Barry Diller's "White Lotus," opportunity.
Diller on why he's inverting the story at People Inc.
Tech and media mogul Barry Diller jetted in to Travel + Leisure’s latest World’s Best Summit in New York on Tuesday morning, direct from Sun Valley summer camp where Open AI chief Sam Altman schmoozed with mad cap invitees like Palantir chief Alex Karp.
Diller, the sockless sage who admitted he was still on California time at the 9.30 am session, shared how he is charging staff with, “inverting” how they are thinking these days. His mission is to transform People Inc., the massive digital publishing powerhouse once known incomprehensibly as Meredith Dot Dash, beyond its roots. Translation - People Inc. isn’t just in the business of producing content for readers of InStyle to Food + Wine, but is looking to use its business intelligence to execute on fresh opportunities such as the event he was keynoting. The need for diversification is becoming more urgent: the company’s traffic has tanked 63 percent this past two years, according to Press Gazette, though the stock is up this year.
On stage with the boss, T&L editor-in-chief Jacqueline Gifford, shared that they had discussed why the magazine couldn’t have come up with HBO’s “White Lotus,” a TV show that has inspired travelers to seek out luxe hotel destinations.
“We have these brands that stand for this, that, and everything that underlies the stories we’re trying to tell,” Diller, known as BD internally, told the audience of travel industry executives. “What if we with White Lotus… looked at our content, our properties, and in a sense inverted the process, which is to say, it’s not just the content; it’s what the content suggests to us. At Travel + Leisure, we know everything about that. Okay, what products and services come out of that? That’s inverting, so to speak, a story.”
“It’s what else can we do? Not with that content itself, but what does it suggest to us that we have an expertise or an insight no one else has, and how do we make productive use of that?”
In a world drowning in data, Diller also shared the importance of using instinct to succeed in defining the future that data doesn’t predict. Diller helped to launch the Fox network for Rupert Murdoch. He later bought QVC and then acquired travel booking service Expedia in the wake of September 11 and founded the Daily Beast with editor Tina Brown. The 84 year old Diller is currently in the midst of acquiring the balance of giant casino operator MGM Resorts. “No technology is going to get between a consumer and an experience of one of our resorts.. Nothing is ever going to displace it. You are money good forever,” he said, sipping a cup of green tea.
He shared the importance of acting on instinct, a skill that can get dulled with age and knowledge. “Information is entirely different than instinct,” he told the audience “I’ve always thought the most difficult thing to do as you go on with business and life is really that every day you get more cynical and wise and less naive. All those things are corrosive to instinct.”
The Cannes Lions Debate.
Just a few weeks earlier, I sat with Diller’s chief executive Neil Vogel, in a quiet villa just outside of the center of Cannes where thousands of data-driven executives were discussing handing over their ad buying to autonomous AI agents while their colleagues emphasized the importance of community and connections. To borrow a phrase from 3 CV’s Michael Kassan: The Math Men have taken over from the Mad Men.
If that weren’t enough to blow-up the entire publishing industry, AI is bringing new headaches. Google can scrape People Inc. recipes and celebrity news, compress and regurgitate it into single sentence answers to queries. If People Inc. wants to fight that by blocking the AI bots, then it must also relinquish any ranking on Google search. Adweek reported last week that several publishers are considering exiting Google search completely to solve the problem. Vogel called Google “bad actors,” in Cannes but noted People Inc’s valuable fresh content meant that the tech giants can’t stay away from the table for very long.
The ad business is now a technology story: beginning, middle and end. Despite all the talk about the continued importance of humans - an unthinkable, ridiculous conversation topic just a year ago - the empathy-light, left-brained logic lizards are in charge. Can Diller’s bet on inversion, instinct and the decidedly old-school acquisition of a Nevada casino chain position his publishing empire for the final simulation?
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This week I wrote for Fortune about James Murdoch’s investment in SpaceX and how it has the potential to net him billions. You can read about how he got hooked up with Elon Musk via a new car purchase and ended up a Tesla insider here:
Contact me at claireatki@me.com to book a lunch and learn session about global media trends or to moderate your next corporate event. Share your story tips, ideas, corrections.