Latest news with #JessicaSibley
Time Magazine
17-06-2025
- Business
- Time Magazine
At TIME100 Talk, Executives Discuss the Power of Digital Inclusivity and Positivity
For most people across the globe, social media is a daily part of life. Billions of people interact with brands, stories, influencers, and other content across various platforms everyday. With the impact that this content carries for consumers, discussing positivity, inclusivity, and the role that brands play is essential. At the Cannes Lions International Festival, TIME CEO Jessica Sibley hosted a roundtable talk with industry leaders to discuss what they are up to in a rapidly changing online environment. The discussions began when CEO Bill Ready of Pinterest—which presented the event—brought up the challenges young people face today, and the importance of cultivating a healthy online platform. He recalls one decision he made to limit access to harmful content for those under 16. 'As a parent, I truly believed I didn't want young people engaging with strangers online,' he said. Ready said that younger users have taken notice of Pinterest's overall approach as a platform where you can 'get away from the toxicity elsewhere.' Others business leaders echoed similar concerns. Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, which reviews the safety of social media platforms, said that his biggest worry is that 'we have waited a long time to deal with' the issue and that it's important to young people everywhere. 'The same concerns we have in the U.S. are global,' he adds. Brieane Olson, CEO of retail company PacSun, says that businesses need to learn about the needs and wants of Gen Z users. 'What has surprised me the most is how misunderstood Gen Z has become through the digital lens,' she said. 'As adults in the room,' added Sadé Mohammed, the Chief Impact and Marketing Officer at TIME, 'there's a feeling of not being included in real life. I think about what we can do to facilitate that community in person instead.' Some executives also highlighted the needs of specific younger audiences. Laurie Lam, Chief Brand Officer at e.l.f. Beauty, a cosmetics firm in California, said more companies need to focus on making young women feel seen and heard. 'As a mom to two girls, our ethos is so rooted in lifting [up] others,' she said. For her part, Ndidi Oteh, incoming CEO of Accenture Song, a creative agency, raised the question of brand accountability. 'It's a reoccurring theme, how do you hold your influencers accountable, how do you make sure that you act with responsibility … to make sure that we're actually moving towards a more positive world.' Industry leaders at the roundtable in Cannes also shed light on their own personal challenges. Erin Andrews, a sports broadcaster and co-founder of women's apparel company WEAR, revealed her experiences in the spotlight. Over time, she said, she found herself more open about her private life, including her treatment for cervical cancer. "It was really difficult," she said. Andrews continues to stay motivated about getting female fans to attend games. 'It brings tears to my eyes when dad's come up to me and say 'I want my daughter to do what you do',' she said. Other attendees of the rountable included Aki Mandhar, CEO of Chelsea Women FC; Lisa McKnight, Chief Brand Officer and Executive Vice President at Mattel; Jimmy Smith, CEO & Chief Creative Officer at Amusement Park Entertainment; Casper Lee, Chief Vision Officer at Creator Ventures; Alexis Ohanian, Founder of Seven Seven Six and Athlos; Rachel Delphin, Chief Marketing Officer of Twitch; Carla Hassan, Chief Marketing Officer at JP Morgan Chase; Andréa Mallard, Global Chief Marketing Officer at Pinterest; and Renata Ferraiolo, CEO of SC Johnson Lifestyle Brands and Blakely Thornton, Culture Critic and Podcast Host.
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Time CEO on embracing AI: It's better to have a seat at the table
Time CEO Jessica Sibley is embracing AI even as it's triggering a massive upheaval in the publishing industry. For the longtime media exec, it just makes better business sense to do so. "We want to have a seat at the table and be with these top executives," Sibley told Yahoo Finance at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Monday. "We started early in this journey, and we've decided to start with a guiding principle, which was are we going to negotiate, litigate, or do nothing? We decided if we were going to negotiate, we were going to opt in. We want to be part of this technology," she explained. Time has pressed forward with a major reinvention under Sibley, partly by leaning into AI. In 2024, it signed a multiyear deal with OpenAI to give it access to Time's 102-year-old content archive. More recently, the company said it'll launch an on-demand podcast with Meta (META)-backed Scale AI that features two AI hosts summarizing four top stories from its newsletter The Brief. Sibley said the company has been leveraging AI across "every single department" to become more efficient, from the newsroom to legal and HR. The push for cost savings comes as Time laid off around 30 staffers in January 2024 and another 22 last August. Sibley cited industry headwinds at the time for the cuts. In the fall, Time expects to enable multilingual, personalized AI interactions on the site, such as AI search, chat, and translation. "The acceleration of how consumers are demanding finding ways of personalized content, multimodal content, and with the AI answer results, we wanted to again embrace it and be part of it as opposed to litigate," Sibley said. Time was purchased from Meredith Corporation in September 2018 by Salesforce (CRM) co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in cash. Sibley began as its CEO in November 2022, joining the magazine from Forbes, where she was COO. Prior to Forbes, she held leadership positions at Condé Nast and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The publication has also expanded its high-profile events business and modernized its tech stack while continuing with its high-quality journalism. To that end, Time named Donald Trump "Person of the Year" for 2024 and followed up with a headline-making interview with the president to mark his first 100 days in office. Sibley said in a recent note that Time is forecasting 24% advertising revenue growth in the first half of the year. Other media players are navigating the tricky balance between negotiating and litigating against AI. Big Tech has been forking over large sums of money for licensing agreements to use publishers' archives to train large language models. The New York Times (NYT) recently inked a multiyear deal to license content to Amazon (AMZN) for AI-related uses, marking its first generative AI contract. The company had sued OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT) in 2023, alleging the tech companies illegally used millions of its articles to train chatbots. News Corp. (NWS), owner of Wall Street Journal, signed a five-year licensing deal with OpenAI in May 2024 worth a reported $250 million. Reddit (RDDT) is claiming in a new lawsuit that Anthropic scraped its users' personal data without consent, then used it to train its large language model Claude. As this is playing out, Google traffic to publisher websites continues to be pressured as the tech giant leans into its new AI snippets. The byproduct: shrinking news jobs. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that organic search to HuffPost's desktop and mobile websites has plunged by 50% in the past three years. Organic search traffic to Business Insider cratered by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025. Business Insider slashed 21% of its staff in late May, blaming the need to evolve the business model in the age of AI. About 6% of the Los Angeles Times staff was let go in early May, Variety reported. In January, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post gave 4% of its staff pink slips. Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How TIME Inc. is harnessing AI amid 'complicated time in media'
TIME Inc. CEO Jessica Sibley joins Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi for an interview at Cannes Lions 2025, discussing what she calls the, "most complicated time in media," and why she's choosing to embrace AI and technological change rather than litigate it. Joining me now here at Cannes Lions is Time Inc. CEO Jessica Sibley. Jessica, always nice to spend some time with you in general, but of course, you're at Cannes Lions, and this is there are a lot of major moments here in the media industry. What are some of the early surprises you're hearing and seeing on the ground here? Well, it's day one, so not too many so far, but thank you for having me, Brian. It's always great to sit down and talk to you in this incredible setting, and it's going to be an amazing can with lots of conversation, and and I'm excited to be here. The one big theme, from what I've been able to tell, I've been here day and a half, it's AI, and how AI is going to change the advertising industry, but it's also changing the media publishing industry. How are you embedding it into what you do at time? Well, AI is everything and the conversation that's happening, I think, every day here in Cannes. Uh, we're really proud of everything that we've done to lean into AI. I would say our journey is in maybe chapter two. Uh, we started early in this journey, and we've decided uh to to start with a guiding principle, which was, are we going to negotiate, litigate, or do nothing? Uh, we decided that we were going to negotiate, we were going to opt in, we want to be part of this technology, part of what's happening across the media industry, across consumer behaviors. And we've done a lot of things to get us to where we are now. A lot of your competitors have taken the opposite approach. They want to litigate AI. What's your advice to them? Well, we're on our journey and our path, uh, which is Time AI. We launched that, uh, we started the process about a year ago. Uh, we wanted to create a version of time for uh agentive AI. And we actually RFP'd 12 different companies. And we landed on three finalists and selected scale AI. I know you've been covering this story with the $15 billion investment into scale. We decided to partner with scale to develop our sort of phase one of Time AI, which was a version of uh person of the year that uh scale built for us. Uh, they indexed our entire hundred years of archives and trained a private LLM. We launched with our person of the year. We knew the optics would be big with President Trump, and we went back uh and trained the model on four recent person of the years, Zelensky, Elon Musk, and Taylor Swift. Um, what does that mean? Uh, the acceleration of how consumers are demanding, um, intentionally uh finding ways of uh personalized content, multimodal content, and with the AI answer results, we wanted to again embrace it and be part of it as opposed to litigate. So the output of that was uh Time AI person of the year. You could um translate it, you could summarize. And podcast is really the audio version. So an audio version of that content. And we're continuing on that journey, uh where we'll be launching several other new initiatives with scale. Can you take us behind the scenes on some of these new initiatives? For example, I saw release from you recently an AI podcast. What is an AI podcast, and then how will AI appear on Time Inc. later this year in different and surprising ways? Well, it's really an audio version. Uh, it starts with uh training the LLM private for safety and security and protection of our IP, which is our journalism, not just of what we do today, but over 100 years. And the consumer expectation is changed and it's accelerating really fast, uh sophistication, dynamic, uh real-time results and multimodal and personalization. So really the output of our content, which we're launching with an audio version of um the newsletter, the Daily Brief, which is our largest newsletter in terms of size of audience, where we take four of the top red stories on our homepage, and we create a toolbar. And you can um listen to one story, four stories in a five minute version or in a 10 minute version. That's cool. And we were very intentional about um training the voice. So a little bit back to our history, uh, we have Henry and Lucy, Henry Luce. And a lot of uh enjoyment out of content is summarization, text, video, but audio. And we can create all of that, again, partnering with uh scale. So Time has seemed to have embraced AI, but for the other, there are a lot of other publishers not taking that route. What's the end game here? Someone has seen a lot of transitions. I think back to your Forbes day, I mean, you've worked through and managed through a lot of tough transitions in this industry. Is there some form of big shake out coming here because of this technology? Well, I can speak for time. We've embraced new formats uh our entire history. So we started as a magazine, and look where we are today. We're on we've leveraged technology that we're on every platform. We're really proud of having 60 million that engage with time across the social nets. So this is part of what we do, it's in our DNA, and we're going to continue to do it, and which is where we are are now. I would say there's there's three parts in terms of an AI strategy. The first is infrastructure. So protecting our journalism, protecting our IP, understanding who's indexing, tracking that, uh who's stealing it, how they're using it. So we have a couple partners that we signed on right away, um for that, Fox verify, uh Tolbit. And uh, second is uh content partnerships. So very early on to sign with uh perplexity, OpenAI, uh recently Alexa, Amazon Alexa Plus. And we want to uh have a seat at the table and be with these top executives. They're like our almost like our AI lab, smartest people that are building this. We want to be part of that, and we want to finally be able to monetize that. So um AI solutions through Mobian is another partner that we're working really closely with. And then the final thing that I will say is we just recently announced AI at time. And that's sort of the internal upskilling of our employees and leveraging AI across every single department, not just our newsroom, uh but legal, HR, being smarter, being faster, exploring, understanding how to use AI for our own business and our own efficiency, but also how to enhance what we're doing, not replace. You recently put out a stat, I think it was in the same release on the AI podcast. I'm sorry, I'm just obsessed with this concept of AI podcast. I'm gonna have a gig in 10 years, but anyway. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm going to have you listen to it. I'm going to send it to you so you can choose Henry or Lucy. Does it use? Yeah. It's my own, it's my own personal. Fair enough. Yeah. You said first half advertising revenue up 24%. I'm in this industry. I don't see a lot of other companies putting out data points like that. How do you explain that strength, and is it still double digit growth you expect in the back half? So that's in our uh our pivot to B2B. So when I started at time, almost three years ago now, I uh we had to make a lot of changes in our transformation. And one of the first things I did is coming from the revenue side was really double down on our B2B model. So what does that mean? Um, working directly with CEOs, CMOs, uh even chiefs of staffs of the executive suite and chief communications officers to um put together high value bespoke custom year-long programs around thought leadership and around the stories that they want to tell as a company and even as individuals. And so uh we're working direct, we're less reliant on platforms or middlemen, and it's really fueling our growth across all of the platforms, whether it's our events and I really call that live journalism, which is just an entry point, investing in the communities, AI, climate, health, and again, doing business, having ongoing conversations with the biggest brands with the biggest budgets that are household global names. And we're really proud of the results. They speak for themselves. Our pacing is up, our B2B business is up, and I think that mitigates the risk in terms of the changes that are happening with AI. And then finally, uh what we're seeing is being a part of the ecosystem, we in the last two weeks, we've had 10 million mentions across the AI answer platforms. And we're seeing those numbers grow. So if changes in algorithms impact us in terms of what we can monetize on the web page with traffic coming mainly from Google, we're able to monetize and reach audiences in new ways that they expect and demand, and that is audio. When you say podcast, I mean, there's an explosion in in getting information in a personalized way. Uh, my editor and I just were with him, Sam Jacobs. Imagine he's going out for a 50 minute run. He loves to run, he's only got 50 minutes. He's running for 50 minutes, that's pretty good. That's good. Yeah. It's pretty good, right? Slow. And he's um an SNL uh junkie. 50th anniversary had a big moment. And he wants to listen to a personalized audio version of what we've written about SNL, um not just recently in 50th, but over the last hundred years. Lauren Michaels is Time 100, he was just named in April this year. Um, he can set that, again, working with scale AI and agentive format to enjoy his run listening to time content. I just think that's one example. I am not an audio person, I'm more of a text based person, and I love summarization, I love translation, I have an ability to now chat and have that Q&A, that question and answer. So we are uh storytelling in new ways and meeting audiences where they are now. And we want to keep up. We want to keep time going strong for the next 100 years. Before I let you go, uh Jessica, you recently wrote, I think it was your first op-ed on time, uh very powerful. For those that didn't read it, um, why were you inspired to write about female leaders in the media industry and and the mentors you've had along the way? Well, thank you for that question and pointing that out. I actually pitched this story to media, and no one seemed to connect the dots or be that interested in the story, so I decided to write it myself for time. And uh, throughout my career, you mentioned Forbes, I had um incredible honor and opportunity to build sort of this entrepreneur, you know, founders, change makers, and a lot of them were female and first and young. And there's such incredible communities that exist for those types of individuals. Um, there really wasn't the same type of community for experienced leaders who have tested the time and have uh done this multiple times in multiple ways at multiple companies throughout their careers. And it dawned on me that uh, number one, we are in the most complicated time in media. No, you're right. Companies splitting up, we got Warner Brothers, CNN, and Comcast. We've got we've got litigation, we're protecting journalists. I mean, it's just it's always been a challenge, and it's always changing, but this marks um a very important moment in history. And I realized that so many of the media companies who have legacy, resilient media companies are being run by women. And I started to make a list, and it grew, and it grew, and it grew. And some of them I know, and some of them I don't know, but want to know. And I wrote the op-ed about that. And it also is this notion of the glass cliff versus the glass ceiling. And there's just too many of us to be a glass cliff moment. So read it, go to it's free. And I think it's a great perspective of what's happening in media today and who some of the leaders are. Well, keep those op-eds coming. Uh, I enjoy your writing. Uh, Jessica Sibley, Time Inc CEO, always nice to see you. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Brian, for having me. Thank you Yahoo Finance. All right, that's it for here for us here at Cannes Lions. Do stick around, much more ahead on Yahoo Finance. 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Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Time Inc. CEO on embracing AI: It's better to have a seat at the table
Time Inc. CEO Jessica Sibley is embracing AI even as it's triggering a massive upheaval in the publishing industry. For the longtime media exec, it just makes better business sense to do so. "We want to have a seat at the table and be with these top executives," Sibley told Yahoo Finance at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Monday. "We started early in this journey, and we've decided to start with a guiding principle, which was are we going to negotiate, litigate, or do nothing? We decided if we were going to negotiate, we were going to opt in. We want to be part of this technology," she explained. Time Inc. has pressed forward with a major reinvention under Sibley, partly by leaning into AI. In 2024, it signed a multiyear deal with OpenAI to give it access to Time's 102-year-old content archive. More recently, the company said it'll launch an on-demand podcast with Meta (META)-backed Scale AI that features two AI hosts summarizing four top stories from its newsletter The Brief. Sibley said the company has been leveraging AI across "every single department" to become more efficient, from the newsroom to legal and HR. The push for cost savings comes as Time Inc. laid off around 30 staffers in January 2024 and another 22 last August. Sibley cited industry headwinds at the time for the cuts. In the fall, Time Inc. expects to enable multilingual, personalized AI interactions on the site, such as AI search, chat, and translation. "The acceleration of how consumers are demanding finding ways of personalized content, multimodal content, and with the AI answer results, we wanted to again embrace it and be part of it as opposed to litigate," Sibley said. Time Inc. was purchased from Meredith Corporation in September 2018 by Salesforce (CRM) co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in cash. Sibley began as its CEO in November 2022, joining the magazine from Forbes, where she was COO. Prior to Forbes, she held leadership positions at Condé Nast and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The publication has also expanded its high-profile events business and modernized its tech stack while continuing with its high-quality journalism. To that end, Time Inc. named Donald Trump "Person of the Year" for 2024 and followed up with a headline-making interview with the president to mark his first 100 days in office. Sibley said in a recent note that Time Inc. is forecasting 24% advertising revenue growth in the first half of the year. Other media players are navigating the tricky balance between negotiating and litigating against AI. Big Tech has been forking over large sums of money for licensing agreements to use publishers' archives to train large language models. The New York Times (NYT) recently inked a multiyear deal to license content to Amazon (AMZN) for AI-related uses, marking its first generative AI contract. The company had sued OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT) in 2023, alleging the tech companies illegally used millions of its articles to train chatbots. News Corp. (NWS), owner of Wall Street Journal, signed a five-year licensing deal with OpenAI in May 2024 worth a reported $250 million. Reddit (RDDT) is claiming in a new lawsuit that Anthropic scraped its users' personal data without consent, then used it to train its large language model Claude. As this is playing out, Google traffic to publisher websites continues to be pressured as the tech giant leans into its new AI snippets. The byproduct: shrinking news jobs. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that organic search to HuffPost's desktop and mobile websites has plunged by 50% in the past three years. Organic search traffic to Business Insider cratered by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025. Business Insider slashed 21% of its staff in late May, blaming the need to evolve the business model in the age of AI. About 6% of the Los Angeles Times staff was let go in early May, Variety reported. In January, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post gave 4% of its staff pink slips. Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
TIME Inc. harnessing powers of AI amid 'most complicated time in media'
TIME Inc. CEO Jessica Sibley joins Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi for an interview at Cannes Lions 2025, discussing what she calls the, "most complicated time in media," and why she's choosing to embrace AI and technological change rather than litigate it. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
