What Decides the Fate of Publications’ Sub-Brands?
By: Chris Sutcliffe
Over the past few years, publishers have sought to reestablish the primacy of brand. In the era of social distribution, audiences typically cited seeing content ‘on Facebook’ instead of attributing it to the brand.
As a result of a confluence of factors, including the return of the first-party cookie to the top table, publishers have prioritized having a direct relationship with audiences instead. That has required that B2C media publishers reclaim that relationship without the platforms as middlemen—and one of the ways that they have attempted to do so is by reasserting the value of ‘brand.’
By investing in brand, publishers are attempting to build a strong foundation on which to base revenue strategies beyond advertising. Nada Arnot, The Economist’s executive vice president of marketing, told AMO:
A lot of brands, particularly during Covid, turned off brand awareness marketing because people weren’t out, so it didn’t make sense. And a lot of brands said, ‘Oh, that actually worked. We didn’t see any impact on our conversions…’ Fast forward a few years, and brands in general realize, ‘Oh wow, we have fewer people at the bottom to convert, because we don’t tell them about us at the very top.’
When I tell that story, it’s easier for The Economist to realize, actually, we do need to keep investing in the top of the funnel, and this is the way to do it.
BuzzFeed, for example, has repeatedly cited the strength of audience affection for the brand name as it seeks to diversify its revenue strategies. In mid-2019, Authentic Brands Group bought Sports Illustrated for $110 million with an eye on building out its ecommerce revenue, citing the name recognition of the brand as a key reason for the purchase. The Guardian, too, set out to build its global brand strength in service of increasing memberships in mid-2022, signing a partnership with an agency specifically for a US blitz of brand advertising.
As part of that effort, some media companies have launched new sub-brands that operate largely independently but still contribute to the bottom line of the parent brand.
BuzzFeed is a repeat offender in this regard, having launched multiple sub-brands including Tasty, Nifty and Goodful—all of which seek to reach audiences that the parent brand cannot or does not.
The same is occasionally true in B2B as well. In the UK, Haymarket Media Group launched a podcast-focused ‘sister brand’ to its marketing-focused title Campaign in late 2022. PodPod was an exploratory sub-brand designed to gauge marketers’ interest in the potential of podcast advertising, with a relatively small outlay and dedicated staff—typical of the initial launch conditions for sub-brands in both B2B and B2C.
Whether they’re called ‘sub-brands’ or ‘sister brands’, these new shoots from the parent brand have something in common: they are first and foremost an experiment in attracting a new audience and creating new revenue opportunities. That was very explicitly the aim of the Los Angeles Times launching the De Los sub-brand, which seeks to bring Latino audiences into the LA Times’ wider ecosystem in a way the parent brand cannot.
But whether they fail in that regard or ultimately succeed beyond all expectations, the publisher eventually has to appraise the worth of the new sub-brand in relation to its parent—at which point it has any number of options from closure to allowing it to overtake the original brand in popularity and purpose.
Promotion and spin-off
The most successful sub-brands can sometimes eclipse their parent.
In the UK, the Scottish national newspaper The Scotsman runs a variety of events, the vast majority of which have the brand name front and center. In 2019, however, it launched a podcast dedicated to the culture and production of food and drink across the country. Since then, Scran (a British and Irish slang term for ‘food’) has published hundreds of episodes and developed a huge following—and has taken primacy in the marketing for its food and drink awards.
And The Scotsman has not felt threatened by this, but rather, has chosen to increase its visibility. Rosalind Erskine, food and drink editor for The Scotsman, and host of Scran, told the audience at Publisher Podcast Summit in London:
I think we recognized that, since people love and listen to Scran, there was no conflict… The Scotsman is still present and there at the event [but] Scran is that main point of contact for the audience… it’s the ‘Scran’ name they recognize and what gets them to the event in a lot of cases.
As a result, the Scotsman has embraced the success of its sub-brand, pushing it even harder as a result of its ongoing success.
For other publishers, a successful spin-off or sub-brand is an opportunity—not for recurring revenue, but for a quick cash payout. The i was originally a tabloid spinoff of the national newspaper The Independent, but upon the proof of its viability its owner JPI Media took the unprecedented step of selling it to DMGT Media for £50 million to bolster its own coffers. And BuzzFeed has sold and been in talks to sell many of its sub-brands, including First We Feast.
Competition and closure
For other titles, however, what constitutes ‘success’ for a sub-brand often leads to different outcomes. PodPod, which we mentioned earlier, has since been folded back into the parent brand Campaign, taking its expertise and assets with it.
It is important to note, however, that getting reabsorbed is not a measure of failure in this case. Arguably PodPod has achieved exactly what it set out to do by creating that new audience for podcast content; at the time of the announcement Haymarket noted: “The strategic shift reflects how podcasting has grown to become a key part of the wider audio advertising market. Campaign will boost its coverage of the audio and podcasting industry and add the British Podcast Awards (BPAs) to its portfolio and PodPod will no longer exist as a brand.”
By contrast, however, a number of sub-brands get shut because of a strategic realignment at the parent brand. BuzzFeed News is probably the most visible casualty of that approach in the past few years, having been closed down in April 2023 as a result of BuzzFeed’s need to cut costs. The news-oriented sub-brand once offered BuzzFeed legitimacy which it sought to attract advertisers, but as it increasingly focused upon new sources of revenue like ecommerce, other sub-brands like Tasty took precedence.
In the end, sub-brands are primarily efforts to discover new audiences, to bring them into the ecosystem of the parent brand and its publisher. What determines whether they are ‘successful’ or not is often less to do with the length of time they exist, and more about whether they create new touchpoints for the publisher as a whole.
