Time launched The Snug and Mimi, sites about home and beauty, and now it's debuting The Drive.
Time Inc. is betting big on digital-only brands. After launching home site The Snug and beauty site Mimi
earlier this year, the company is set to unveil another brand new
digital vertical, The Drive, this fall. And while The Snug and Mimi
focus mainly on curating content from Time Inc. brands and other outside
blogs, The Drive will be its own full-fledged editorial enterprise—and
the publisher's first foray into the automotive space.
The Drive will target the under-35 crowd, many of who are newcomers to
car culture. It's an increasingly valuable market for automakers, and
according to Time Inc.'s svp of digital innovation, Matt Bean, an
underserved one. "There was an apocryphal marketing notion that
millennials didn't want cars because they were all about experiences and
not tangible, owned things like cars. Well, that's begun to change," he
explained. "A lot of auto marketers have started going after a younger
audience. They're aware that they need to own those audiences now
because they're going to be the buyers of the $70,000 cars in 10 years."
To lead The Drive, Bean brought in former Maxim digital director (and
longtime automotive journalist) Mike Guy as editor, and former Road
& Track and Esquire general manager Eric Goeres as gm. "These are
car guys through and through, but they can also plug into the lifestyle
approach to things," said Bean. "I like to say that this is a brand
that's not just about what happens in the garage or on the track. It's
about the culture around cars as well."
The lifestyle angle means that The Drive will fit nicely into Time
Inc.'s larger strategy of fostering collaboration among brands. For
instance, said Bean, the site might partner with Food + Wine or Travel +
Leisure on a road trip package, or link up with Sports Illustrated on a
story about athletes and their cars.
Another key focus of The Drive will be longform journalism. "Everybody
has a story about the top car moments in the James Bond films or a photo
gallery of Steve McQueen and his cars or coverage of the auto shows,
but it's the storytelling piece that we plan to layer on top of that
that I hope will help to differentiate us," said Bean, who helped launch
Sports Illustrated's longform platform when he was managing editor of
SI.com. (His partner in that project, SI creative director Chris Hercik,
is also overseeing The Drive's creative side.)
On the advertising side, The Drive is taking full advantage of Time
Inc.'s existing corporate ad sales teams in Detroit, which are currently
working to lock down launch sponsors for the new site.
While The Drive is Time Inc.'s first car brand, its greater strategic
importance within the company is as the template that future
digital-only verticals from Bean's Digital Innovation Group will be
built upon. "If you look at a publisher like Vox or Gawker, they're
leveraging the same back end so they don't have a lengthy development
cycle when they want to get a new brand up and running," said Bean.
"We're planning to leverage a common infrastructure so that we're not
rebuilding the wheel each time we launch one of these [new verticals]."
Indeed, Bean seems to be modeling the Digital Innovation Group as a
new-media company along the lines of the aforementioned publishers more
than as a division of an old-media publisher, describing it as "a
startup surrounded by the world's best brands." That digital startup
mentality will be further cultivated if the group moves to fancy new Brooklyn digs
complete with "indoor slides and pinball machines" later this year, as
reported by the New York Post, rather than following the rest of Time
Inc. to the Financial District.
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