Time Inc. launches digital video unit
More changes are afoot at Time Inc. following the reshuffling CEO Laura Lang kicked off last summer. The company has now announced the launch of a new digital video unit, a recognition that the company’s brands need to tap new, potentially lucrative sources of revenue as their traditional print business continues to decline.
To manage the unit, Lang brought in J.R. McCabe, who was VP, chief video officer at Meredith Corporation. In the newly created role of SVP, video at Time Inc., McCabe will report to Todd Larsen, who was named EVP and group president of news and sports over the summer and is also overseeing the digital video unit.
Until recently, there were about 20 people working on video production across Time Inc., some of whom were assigned to specific brands or to the Time Inc. Studios group, a company spokesperson said. Now, those employees will be centralised under McCabe’s leadership and work across all of the company’s brands. (At the moment, there are no plans to begin by focusing on any specific titles.) There are also some structural changes ahead, with Lang saying that Time Inc. plans to build out a physical space specifically for the new video unit.
“This move will unify the strong but disparate efforts we currently have in video, bringing resources from all three clusters and the Time Inc. Studios together to create a strong team with a common set of facilities and back-end technologies,” Lang wrote in her memo. “Advertisers are continually looking for more that can be done in video,” she later added.
