With fingers crossed for an in-person return next year, Conde Nast hosted its third annual Health NewFront and the second virtual event.
With an eye on health and wellness topics over the past year, the media company expanded its content offerings across different platforms—TV, video and podcasts—to create new spaces for advertisers.
“Health has become the cultural conversation over the past year," Carrie Moore, Conde Nast Health head of sales, said in an email.
Conde Nast's intent for 2021 remains the same, however. Leverage its powerhouse lifestyle content umbrella brand, along with the personalities of specific titles like Self, Glamour, GQ and Wired, to match pharma and health brands to targeted audiences.
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New this year, five of Conde Nast’s publications are partnering with Twitter for Health X, a custom video platform based on Twitter's in-house trend insights and analysis. The condition-specific editorial content includes pre-roll ad placement for brands along with promoted tweets, tags and even custom hashtags.
The goal of Health X is to pair Conde Nast brand's different points of view and content "not only with the trending conversations in health but the real-time sentiment and emotions that are unique to Twitter," Moore noted.
Self magazine’s new editor-in-chief, Leta Shy, said Self is expanding its popular “My Way to Well” interactive digital experience. The project centers on a diverse group of patients giving viewers a look inside what it’s like living with a chronic condition, and will now expand to GQ, Conde Nast Traveler and Epicurious.
Shy also introduced Self’s new project "Self Conditionally." The condition-specific editorial, digital, video and audio content will be created in conjunction with Self's medical advisory board along with experts at the Mayo Clinic.
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Conde Nast Health recorded "explosive growth in health and wellness content" from 2019 to 2020: The number of visitors doubled year over year, and time spent on its content grew by 129%, Moore said.
Despite its print origins, Conde Nast Health embraced digital even before the pandemic, notching fourfold business growth since it launched four years ago. According to Moore, the company now works with 90% of the top 20 pharma companies.
The company’s cookie-less solution called Obsidian offers targeted, artificial intelligence data analysis and continues to be a big draw for advertisers. According to Moore, the number of campaigns driven by the product jumped by 450% from January to May of 2021.