Q&A with Maya Draisin, SVP, Progress Marketing, TIME
By: Saanya Jain
Tags: Journalism, Subscriber Spotlight, Media

Q&A with Maya Draisin, SVP, Progress Marketing, TIME

TIME has launched three new initiatives — TIME for Health, TIME for Learning, and most recently NextAdvisor — as well as expanded TIME for Kids under the umbrella of “improving people’s lives” over the past few months. We spoke to Maya about the strategy and execution behind the launches. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.

Can you tell me about your path to TIME and your role?

I’ve been at TIME since October. I came from Conde Nast where I was on Wired for 17 years. In the last four or five years, I took on brand marketing for GQ, Golf Digest, Pitchfork, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.

What was the impetus behind launching these products?

The super power of TIME is trust and accessibility for everyone all over the world. So we started thinking about consumer products that really spoke to a need in such a way that we made their individual lives better. You start looking at areas such as health care, education, personal finances, jobs, and personal development.

We started moving pretty rapidly in the direction of health in particular. When the pandemic hit, however, it became very clear to us that TIME for Kids and the ability for teachers and parents to handle distance learning was a huge critical need. As TIME for Kids has been in the classroom for 25 years, we had a real opportunity to support the teachers in our community and, by extension, the parents. On March 23, which is basically a week and a half after it became clear that kids were going to be home for school, we launched TIME for Kids’ free digital library, which made TIME for Kids 2020 available to anyone for free anywhere in the world. We’ve had 350,000 people sign up for that library.

In that, we really had our first experience with people responding to us and telling us how useful it was to them and telling us what else they needed, which ended up being additional languages. So we have since launched in both Spanish and Chinese as well as creative outlets, like art. Its intent was to go through the end of the school year, which would have been June, but we extended it through the end of July, just because people aren’t a hundred percent out of their homes.

On July 6, we’re launching Camp TFK, which is just an email sent daily offering five things — some games, arts and crafts — to help parents to keep their kids occupied.

We launched a video series with Adobe called Draw with Drew, which is an eight-part series featuring the creative director of TIME Kids and the editor-in-chief’s daughter, Rosie, who already had this organic drawing exchange over the years. We’ve had over 1.5 million views of the eight episodes, and people sending in their drawings or posting their drawings from all over the world, which we turned into a digital magazine.

TIME for Health launched a week ago. As a news organization we have a front row to the changing needs of people, and so we started to see that there was fatigue around the heaviness of coronavirus coverage. We decided that wellness information on how people can live better, live healthier, be more resilient would be useful.

We launched the set of six visual wellness magazines a week ago in a series of categories, the major ones being food, fitness, and sleep. This week, we’re launching two new magazines and we’ll just keep adding to this library.

That is really a first step in what we want to do for health, with the followup being an event series that starts on July 8, which is when we’ll have our first TIME for Health talk, in follow up to the very successful TIME 100 Talks. With them, it’s definitely less thought leadership and conversation and more practice. So the first one will be about meditation, and we’re looking at things that add utility and value that can help you make your wellness more actionable.

As for TIME for Learning, which we launched a week ago, we were looking at other needs. As we face 25% unemployment as well as people being furloughed or people going into the summer who might’ve had internships or other opportunities for professional development, there is a real need for people to be upskilled and reskilled as we reopen and they face the opportunity to find new jobs or to succeed in their same jobs.

We partnered with Columbia to create accessible business school programs. Normally Columbia has really incredible, hands-on executive education, but it’s 10 weeks and it ranges from $1,500 to $3,500. With the support of Deluxe [a financial services company for small businesses], we were able to bring that down under $200. So we launched five courses, four of which are $195, and one of which is a mini course at $65. They cover basic skills of negotiation, leadership, marketing, and finance to help people make use of this time to upskill.

How are you establishing a user demand for these products?

If I watch what editorial is covering and the tone that they take, you have a pulse on what’s going on in the culture, in our readership and beyond. Simultaneously, we are listening on social. Then, you can look at the data and see the rapid climb of the coronavirus newsletter, which is at 70,000 subscribers, and see the reading rates and pace of subscription change over time.

Also, there’s something very personal to it, too. We’re all in this together, and we started to feel it personally about how what’s needed changes.

Finally, these are larger societal trends — the need for mental wellness has just become more clear. So it’s a combination of anecdotal evidence and analytics.

How were you able to pull these different initiatives off in a short time frame?

It was because there were things in motion already. If you look at TIME for Kids, we were having a conversation about digital magazines for fall for the 2020–2021 school year to enhance features and be more multiplatform. When this hit, we were able to take conversations that had been going for a couple of months and were meant to launch in September and speed that whole process up.

In the case of TIME for Health, it is existing editorial content that our editors were able to curate and update and refresh for this.

Columbia was completely new, but they have a whole staff of exceptional faculty, so they could tap into that. That was probably the one that is most from scratch.

How are these initiatives being monetized?

They were all very different. TIME for Kids was done so quickly — pretty much in two days on a weekend — with the support of Google, AT&T, and HP. We are currently selling subscriptions for 2021. 350,000 people signed up for the free edition, two thirds of whom are new or not subscribers to TIME for Kids and not even subscribers to TIME.

TIME for Health is also currently planned through August with the great support of Merck on the digital destination and the free wellness magazine, and the video series is sponsored by CVS Health. It’s really a short term response to something that we will see if it turns into something more.

The Columbia partnership is a revenue share. While it is focused on the short term, if it works, we would be extending it, but it’s also part of TIME for Learning, which is an initiative that is bigger than this. Our goal is to reach K-12, college, and lifelong learners, and this is kind of a foray into the lifelong learning piece of things. We have TIME for Kids in the classroom for K through six, and TIME Edge for middle school. You’ll start to see us looking to venture into high school and college.

Most of these were done to solve a consumer and societal need in the moment, and we need to figure out how to monetize them. It’s kind of a cart before the horse on these, but in an exciting way. That approach — especially in TIME for Kids — got us where we needed to be faster.

They’re all areas that were strategically where we intended to focus. From the insights, they show up as the areas that TIME has permission to play.

We had the opportunity through this hard period of time to move quickly and start experimenting in these spaces, when otherwise we probably would not have moved as fast. What it ended up doing is forcing a bit of a test and learn approach. It really forces you to listen to the consumer and adapt to what it is they’re asking for — and to create a product that really fits their needs, as opposed to many of the other ways that products get created.

What’s in store for the future?

There’s a lot more — TIME for Learning and TIME for Health is a huge place to explore, and this is really just dipping our toe in the water. Another piece of this puzzle for what people need now are the jobs themselves, and so exploring that space to see if there’s anything that we can do to help with that.

We just launched a bunch of things, and now the real interesting work is in figuring out how to grow them.

What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media at an organization other than your own?

I am interested in responses to what is going on in the world that are not lip service but address a real need or make real change. Two examples of that that I’ve really admired lately. The first is Teen Vogue Prom — my old colleagues are always so en pointe. When school was cancelled, they recognized that seniors were going to miss prom, and jumped in to create a special virtual experience and lead into the big night with styling advice, makeup tutorials and dance lessons!

Secondly, while it may be showing my tech roots, I really appreciated that Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit, resigned from the board of Reddit so that he could be replaced by a Black candidate. While this is primarily a personal response, it is very on brand for him and his family, but also important when put in the context of the stance Reddit has previously taken on racist speech on the platform.

Rapid Fire Questions

What is the last book you read?

I’m reading three: Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad, Subscribed by Tien Tzuo about why the subscription model is your company’s future, and The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For by Charlotte Alter.

What is your first read in the morning?

Twitter.

What would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role?

I would probably be a floral designer.

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