Today’s conversation: Puck CEO Sarah Personette on why she’s wary of becoming an events company.
Welcome back. Hope you had a nice break. The best way to cannonball into the new year is a trip to Las Vegas for CES. It’s good to have a reminder that for all the talk that scale doesn’t matter, there are exceptions. My hotel has 5,000 rooms. CES will attract some 140,000 visitors to Vegas this week.
These kinds of mega events are an acquired taste. The tech industry has long liked a tradeshow and opportunity to show off their corporate-branded backpacks. The successful ones like CES become true ecosystem events where specific industries can cluster. The media + tech world is clusters around the Cosmopolitan, especially the multistory Chandelier Bar, where the true pros aren’t afraid to pop open a laptop to show off a dashboard. CES has remained a media industry tentpole event, alongside Possible, Cannes and maybe Advertising Week.
We have a pair of events at CES:
Tonight, we are partnering with Index Exchange to host “Innovators Unscripted,” a discussion about the coming era of agentic advertising with Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale, Dentsu chief trading officer Ant McDonagh. We’ll have highlights and the full conversation available.
Thanks to Index Exchange and EX.CO for their support.
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Why TIME’s email engagement is soaring
TIME’s newsletters reach millions of readers every week. But until recently, they were stuck with clunky workflows, limited insights, and flat engagement. After migrating 13 newsletters and millions of subscribers to beehiiv (with zero downtime) things changed fast. Open rates on “Inside TIME” jumped 63.8%. Click through rates across their portfolio increased to 11.7%. Editors now publish faster, with better tools and real-time insights. TIME proves that even the most established media brands can evolve and thrive when they own their email strategy.
Why Puck doesn’t want to be an events company
Puck co-founder and editor Jon Kelly has a nice line he used with me in 2023 about building a media company in the post-scale era: It’s foolish to try to own the waterfront.
Media companies need to pick their spots. But they also can’t get pigeonholed. Puck began during newsletter mania, betting it could rebundle individuals who otherwise would set off on their own by offering them equity stakes, performance bonuses and franchises built around them. The newsletter was the atomic unit Puck produced. It subsequently added podcasts and has dabbled in events.
But on events, Puck CEO Sarah Personette, who joined Puck a year ago after top sales roles at Twitter and Facebook, in is not as starry eyed as some of her peers. She flatly declares she has no interest in being an events company, in contrast to the approach taken by Semafor, which launched around the same time. Semafor has positioned itself as an events-led media brand.
“I have seen that when a P&L gets over-rotated to events, it’s actually the downfall of a media company because then they become an event company, and they're no longer a media and a content company,” she told me on The Rebooting Show.
Sarah’s experience includes serving as the COO at Refinery29, which relied on events through its 29Rooms experiential arm.
Puck’s events strategy breaks into three types:
Owned events. Puck has held its first two ticketed events with The Arena, a full-day event for a 100-odd sports executives convened by John Ourand, and The Art of Influence, an art market event built around Marion Maneker’s franchise.
Thought leadership. These are small scale events that appeal to industry insiders in core Puck markets: Washington DC and Hollywood. Think Puck’s “power breakfasts” that bring together lawmakers, regulators and lobbyists, and its awards-season gatherings that tap into Hollywood’s enduring “for your consideration” marketing.
Built if sold. These are small scale events like private dinners that are held in collaboration with a partner and often used as leverage to get larger ad commitments.
It’s a fairly robust roster, but hardly the kind of high-octane events operation that powers most B2B media businesses and increasingly magazine brands like Forbes, Time and newer entrants like Semafor.
Convening power matters for a brand. Puck’s model is a bet that individual talent will create leverage in the marketplace in convening. Puck clearly wants to capitalize on that without being pulled into what is, in effect, a hard-to-scale services business, particularly if you’re operating 100-plus events like some publications.
This carries risk of brand dilution, particularly if the events operation is focused on the thought leadership and built-if-sold buckets. I’ve been surprised in our own private dinners how many consumer brands run events at margins far lower than my experience in B2B. Puck positions itself as “business-to-professional,” which apparently is B2B but fancier.
“Not everyone runs their experiential business with a mind to margins,” Sarah told me. “You introduce an event to drive top-line revenue and all of a sudden you have a very, very messy P&L.”
Listen to the full conversation with Sarah for more on its events strategy, why podcasting is more about relationships than revenue, how Airmail now brings Puck to over 100,000 paying subscribers.
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