00:00 Brian Sotzi
The person I’m currently joining here at Cannes Lions is Jessica Sibley, CEO of Time Inc. Jessica is always nice to spend time with you in general, but of course you are at the Cannes Lions. This has many big moments in the media industry. What were the early surprises you hear and see on the ground here?
00:19 Jessica Sibley
Well, it’s the first day so far, not that much, but thank you Brian, for welcoming me. It’s always great to sit and talk to you in this incredible environment and it’s going to be a great can for many conversations. And I’m excited to be here.
00:35 Brian Sotzi
From what I was able to convey, I am here for a day and a half, one of the major themes of how AI is trying to change the advertising industry, but the media publishing industry is also changing. How do you embed it in what you are doing?
00:50 Jessica Sibley
Now, I think AI is everything, and there’s a conversation happening every day at Cannes. Well, we are truly proud of everything we did to lean on AI. I think our journey is probably in Chapter 2. Well, we started early on this journey, but we decided to start with the principles of guides. Well, we decided to negotiate. We are going to opt-in and we want to be part of this technology and be part of what’s going on in the media industry. And we did a lot to take us where we are now.
01:24 Brian Sotzi
Many competitors take the opposite approach. They want to sue AI. What’s your advice to them?
01:35 Jessica Sibley
Well, we are on our journey and path. Well, I started the process about a year ago. Well, I wanted to create a time version of UH Agent AI. And we actually rfp 12 different companies. Then we chose three finalists and Scale AI. I know you’re covering this story with a $15 billion investment in scale. We have decided to partner with Scale to develop something like Phase 1 of Time AI. Well, they indexed our entire 100-year archives and trained private LLMs. We launched this year with people. We knew that optics would grow alongside President Trump, so we went back to uh and trained models with four recent figures from Zelensky, Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. Um, what does that mean? Um, I wanted to accept it again and be part of it in contrast to the lawsuit, um, intentionally, with the results of personalized content, multimodal content, and AI responses. So the output was AI people’s time this year. You can translate it, you can summarise it. The podcast is actually an audio version. So the audio version of that content. And we continue on that journey. Well, we’re launching several other new initiatives on scale.
03:43 Brian Sotzi
Can you take us behind the scenes on some of these new initiatives? For example, an AI podcast has recently been released. What is an AI podcast? And how will AI appear at Time Inc. in a variety of amazing ways later this year?
04:01 Jessica Sibley
Well, it’s really the audio version. Well, it starts with training LLM Private for the safety and security and protection of our IP. This is more than just what we do today, but it’s been more than 100 years of journalism. And consumer expectations have been changed, which is very fast, sophisticated, dynamic, accelerating real-time results and multimodal and personalization. So the output of our content is launched with the audio version of UM The Newsletter, The Daily Brief. This is the biggest newsletter in terms of audience size, shooting four red stories on the homepage and creating a toolbar. You can also listen to one storyline in a 5-minute version or a 10-minute version, four-storey version. cool. And we were very intentional about training our voices. So go back to our history a bit, uh, there are Henry and Lucy and Henry Ruth. Also, much of the fun from the content is summaries, text, video, but audio. And we can once again create everything that partners with the UH scale.
06:08 Brian Sotzi
So, while time seemed to embrace AI, for others, there are many other publishers who haven’t taken that route. What is the endgame here? Someone has seen a lot of transitions. I think I’ll be back on your Forbes day. So you’ve gone through and managed many tough transitions in this industry. Is there a form of big shakeout coming here for this technology?
06:41 Jessica Sibley
Well, I can talk for the time. We embraced the whole history. So we started as a magazine and see where we are today. We leverage the technology that is available on every platform. We are truly proud to have 60 million people who spend time beyond the social network. So, this is part of what we do, and it’s in our DNA, we continue to do it and that’s where we are now. I think there are three parts regarding AI strategies. The first is infrastructure. So we protect our journalism, protect our IP, understand who is indexing, track it, who is stealing it, how they are using it. So there are a few partners who signed on right away. Well, the second is content partnerships. So, very early on, I recently signed with UH Perplexity, Openai and UH with Amazon Alexa Plus. And we want to sit at the table and be with these top executives. They seem like the smartest people building this, like our AI lab. We want to be a part of it and we want to be able to monetize it in the end. So UM AI solutions via Mobian are another partner we are really working closely with. And the last thing I say is that we recently launched AI. And it’s like an internal ripe of employees who are leveraging AI across all departments, not just our newsroom, but not just legal HR, but faster, faster, exploring, and understanding how to use it for their own business and our own efficiency, as well as strengthening and unreplaceable ways to enhance what we are doing.
09:36 Brian Sotzi
You recently put out the statistics, I think it was on the same release on AI podcasts. Sorry, I’m hooked on this concept of AI podcasts. I’m going to do a gig in 10 years, but anyway. Understood. Yeah.
09:48 Jessica Sibley
Well, I’m going to have you hear that. I’ll send it to you so that you can choose Henry or Lucy. Would you like to use it? Yeah.
09:55 Brian Sotzi
It’s my own, it’s my own personal. fair enough.
10:00 Jessica Sibley
Yeah.
10:01 Brian Sotzi
Advertising revenues rose 24% in the first half. I’m in this industry. I haven’t seen many other companies deliver such data points. How do you explain that strength, and is it double digit growth you still expect in the second half?
10:22 Jessica Sibley
That’s in our pivot to our b2b. So when I started now three years ago, we had to make many changes to the transformation. And one of the first things I did was come from the revenue side. So, what does that mean? Well, in direct collaboration with CEOs and CMOS, Executive Suite staff and chief communications officers have also compiled a collection of expensive customization programs around thought leadership and stories they want to tell as a company and even individual. And we work directly, and we are less dependent on platforms and intermediaries. Whether it’s ours or ours, we’re driving growth across all platforms. I’m in community, AI, climate, health and once again doing business and having ongoing conversations with the biggest brands. And we are truly proud of the outcome. They speak for themselves. Our pacing is on the rise, and the B2B business is on the rise, and I think it will mitigate risks in terms of the changes that are happening in AI. And finally, um, what we’re seeing is that we’re part of the ecosystem. Over the past two weeks, there have been 10 million mentions on AI’s response platform. And we see those numbers grow. So, if the algorithm changes have affected us in that we can monetize on our web pages, primarily through traffic coming from Google, we can monetize and contact our audience in the new ways they expect and demand. When I say podcasts, I have an explosion in getting information in a personalized way. Well, my editor and I were with him, Sam Jacobs. Imagine he’s going out for a 50-minute run. He loves to run, only 50 minutes.
13:02 Brian Sotzi
He’s running for 50 minutes, which is pretty good. that’s good. Yeah.
13:05 Jessica Sibley
It’s pretty good isn’t it? slow. And he is snl uh junkie. There was a big moment on the 50th anniversary. And he wants to hear the personalized audio version of what he wrote about SNL. It’s not the 50th year these days, but the past 100 years. Lauren Michaels was appointed in April this year with 100 hours. Well, he can enjoy listening to the time content again, working with scale AI and agent format. I think that’s one example. I’m not an audio person, I’m a text-based person, I love summaries, I love translations. Now you have the ability to chat and have that Q&A, that question and answer. So we’re storytelling in new ways and meeting current audiences. And we want to catch up. I want to strengthen my time for the next 100 years.
14:22 Brian Sotzi
Before I let you go, um, you wrote recently, I think it was your first operation on time, um, um, um, very powerful. For those who haven’t read it, um, why were you inspired to write about the female leaders in the media industry and the mentor you had?
14:41 Jessica Sibley
Well, thank you for that question, please point it out. I actually pitched this story to the media, but no one seemed to connect the dots or seem interested in the story, so I decided to write it myself for a while. And, um, throughout my career, you mentioned Forbes, I had the opportunity to build something like this entrepreneur with an incredible honor, you know, founders, change makers, and many of them were women and young people. And there are incredible communities that exist for these types of individuals. Well, for experienced leaders who tested their time and did this multiple times in multiple ways in multiple companies throughout their careers, there was actually no community of the same type. And, um, I’ve given up to me that we’re at the most complicated times in the media. No, you’re right. The companies split and got Warner Bros., CNN and Comcast.
16:00 Brian Sotzi
There are lawsuits and protecting journalists. So, it’s always a challenge and constantly changing, but this is a very important moment in history. And I realized that many media companies with legacy and resilient media companies are run by women. And then I started making a list, and it grew, it grew, it grew. And some of them I know, and some of them I don’t know, but I want to know. And I wrote Open about it. There is also this concept of glass cliffs and glass ceilings. And there’s too much of us to be a glass cliff moment. So read it, go to time.com, it’s free. And I think it’s a great perspective on what’s going on in the media today, and who some of the leaders are.
17:38 Brian Sotzi
Well, continue with those operations. Well, I enjoy your writing. Well, Jessica Sibley, CEO of Time Inc, is always happy to meet you. appreciate.
17:47 Jessica Sibley
Thank you Brian for welcoming me. Thank you to Yahoo Finance.
17:50 Brian Sotzi
Well, that’s for us here at Cannes Lions. Going further ahead of Yahoo Finance.
