“I think that the opportunity for ADWEEK is really to transcend the category of trade publication and to evolve into a business intelligence resource platform tool for not just advertisers and marketers and people who are in the brand world, but also media, technology, publishers, and ultimately the aspiration for us to be as valuable and as essential to CEOs and CFOs.” Will Lee

“I want to capture the executive or the director’s 8 to 10 minutes of their morning media diet, however long that is, and however they consume it, but really be essential to them on a daily basis.” Will Lee

From a hefty background in magazine media to a role at NPR, Will Lee, CEO of ADWEEK, is now set to transfer an industry publication to a major resource platform tool to advertisers, marketers and people who are in the brand business world.

He brings his passion and dedication to an industry in dire need of such passion and dedication.  A lot has changed since ADWEEK was launched in 1979.  The industry that the magazine was launched to serve is not the same in 2024 and the magazine itself is not the same.  High hopes and plans are in store for ADWEEK.

To check on those hopes and plans I reached out to Will Lee, who was appointed CEO eight months ago and we had a very pleasant and futuristic conversation. 

But before you read the entire conversation, here are the soundbites:

On his view of the ADWEEK community: What I mean by community is not just convenings and gatherings, but really having a very core group of people who help shape ADWEEK both from external side and inside.

On the role of Sora and AI: I happen to think Sora is something that we need, and generally video. Video based AI is something that we as a publication and as experts really need to help marketers and advertisers understand how to use it and also what the dangers are.

On the trust factor of AI: But if we can figure out a way to use AI to service the information that we already have and the information that we’ll be creating,  people will trust us as opposed to GPT-4 or Gemini.

On the role of print in a digital age: I believe in the ability of a print publication to create a relationship with the consumer that is very different than digital or social or audio or other formats. And the reason that is, it’s  almost an evergreen resource.

On the role of the magazine cover: It’s about having covers that get people’s attention and  say something and are meaningful to the audience. Because, again, these covers, these magazines have to have real utility. So that’s the thing I’m going to stress with the magazine, is that it is very, it is an important and essential utility.

On his job at NPR: So this was almost like a sabbatical that I took in public media. What I would say specifically about NPR, is that NPR actually is a very sophisticated commercial business, if you will.  Obviously, it’s a non-profit, but it thinks like a commercial media company.

On the changes of the media business model: That the notion of scale and audience size as a predictor of commercial success, that correlation is completely going to change

On looking at the future of the business: I think about the agency landscape and about what will happen to creative agencies as a result of Sora and all the rest of the AI tools, as well as how quickly the internet and web publishing are going to be drastically altered over the next two years.

On his views of the open web: We’re about to enter a phase of the open web, which is going to be literally one million times worse than what the blogosphere looked like in 2005. If you think about the barrier to entry was very low, anybody could start a blog and there was all this terrible, low quality content out there. Some of it got monetized and some of it didn’t.

On what keeps him up at night: The way that our media is now shaped from a financial standpoint and from a business standpoint, where so much of the, the media that is high quality, you have to pay for, and you have to pay a lot for, I think is a real problem.

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Will Lee, CEO of ADWEEK.

Samir Husni: Congratulations. It has been eight months since you’ve become the CEO of ADWEEK.

Will Lee: Yes.

Samir Husni: I read you are going to transform ADWEEK from an industry publication to a platform that will reflect that advertising, marketing, journalism that’s taking place in 2024. Can you give me a brief roadmap on what your plans are?

Will Lee: Sure.  I think that the opportunity for ADWEEK is really to transcend the category of trade publication and to really evolve into a business intelligence resource platform tool, however you want to describe it, for the not just advertisers and marketers and people who are in the brand world, but also media, technology, publishers, and ultimately ask for the aspiration is for us to be as valuable and as essential to CEOs and CFOs. Also other members of the C-suite as we are to marketers and advertisers.

Now, of course, the brand ecosystem is still the core of our audience. So we want to be able to serve them in the ways that they need to, but really we want to become a much more valuable resource to the entire ecosystem and to the entire executive team in terms of  a roadmap. That’s sort of the overall vision.

In terms of the roadmap it’s a few things:  One is to continue to raise the standard and the level of our content product. So that is creating new and better email products, for instance, creating new and better audio and video products, and also to use the magazine in more essential and interesting ways. I want to capture the executive or the director’s 8 to 10 minutes of their morning media diet, however long that is, and however they consume it, but really be essential to them on a daily basis.

It is about elevating the level of the product. So if you go beyond that, then in terms of the customer continuum for ADWEEK, there’s the editorial content and there’s our event business, right? We’ll continue to evolve that and connect our editorial and content to our live events in a much, much deeper way. So that’s another part of the roadmap. 

The third part of it is really building community. What I mean by community is not just convenings and gatherings, but really having a very core group of people who help shape ADWEEK both from external side and inside.  Really have a way of connecting all of that into one continuum for our audience.

Samir Husni: You have a trusted brand. How are you going to deal with all the untrusted things that are taking place? From folks using AI to create deep fake videos or whether the new Sora that is coming soon, that’s going to create video from a short text.  What are your plans to combat the negatives of AI and Sora and all the other new technologies that’s coming up?

Will Lee: Sure. I happen to think Sora is something that we need, and generally video. Video based AI is something that we as a publication and as experts really need to help marketers and advertisers understand how to use it and also what the dangers are.

From an editorial standpoint, we need to be curating the best information.  Both from experts internally, but also from the industry to help people understand how to navigate that. There’s a possibility that video AI and particularly, and maybe source specifically, could be the subject of an entire conference for us? Going forward and getting people to talk about it and to understand what the challenges are is really important.

Separately, because we’re a trust resource, one of the things we’ll be working on is using AI to sort of confine the amount of information that you can get from ADWEEK. In other words, almost create  an AI portal or a bot, if you were some kind of product that uses the 45 years of information that we have at ADWEEK to inform the consumer. So we can use it to our benefit.

Obviously, the large language models are going to scrape our stuff from the web and other places.  But if we can figure out a way to use AI to service the information that we already have and the information that we’ll be creating,  people will trust us as opposed to GPT-4 or Gemini.

Samir Husni: In the last few days we’ve seen that those sources are deeply untrustworthy.  When ADWEEK was started in 1979 the status of marketing, the status of advertising and the status of journalism were completely different that we are seeing today. How are you going to use the print edition of ADWEEK to reflect the true value of advertising, the true value of marketing, the true value of journalism, or what directives are you giving to your people?

Will Lee: It’s a really good question, Samir.  As you know, my background, my last job was at NPR and we had a  legacy media source there as broadcast radio. Before that I was with People, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, and so on.  I really believe in the ability of a print publication to create a relationship with the consumer that is very different than digital or social or audio or other formats. And the reason that is, it’s almost an evergreen resource.  

The thing that we need to do in our magazine going forward is to be very high utility.  It can’t just be pretty pictures and interesting graphics, but it has to be a utility. I talk about it like the magazine should almost be like a Harvard Business School case study that you actually want to read. In other words, like it’s something that you can keep around, you can pass around, you can, you can refer back to it. And of course that product will be very, very closely tied in and integrated with our digital product and our other products.

But how we can transform ADWEEK, the magazine into something that someone wants to keep,  so for instance, if you think about the Harvard Business Review,  we all have stacks of Harvard Business Reviews  in our homes that we don’t want to throw away because we’re worried that we’re going to miss something. And yet you might not read the entire thing.  In fact, you might not read any of it.  I want ADWEEK to have that level of staying power and I think it can. We just put Christina Aguilera on the cover, which, you know, isn’t exactly what the HBR would do. The reason that it’s important for us to have people like Christina on the cover, and we’ve got some celebrity covers coming up.

It’s about having covers that get people’s attention and  say something and are meaningful to the audience. Because, again, these covers, these magazines have to have real utility. So that’s the thing I’m going to stress with the magazine, is that it is very, it is an important and essential utility.  We had Naomi Osaka on the cover. It’s not about having celebrities or not celebrities on the cover. We did a cover with DoorDash,  and we did a cover about their Super Bowl campaign.

Samir Husni:  Just a fun question, in your previous jobs The Hollywood Reporter or Entertainment Weekly, or People, did any celebrity ever ask you to be on your digital page or on the magazine cover? 

It’s a good question. It’s interesting at EW once we started to reduce the frequency, we started to do more digital covers, which were essentially these great assets, short form videos, for social platforms, Instagram, TikTok, and they were beautiful and lushly produced, kind of more so than the print covers. I think the interesting thing about digital covers is just how widely they can be seen, because it still has real meaning for someone to be on a cover like that.

There were people who obviously  wanted the cover.  Particularly People, because it’s still so widely distributed.  The power of a cover is, it’s staying power.  It’s always there. It’s a physical asset.  I’ll tell you this, it’s amazing how many times I get on a call with somebody from an agency or from a brand marketer, and they’ll have a framed cover of ADWEEK in their office and say look, I still have this from when I was on the Hot List cover or whatever.

So it’s actually really, it’s an important asset for us. And I really enjoy the craft. And so it’s, I feel lucky that we still do it.

Samir Husni:  You came to ADWEEK from NPR. So you saw the not-for-profit reporting and dealing with media. How is it different to be working for-profit now? 

Will Lee: Oh, so many ways, Samir, so many ways. Actually, all of my career before NPR was in the for-profit sector. So this was almost like a sabbatical that I took in public media. What I would say specifically about NPR, is that NPR actually is a very sophisticated commercial business, if you will.  Obviously, it’s a non-profit, but it thinks like a commercial media company.  We did a lot of things to license in terms of business development, in terms of even corporate development considering lots of different kinds of M&A and partnerships and so forth, which very much like, are like commercial media.

I think the one thing that is significantly different is from a mission and from a goals standpoint, serving the American public is so much in the forefront of what NPR does, which I don’t think, if you went and asked the CEOs of ten publishing companies, that would be the first thing that comes out of their mouth in terms of like what their mission, what their goals are, which is fine because they have a different set of  stakeholders. But, the thing that was inspiring to me that I loved about NPR, and frankly is going to be really important in 2024 is NPR’s ability to, and the importance of NPR’s service to the American public.

Samir Husni: If you look at the status of marketing or advertising today compared to your previous years, your previous career, how would you describe it? Are we better off? Are we worse than it was? 

Will Lee:  You know we can talk for an hour about this.  Let’s just take advertising specifically. Obviously with what seems like a true cookie-less future happening like in real time, that will change significantly.  Anybody who publishes on the web can make money, It just will, it will change the cost of things, it will change how consumers are targeted.

That will have significant ripple effects on the businesses that I’ve worked with. Until a year and a half or so, that the notion of scale and audience size as a predictor of commercial success, that correlation is completely going to change.

Now, I can’t tell you whether what the true statistical sort of wavelength and amplitude of there is, but it’s going to change significantly.  And I think, that will alter, how media are created. I think also that in marketing, because of the way that the economy has been, so unpredictable over the last year and a half, I think marketers are in a very different situation,  I wouldn’t say that they’re in a very dynamic moment, which is to say their budgets are more under scrutiny.  Their role in growth and in driving the business forward is much “murkier” than it has been in a long time.

ADWEEK’s place in all of this is to help, to quote somebody I spoke to recently, “so it’s kind of messy right now.” And I think one of ADWEEK’s roles is to un-mess that mess.  To be a good curator, to be  good way of helping to clarify.  I don’t pretend that we’re going to have the answers, but I think through all of our different audience touch points, editorial, events, experiences, and community, I think we do have a way to, to help. And so I think it’s a really exciting time for ADWEEK. I think about the agency landscape and about what will happen to creative agencies as a result of Sora and all the rest of the AI tools, as well as how quickly the internet and web publishing are going to be drastically altered over the next two years.

I think this is a really, really interesting time to be at a B2B publication, looking at the landscape as a whole.

Samir Husni: So if you think anyone who has access to a laptop or a phone can be a publisher, is that a good thing or a bad thing? 

Will Lee: I don’t think I have a binary answer there.  I do think that my consumption behavior has changed significantly over the last two and two and a half years where I read a lot more individually published newsletters from people that I trust.  Casey Newton, a platformer, I’ll read across all of my span of interest. Instead of reading a brand, I read individuals.  I do think that the individual contributor is an important force. The notion of anybody being able to create movies, webpages and all this sort of thing.

There’s significant danger there.  We’re about to enter a phase of the open web, which is going to be literally one million times worse than what the blogosphere looked like in 2005. If you think about the barrier to entry was very low, anybody could start a blog and there was all this terrible, low quality content out there. Some of it got monetized and some of it didn’t.

I think you’re about to enter a phase where that will become almost infinite. And that is frightening. We have to have better discovery and better curation.  And frankly, I don’t think that Google and some of the other platforms have taken that seriously enough into account. 

Samir Husni:  Let me shift a little bit,  I used to look at the launch of the year at the Hot List of ADWEEK and sadly speaking there’s not many launches these days. The industry has changed to a bookazine industry.  Do you think this is a sign of the future that we are going to lose big launches Like Portfolio and Domino that ADWEEK used to celebrate?

If you think about what’s happening now with Buzzfeed, Vice, and some of those other businesses.  Which probably replaced some of those big splashy launches.  Media entities now might not just be a magazine. Obviously you wouldn’t just launch a magazine today.

You’d launch the whole span of it  a multi-platform product. We’re going to see more great brands. 

You’ve just given me idea, which is that instead of sort of the launch of the year being focused on a magazine, it’s really the publishing launch of the year. Because in the next year or two, there will be more people who try interesting things. I think they’re going to be narrower and I think there’ll be a little bit more niche. I don’t think you could launch a general interest business publication like Portfolio today. But I do think that you could do something a little narrower, and it could succeed. So it’d be interesting to see how people think of a print product today.

I talk about Monocle a lot and how Tyler (Brule) and his team believe in and lean  hard into the print side of things.  They have multiple print publications. So I do think that there’s room for that.

Samir Husni: Let me just end up by asking you two personal questions. One, if I come to visit you uninvited one evening to your home, what do I catch you doing? Watching TV, reading a book, cooking? 

Will Lee: Depending on what time it is,  reading with my two and a half year old son or building towers out of magnet tiles. After he goes to bed, I love to be in the kitchen trying things out. I do like that.

Samir Husni: My last question to you is what keeps you these days up at night?

Will Lee:  As a first time CEO thing that keeps me up as night is asking myself the question, are we moving fast enough with enough velocity and with enough impact.  Sort of instilling that urgency and embodying it. Showing the team and even our audiences that we are moving quickly we are changing quickly, we are evolving quickly, and doing it  sensibly and responsibly. That’s something I honestly think about in the middle of the night  more often than I’d like.

That’s kind of a personal one, but on a larger scale, the way that our media is now shaped from a financial standpoint and from a business standpoint, where so much of the, the media that is high quality, you have to pay for, and you have to pay a lot for, I think is a real problem. And I’m not saying this as a plug for NPR, but I think that, you know, having free and openly available sources of, of high quality information for the consumer is incredibly important.  That does concern me from almost from the viewpoint of the future of the democracy in the Republic.

Samir Husni: Thank you.