• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, April 29, 2014

Glam Media promised to do something at its NewFronts presentaton that nobody else would do, and I guess it succeeded, unless there are lots of other content providers that intent to change their names. It started the event as Glam and ended up as Mode Media, and with an ambitious, if still kind of blurry new path forward.

Glam, or make that Mode, unveiled a new curated platform of content, that broadly dotes on food and  fashion for men and women.

“Todaymarksa major transformation of Glam Media. Just 10 years ago, we founded a little start-up called Project X," says founder Samir Arora, adding it’s the seventh-largest U.S. media company and, he says it’s the top lifestyle property on the Internet.

Among, oh, about 10 million.

Mode, therefore, becomes a new multichannel operator with an umbrella brand and that allows the better-known Glam to stick around focused on fashion, beauty and style. Other channels, like Foodie, Tend (for families and parenting), Brash for men, Bliss for health, become channels under Mode Media.  But, I’m told, a separate Web site named won’t exist for a three to six months. Mode is a bunch of curated content done efficiently enough that if it beckons recipes for vegetarians, it can created a bunch of them in short order.

Letting Glam be Glam, as an entity inside Mode,  lets Mode also work around the slight impediment that Glam doesn’t work as a name for all the parts of what the company does. Mode is a better title that way.

Mode named several new content series--one about busy moms hosted by a former Miss America, another one called “Fashionista Mom” and so on. It does seem there’s only so much of this advice to go around, but in the case of Glam/Mode at least, they’re near the front of the line.

Mode Media was doing native advertising before it was native advertising; in fact, it was doing social media before it was called that, too, and the whole food, health, beauty slot put them in prime native advertising space. Arora says you can find Mode/Glam content in thousands of places on the Internet. The Mode/Glam thing to lots of users may not ever be exactly relevant or even known, it seems. But for advertisers, it makes a lot of sense.

pj@mediapost.com