Raunch and circumstance, Vice style
It’s not every day you hear more than a dozen references to porn before 10 a.m. But it was that kind of morning at Marketing’s Young Influencers Conference today in Toronto.
The porn references came from keynote speaker Shane Smith, CEO and co-founder of Vice Media. As one of the C-suiters at the mega youth media company (and the word “mega” definitely applies considering Vice has 34 offices around the world and was recently valued by Forbes at $1 billion), Smith said Vice specializes in Gen Y, but at the same time has “never gone after a demographic.” Why? Because robotically targeting Gen Y without truly understanding the demo or being authentic will leave you, as Smith succinctly put it, “fucked.”
But back to the porn for a second. In the days when Vice still existed as solely a free print magazine, the team saw there was a switch to online video happening, and they wanted in. Badly. But in those pre-Hulu days, Smith said “No one was doing it on a large scale, so we said ‘Who does it the best?’” That’s when the Vice team started studying the adult entertainment business. “Everything we learned, we learned from porn. It is the gold standard for online video.”
Smith gave a long list of props to that industry: porn pioneered HD video online, it’s the fastest video streaming online, it offers seamless ‘search by category’ functions, it’s figured out SEO optimization and geo-targeting and on and on, he said.
And porn also pioneered the vertical content model, one that Vice has since used for its own business. “We realized people were coming to Vice to consume in verticals,” whether that be sports, style, travel or food.
Today’s Gen Y readers are also flocking to Vice for news. The newest channel in the company’s “digital media family,” as Smith said, is Vice News. “People say young people don’t care about news, but they really do. It’s one of our number-one traffic drivers and one of the largest-growing markets for us.”
Mainstream media has turned off young people, but Vice is not mainstream media. It tackles topics like politics and the environment through a network of 3,500 (paid!) correspondents around the world in countries from North Korea to Iraq to Liberia. Unlike mainstream media outlets, which Smith said wear their agenda on their sleeve, Vice’s content is “non-political, non-partisan and fully immersive… [It is] character-driven, real, raw stories.” And you won’t find any perfectly coiffed celebrity journalists in Vice videos. “Our reporters are regular people, not media personalities,” said Smith.
Vice’s anti-try-hard approach (and a huge serving of racy, adrenaline-fueled arts, culture and news content) has helped it build a media powerhouse that comes up with new digital and real-world initiatives faster than you can say “indie-turned-empire.”
But none of them would resonate if the content wasn’t authentic, and that’s a word Smith used several times during his keynote. A boardroom full of middle-aged marketing executives isn’t going to churn out ideas that work for youth, he said. “I’m Gen X and I’m already too old,” he said. (Spoiler alert: if that doesn’t make you feel decrepit, it’s about to get worse. The median age of Vice staffers is 26 and the majority of its creatives are in their early 20s.)
In addition to hiring people who understand the demo best because, you know, they are the demo, Smith said, “We try to make things that aren’t shit.” It sounds flippant, but he commented that most media companies have a long way to go when it comes to creating content that clicks with young influencers. But he does give Vice some credit amongst that crowd: “We’re the tallest of the midgets.”
Asked about the future of print media, Smith said, “I’m a print guy. I love print. A lot of magazines are dying,” though, he said, adding that Vice’s print magazine is still growing because of the brand’s online projects. While he said some magazines still rely on selling print ads to make money, unless they can create a microsite or “put a brand in a 360 media environment with 10,000 different partners… you’ll probably go the way of the dodo.”
Addressing the inevitable changing of the guard that happens in every generation of media, he referenced the general evolution that’s happened over the past few decades—a passing of the iconic magazine brands that managed to capture cool: Rolling Stone, then Spin, then Vice. “Will we become Viacom one day?” There was only a slight pause before Smith answered himself. “I’ll take it because I’ll be rich.”
