inc. Sports Group explain how to compete in a market that is saturated with free content.
Mark Ford and Terry McDonell from Time Inc. Sports Group explain why you should not monetize social media... yet.
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Mark Ford and Terry McDonell from Time Inc. Sports Group explain how they transitioned the iconic Sports Illustrated Magazine onto a digital platform and made a healthy profit in the process.
Mark Ford and Terry McDonell from Time Inc. Sports Group explain why tablets are the future of print.
Mark Ford & Terry McDonell, President & Editor, Time Inc. Sports Group
Mark Ford In January of 2011, Mark Ford was appointed EVP of Time Inc. and President of Time Inc.’s newly formed Sports Group. He will now oversee the global and international business development and operations for Sports Illustrated, the Sports Illustrated Golf Group and SI Kids franchises which together reach 30 million sports fans and generate $600 million in revenue. Ford will also work in partnership with Turner Sports to create the #1 sports web business. In addition, he will seek opportunities across all Time Warner sports operations (Warner Bros., Turner Sports and HBO) to align and leverage Time Warner’s sports assets, build a multiplatform sports business and new revenue streams for the company. Terry McDonell Terry McDonell is the editor of the Time Inc. Sports Group. McDonell directs all editorial content and operations of the weekly magazine Sports Illustrated, SI.com, GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com, as well as SI Kids, FanNation.com and international editions including SI China, SI South Africa, SI India and others.
Anna Gilligan: Sports Illustrated is so successful because of its storytelling. That doesn’t necessary mesh well with the digital platform where you have really short attention spans. Terry McDonell: Well you just articulated probably the dumbest idea of 1996 which was what people used to attack print media then when USA Today was growing. The idea was that everybody likes short, simpleminded things when in fact they don’t. The reading experience on the tablet is every bit as satisfying as the reading experience in the magazine, in a book, in whatever. This is what accounts for the great growth in e-books. There was some thinking about this probably two years ago that sounds almost remedial now but what it was it was a declination between a lean back experience and a lean forward experience. You probably remember that. A lot of people were talking about that. That’s when the best word in the language according to marketers was curation. We’ve moved past that. But what it meant was that a tablet was a lean forward experience where you would get deeper and deeper into it and you would read and there would be enrichments and you would be able to punch through basically into deeper and deeper, deeper levels of what were like networks or channels and that that was what that was about. This is opposed to leaning back and just hitting stuff and shooting around on the Web. It turned out that that was a very interesting speech as made by many of my colleagues. Didn’t – and it was fundamentally true except that we don’t talk in that language anymore. We just talked in that language when we were trying to explain something that was a time very surprising that people would actually read on a tablet when in fact that’s what they do now. Mark Ford: Yeah. We always knew too SI.com would become – the technology would evolve in a way that would become a richer reader experience and it sure enough came with the tablet. Everyone was so focused on just – it’s got to be the Web browser and it’s got to be about SI.com or whatever digital property. Well all these mediums work together in different ways and you have to communicate differently to sports fans depending on what medium you’re using. If you’re using television you go one way, print another way, tablets another. Then when you dive into emerging digital media it’s different on the phone than it is on SI.com. We know that and appreciate it and do lots of research so we can engage those fans however they want it depending on what medium they’re using.
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