Table Talk: Dan Fuchs, VP, Chief Revenue Officer, Delish at Hearst
A warm welcome to Dan Fuchs, VP, Chief Revenue Officer of Delish at Hearst, and my newest Table Talk guest. With an 18 year-long (and counting!) career at Hearst, Dan has led Delish and Hearst to transform with new commerce programs, affiliate marketing initiatives and innovative monetization strategies.
Chicory has worked with Hearst, Delish’s publisher, for about two years to make their recipes shoppable at a variety of major and regional grocers and retailers (find a shoppable Delish recipe here), as well as offer shoppable and contextual media solutions to their advertising clients. Delish is one of the largest publishers in our recipe network of over 1,500 recipe sites, and has been an invaluable partner to Chicory as we developed new products and refined current ones for CPG brands.
In this Table Talk interview, you’ll learn from Dan about Delish’s view on revenue diversification, the acceleration of online grocery, new revenue initiatives and much more. Enjoy!
How did you get started at Delish and what do you do at the company?
This is my 18th year at Hearst, and I’ve had the privilege of managing sales teams for two of our amazing joint venture partner businesses, O, The Oprah Magazine and HGTV Magazine.
I moved over to Delish early last year when the company put in place a dedicated sales and marketing team for the brand. As Chief Revenue Officer, I oversee the financial side of Delish, managing the brand as a holistic enterprise business. Our team works to grow and develop Delish through advertising partnerships, consumer revenue opportunities, licensing and product development, and print extensions. We work closely with our editorial team to collaborate on ideas that will grow our audience and our profitability.
How does Delish view commerce as a publisher? What are your thoughts on revenue diversity and moving away from purely advertising-based models?
I see commerce for Delish in two ways. First, there’s how we work with partners on an affiliate basis, using SEO and other data to maximize the monetization of editorial content. Secondly, a smaller but growing area is the Delish Shop, a Hearst-owned marketplace within our site that sells editorially designed merchandise, ranging from cookware to apparel, to Delish books and even phone cases.
There was enough meaningful growth in both these areas in 2020 that I believe that the revenue contribution from them will double over the next couple of years. I also think there’s a great opportunity for us to work with advertisers collaboratively within our Shop, potentially developing exclusive products for our shared audience.
How has digital recipe planning changed recently and how has it informed your monetization and content strategy?
SEO data continues to show us that while our readers enjoy fun and indulgent recipes, there’s still a major focus on easy and accessible weeknight cooking. We’re making sure we continue to promote content galleries around these topics, and we’re having success with advertisers sponsoring them as well.
From a health perspective, keto recipes continue to drive a lot of Delish traffic, and we’re also seeing interest in other healthy lifestyle trends. We’re testing a vegan/meatless cookbook project in Q2 via an Amazon print-on-demand model to gauge how well this topic will resonate with our audience (and if it can drive meaningful consumer revenue).
How has the acceleration of online grocery intersected with and/or challenged your value prop as a publisher with both consumers and brand clients?
It’s been very valuable for Delish to offer advertisers and readers Chicory-powered shopping tools, and now we’re seeing interest from the retailers themselves in marketing directly to our audience, and through more top-of-funnel tactics. The online grocery marketplace is extremely competitive, and the major players are making efforts to differentiate their brands. An association with Delish can provide these partners with more credibility in the space since we offer significant value as a trusted and reliable source of recipe content.
Our editorial team also sees an opportunity via online grocery to connect to the younger segments of our audience. There are no obstacles to them utilizing the technology, and they’re still developing brand loyalties and gaining spending power.
How do your new quarterly print magazine and all-access paid membership program play into your monetization strategy and what reactions have you seen so far from your readers and advertisers?
Delish Unlimited launched in December 2020 and is now Hearst’s largest membership program (and growing!) We have over 45,000 members so far with around 70% of them buying the all-access offer, which includes our new magazine.
The consumer revenue from Delish Unlimited will be a meaningful number to our P&L this year, and while the magazine is not an ad-driven model, we are selling a limited number of ad pages to various partners and are working on some exciting custom content opportunities for the 2nd half of 2021.
What solutions have you developed for shopper marketers interested in driving lower-funnel results and receiving tangible and sales-related metrics?
Last year, we worked with the Chicory team to structure a new recipe database for Delish and other food-forward Hearst brands, and this new product has allowed us to work with marketers to better target their messaging in extremely relevant environments. We can now more efficiently develop contextual plans for clients that, along with Chicory-powered shoppable solutions, really drive conversion and sales.
A similar activation is an ad product called Delish Express. Here, we use internal and Chicory data filters to mine existing video recipe content that features an advertiser’s product or category. We then edit it with title cards and package it as an efficient sponsored portfolio of branded content.
What new content formats, features or user engagement strategies are on the horizon for Delish?
You’re starting to see some design changes to Delish, starting with the home page that provides our readers with a better-organized collection of food news and recipe content. “Top rated” and “top trending” recipes are prominently positioned and consistently updated, and there’s a greater focus on more in-depth stories around issues in food that really show off our journalistic chops, such as the current package around food waste that’s on the site now. All this ladders up to an overall editorial strategy of “recipe relevancy,” adapting content to be hyper-seasonal and to follow consumer desire.
I think we’re also doing great work in social media, really understanding what each platform offers and tailoring our content to fit the medium. For example, when baked feta pasta took off as a TikTok trend, we capitalized on that with our own takes on the recipe and have increased our following significantly.
How will recent privacy laws and the ‘death of the cookie’ impact strategy for publishers?
Scale and quality of first party data will determine how we fare with these changes, and we feel that Hearst has both advantages. We’re capturing over four trillion unique data points per month, so our data scientists can build highly detailed audience segments, optimization algorithms, and content insights. As we continue to see increased focus on contextual strategies from advertisers, premium quality first party data should be a top priority for all publishers.
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