Condé Aligns Ad Sales Teams At Brand Level

As part of a broader sales and marketing overhaul, Condé Nast late Tuesday said digital sales and marketing would shift to the individual brand level.

Per the realignment, the Condé Nast Digital sales and marketing team will join The Condé Nast Media Group to form one multiplatform, multi-brand unit. As such, all sales and marketing at The Condé Nast Media Group will now come together under Chief Marketing Officer Lou Cona. "By integrating its sales and marketing expertise into the Media Group, we are positioned for maximum growth and are better aligned with the industry," Cona said on Tuesday.

Drew Schutte, currently SVP, chief revenue officer of Condé Nast Digital, will become EVP, chief integration officer for Condé Nast Media Group. Reporting directly to Cona, Schutte will serve as the primary liaison between the brand publishers and The Condé Nast Media Group.

Going forward, Schutte will oversee all pricing, planning, and creative marketing in support of the integration of print and digital for single-site brands.

Josh Stinchcomb, currently publisher, Internet Sales Group, will become VP of digital sales for Condé Nast -- also reporting to Cona and working to integrate digital sales.

Condé Nast Digital will now focus on developing and executing the company's digital growth strategy, and will oversee content and operations for emerging digital businesses.

These structural changes reflect the new strategic focus announced by Condé Nast in July, while a transition schedule for the changes will begin immediately and continue throughout 2011.

Under pressure to create greater efficiencies of scale, Condé Nast in early 2009 replaced a scattered digital approach with a single division dubbed Condé Nast Digital. The alignment of assets came just over two years after Condé Nast seized operations and maintenance of its individual magazine sites -- including Glamour and Vanity Fair -- from what was then called CondéNet. Along with broad ad sales assistance, CondéNet had since overseen portals like Concierge and Epicurious, along with Wired Digital.

The bigger picture: looking 15 years down the road, digital circulation and advertising revenues from new devices like the iPad will make up roughly one-third of Condé Nast's total publishing revenues, Nicholas Coleridge, the managing director of Conde Nast U.K., said last month. It was not clear, however, whether Coleridge was referring to the U.K. -- or global -- market.

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