Devin Nadi | Vox

Spotify has 300 million users. It wants more of them to listen to podcasts.

2020-11-19T16:54:56-05:00

Spotify wants to own the podcasting space, and it’s made that clear with a series of high-profile acquisitions and deals over the past two years — including the Ringer, Gimlet, Joe Rogan, and, most recently, Megaphone. Its next goal: get more of its 300 million users to start listening to podcasts.

Peter Kafka talked to Gimlet Media’s new head of content, Lydia Polgreen, about how she plans to achieve that at the Code Media@Home series.

“Our goal is to get people into the habit of listening to content on Spotify that’s not music,” Polgreen said. While the growth of podcasts has been strong, it’s still a tiny fraction of overall listening for the service. She pointed to the latest Edison research that podcasting hit an all-time high in 2020, now accounting for a 6 percent share of audio consumption in the United States.

To that end, Gimlet is experimenting with mixed media extensions of podcasts, like vodcasting (video podcasting), and it’s leveraging Spotify’s robust predictive algorithm to feed music listeners shortform spoken content in the Daily Drive, its recommendation service.

“Just as Spotify helped people discover the best music for them — it didn’t just know what you liked, but it was able to predict what you might like,” Polgreen said. “There’s a lot of really fascinating work going on at the company that’s trying to solve this problem for spoken word audio too.”

The most recent iteration of this looks a lot like traditional FM radio. Last month, Gimlet Media launched The Get Up, a morning show that mixes daily news and talk with Spotify’s personalized music recommendations — “that special sauce Spotify has with music,” said Polgreen.

Deciding to reinvent the drive-time radio show during a pandemic, when a large share of would-be commuters are homebound, doesn’t seem like great timing. But according to Polgreen, half a million people have tuned in so far. And after an initial dip, Gimlet listenership is back to where it was pre-pandemic.

Polgreen also told Kafka some of her other ideas for audio: a daily shortform soap opera-style fiction podcast, and a weekly, appointment-listening documentary show. “We’ve yet to see a show that’s become the 60 Minutes for audio,” she said.

Watch Kafka’s full interview with Lydia Polgreen above to hear more about her vision for podcasting at Spotify, why she left a long career at the New York Times to join HuffPost after the 2016 election, and her thoughts on Joe Rogan’s interview controversies.

Most US clinical skin care is designed for white women. This CEO is making products for everyone.

2020-10-05T13:15:59-04:00

In an already crowded market like skin care, which has grown explosively in recent years, how can you launch a new product line that stands apart?

That’s a question for Topicals co-founder and CEO Olamide Olowe. The science-backed skin care line for chronic skin conditions launched in Nordstrom in early August, and its products sold out in less than 24 hours.

In a candid interview with Jason Del Rey for the Code Commerce@Home series, Olowe detailed the strategy that made Topicals a nearly overnight hit: Years before launching or even finalizing the formulas of their products, Topicals built a community specifically focused on BIPOC women with chronic skin conditions.

“Community isn’t just Instagram followers or people on your email list,” she said. “Community is a shared sense of experiences.” Two years ago, Olowe and Topicals co-founder Claudia Teng decided to build a skin care company rather than attend med school. Their first step was to research how people talk about their chronic skin conditions, and how they accessed care.

“People with chronic skin conditions will never find a cure,” she said. They just adapt their lifestyle to managing the condition. “For us to go out to our community and say, ‘Use our product and aspire to have perfect skin’ — it’s not realistic and it’s damaging to people’s mental health.”

From their community, they heard about experiences that matched their own growing up: Clinical skin care products frequently neglect the needs of women of color. According to Olowe, 75 percent of dermatology clinical trial participants are white, which means many products on the market are not proven to be safe for darker skin tones. Some commonly used ingredients can even cause skin cell pigment death for certain types of skin through prolonged use.

“We have to question systems and understand why there hasn’t been inclusivity in dermatology,” Olowe said, noting the profession is “literally skin-based.” By building community first, Topicals is aiming to make its product development inclusive.

Another thing Olowe learned from Topicals’ community: People with chronic skin conditions want that treatment to work, but they also want it to be fun — to look and feel good.

“When you walk into a CVS or a Walgreens, the beauty aisle is separate from the chronic skin care aisle,” Olowe said. “There wasn’t a brand in that chronic skin care space that you were excited to pull out of a bag in front of your friends, or live on your vanity.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Twitter — not YouTube or Instagram — is the social media network that Topicals has relied on for community building and marketing. The company developed a following by posting detailed, educational threads on the platform about the science around skin conditions. They’ve also used their account to take on difficult topics, posting a thread about the science of tear gas irritation during the height of the George Floyd protests, when law enforcement around the US was using tear gas on protesters.

Olowe also discussed how she dealt with challenges in securing funding. She pitched 100 investors, forming connections by cold emailing, LinkedIn messaging, and dabbling in VC Twitter. What she learned: “They’re looking to invest in ideas that will transform a category.”

All that pitching paid off. Topicals investors include Netflix CMO Bozoma Saint John and Insecure actresses Issa Rae and Yvonne Orji. At 23, Olowe is the youngest Black woman to secure more than $1 million in venture funding, and she’s just getting started.

Watch the full interview here as part of the Code Commerce@Home series, and register to tune in for upcoming live events.

How Old Navy quickly turned its stores into e-commerce distribution centers

2020-09-25T17:28:41-04:00

As the magnitude of the coronavirus pandemic became clear last spring, Nancy Green, the head of Old Navy for Gap Inc., established a central command team dubbed “The Lemonade Team.” The goal: “To make lemonade out of whatever lemons were coming at us,” Green told Recode’s senior commerce correspondent Jason Del Rey.

In a candid interview that kicked off the Code Commerce@Home series, Green recounted her rapid-fire decision-making around core business operations as lockdown orders unevenly swept the nation and e-commerce demand doubled overnight.

“Everything is coming at you really fast,” Green told Del Rey. “You have to quickly react and re-gear how you run your business.”

For Old Navy, that meant temporarily retooling its brick-and-mortar stores as distribution centers to fulfill online orders and building and scaling up curbside pickup in a two-week window. Simultaneously, they retrofitted their stores for eventual reopening with Plexiglass sneeze guards, new cleaning protocols, and signage to enforce social distancing and mask-wearing.

The most surprising thing to Green has been the sheer pace of behavior change that the pandemic caused. “To see a level of e-commerce demand accelerated by several years — it’s extraordinary,” Green said. “I don’t think any of us have seen anything like this ever.”

Green also discussed why she is encouraging CEOs to join Old Navy in paying employees to work as poll workers this election, and how Old Navy competes with Amazon by staying laser-focused on their core business: apparel. “It’s 100 percent of what we do,” she said.

“Clothing is very, very emotional. We don’t look at it as a commodity,” Green said. “These are the things that these people wear, and that builds a lot of psychological safety — when you feel confident and comfortable in your clothes, you feel confident and comfortable in your life.”

You can watch the whole interview here.

Register for Code Commerce@Home to watch Del Rey’s upcoming live interviews with Topicals co-founder and CEO Olamide Olowe and Amazon Worldwide Vice President for Grocery Stephenie Landry.

The Black List’s Franklin Leonard says greed can combat Hollywood’s bias

2020-01-31T12:00:18-05:00

Black List founder Franklin Leonard | Courtesy: Franklin Leonard

The Black List — a list of producers’ favorite unproduced screenplays — started with an idea so obvious that producer and Black List founder Franklin Leonard couldn’t believe it didn’t already exist. He just asked producers he knew what their favorite screenplays were, then created a list.

“I was terrified that I had violated some unwritten rule of Hollywood and that surely other people had had this idea, hadn’t done it for a reason, but I was too dumb to realize that,” Leonard told Kara Swisher on Recode Decode.

In fact, he had identified an incredibly valuable opportunity: an easy way for producers to find the best screenplays circulating, rather than digging through piles of mediocre work.

He came up with the idea while working as a script reader for Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way Productions. Most of the scripts Leonard read were not great, and he thought there must be a better way of surfacing interesting material. So he emailed some of his peers and asked them about great screenplays they had read but passed on, then put the results in a pivot table, and created the first Black List.

The first Black List in 2005 included major box-office hit Juno and Academy Award-nominated Lars and the Real Girl. Since then, Leonard has published the Black List annually as a survey of over 250 film executives on the best screenplays they’ve read that have yet to be produced.

The list helps recirculate great screenplays that executives had passed on in a given year. Since its development in 2005, four out of the past 12 Academy Award winners for Best Picture and 10 of the last 24 winners for Screenplay came from the Black List.

This all raises the question: If the screenplays included in the Black List are so great, why didn’t they get produced right away? “The industry has gotten away from prioritizing ‘Is the script good?’ as the primary driver of whether you make the movie,” Leonard says. Producers have overvalued other factors of success like star actors, genre, viability in foreign markets, and strayed from fundamentals.

“Screenwriters are terribly undervalued in Hollywood, given their relative contribution to the success and failure of the things that we all make,” he told Recode Decode.

But the Black List has numbers to back up its success: Movies made from the Black List make 90 percent more revenue in the box office than non-listed films with similar budgets, according to a recent Harvard Business School study. “The Black List, to some extent, lays bare the fact that if you take great scripts, and make them into movies, you have a better chance of delivering a financial return,” Leonard says.

More recently, Leonard has expanded the Black List into a two-sided marketplace for screenplays. Each screenplay is scored by a Black List-sanctioned group of industry professionals. The marketplace allows producers to search within a given genre and by score.

In light of the lack of diversity among this year’s Academy Awards nominees, Leonard is optimistic that reducing barriers to entry is the key to telling more stories and getting more recognition. “We wanted to create something that anybody — if they were talented — could be discovered,” he said.

Leonard’s team has analyzed demographic data from the most successful screenplays from their marketplace, and noticed that the distribution of scores by gender are virtually identical with one exception: “At the very bottom of the scale — so the worst scripts — women just fall off,” he said. “Women are not submitting, on average, bad screenplays to our site.”

The data is confirmation for Hollywood of what Leonard already knew: “Who you are, or what demographic group you’re a part of, has no direct correlation to your talent.” It’s only a reflection of gatekeeping and who-knows-who that have traditionally circulated screenplays in Hollywood. A study of spec script sales from 1991 to 2012 showed women wrote only 13 percent of screenplays that were sold and produced.

Leonard’s hope is that maybe greed can finally diversify Hollywood because more diverse movies continue to break box office records both domestically and abroad.

And Netflix — famously data-driven — is leading the pack. He describes the weekend the streaming service released Always Be My Maybe, a romantic comedy with two Asian-American leads, and When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s miniseries on the Central Park Five that explores race and the criminal justice system, as a turning point.

“I suspect that that has to do with their approach to data,” Leonard says of Netflix’s strategy.

But if the Academy Awards nominations are any indication, mainstream Hollywood is slow to catch on. “Sometimes even the greed doesn’t overwhelm the bias,” he says. But eventually, he hopes that will change.

When Pinterest users started searching for vaccines, CEO Ben Silbermann pulled all medical information from the platform

2020-01-17T18:00:28-05:00

Pinterest is much smaller than its tech giant competitors Instagram, Amazon, and Google. But the visual discovery platform has established a quietly radical approach to search: deliberately engineering results to avoid harm, and holding itself accountable for unintended consequences.

Founded in 2010, Pinterest grew up against the backdrop of its rapidly scaled competitors struggling to adequately police the spread of disinformation on their platforms.

“I think back then it was just sort of a foregone conclusion that if you build technology platforms, good things will automatically happen,” CEO Ben Silbermann told Kara Swisher at the National Retail Federation in a live episode of Recode Decode. “The lesson that everyone’s learned over the last few years is that if you want positive things to come out of internet technology, they have to be deliberately engineered that way.”

Silbermann’s approach to search is a quietly radical departure from Pinterest’s fellow social media platforms. Without calling them out directly, Silbermann says, “If you don’t take some responsibility for what people see, you’re at some level responsible for the downstream consequences of that.”

The platform faced its first test when it noticed people had begun searching Pinterest for medical information, specifically about vaccines. The reemergence of previously eradicated diseases like measles has been linked, at least in part, to disinformation on social platforms shared by people who believe unfounded claims that vaccines can be harmful.

“And we made the decision then, that as a starting point, we would just not serve up content because we couldn’t ensure that we were giving people great information,” Silbermann said.

Over the past six months, Pinterest has permitted verified sources like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to post results exclusively.

They took a similar approach to users searching for terms associated with clinical depression and anxiety. Under the guidance of clinical psychologists, Pinterest designed a product called “Compassionate Search.” The goal is to serve results that will aid rather than harm users, all based on expert advice from medical professionals. Silbermann said this means results should normalize emotions but not the behavior of self-harm.

Silbermann is driven by his early vision for what the internet could be. “Like a lot of people, I thought the internet would be this positive place that could connect people in a positive way, that could lead people to feel really good. And it didn’t turn out that way,” he says. “A lot of the internet wasn’t built with the needs of especially women in mind.”

Pinterest is still dwarfed by the likes of Instagram, Google, and Amazon, whose businesses focus on the intersection of search and commerce. But at 320 million US users, Pinterest is growing quickly. We’ll see how Silbermann’s accountability for unintended consequences evolves with scale now that it’s a public company answerable to the stock market — and whether any of its competitors follow suit.