Q&A: Kim Patel, Director of Global Corporate Strategy @ Vice Media
This week, The Idea caught up with Kim Patel about how her job is like firefighting, Vice Studios and international expansion.
Can you tell me about yourself and your role at Vice Media?
It essentially sums up to being a firefighter for the business. My objective at the end of the day is to make sure that the journalists and the producers that are going out into the field and creating amazing stories can do their job.
So, it’s a mix of both operations and strategy. The operations piece comes in where I essentially step into any issue or problem that’s happening that’s preventing the content from being created and I go and fix it.
And then the second piece is the strategic piece. I am mainly focused on growing revenue for the company because I want to be able to give people bigger budgets to make better content. That includes thinking about different ways in which we can use our content library and taking that to different types of partners and platforms, whether that’s Spotify or Twitch or YouTube. That’s a big part of my job, as well as thinking about how to license and distribute content internationally to different telecom companies in different countries, making other types of international content and different-language content.
What are Vice’s strategy goals and how have they evolved since you’ve been there?
I started at Vice three years ago in the digital business, so that was Vice.com and other properties. Vice.com was essentially the first touchpoint for any consumers to enjoy and consume the Vice brand. The great thing about Vice is that all of our businesses have a voice of their own, but the DNA is always the Vice DNA.
25 years ago when the magazine was created in Montreal, Canada, it was all about punk and it was all about being essentially against the grain. I think the company has really tried to hold onto that, but as we’ve grown, we have to be able to grow with our audiences. As more and more people got access to Vice, sometimes we had [to walk] a fine line between being mass market versus being edgy and so that was definitely difficult from a creative standpoint.
What the teams have done is really trying to hone in on who the audience is and why people resonate with [the brand] so much. A lot of that is because we report the same story that another major media brand may also report with a different frame, a different voice and a different perspective that people appreciate it because it’s just more raw. I think that’s really integral to the strategy, and what’s happened in the last two years is kind of figuring out how to hold on to where we’ve come from but grow at the same time. That’s one piece of it.
I think the second piece of it is thinking about taking [what] started out as a website and a magazine and harnessing it in different formats. So that meant launching Vice Studios, a film studio. That [also] meant launching a creative agency, Virtue, which doesn’t necessarily function under Vice’s umbrella but it’s the white-label that started out from Vice.
What was the thought process behind starting a studio of your own?
We were always dabbling in documentaries since video was a thing, like back in 2004. Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a huge tentpole for us and a big part of our history. We realized that we have a good ecosystem of all these creatives who love the brand, people who have relationships with the founders, people who just know a lot of other people. So how are we not building a business out of this — we have such a phenomenal, talented ecosystem literally at our fingertips. We are also really good at the documentary and news-style programming. So how do we marry the two?
That’s how the studio was born. It’s focused on movies that are more niche and more angsty, or specifically about certain topics that are documentary-style that most people wouldn’t cover. The type of content that they produce [can also be] really out there, like the movie Beach Bum.
Tell me a more about the process of developing a project — do most ideas come from other Vice platforms?
Yes, the [studio] does definitely take inspiration from what’s happening inside Vice at all times. This has happened with Viceland, [with] a digital show, or digital producers come up with an idea and they shot maybe a pilot video and tested it on YouTube and it did really well. [Then] they shot a short-form series and that short-form series did so well that it then went to Viceland, and Viceland thought, “Let’s make this into a TV show.”
Now what can also happen is that digital producers or people from Viceland might come up with a concept and potentially think this could be a documentary, [ask whether] we can attach the right talent to it, take it over to studios and potentially green light it.
What are the ways in which Vice Media’s different platforms work in conjunction with Vice Studios?
Outside of just being able to market with them, there’s the ability to talent share, both on-screen and off-screen talent, within the ecosystem that is Vice. Let’s say somebody comes into the ESPN headquarters for an interview that day, and what ends up happening is that they’re on one show and then they’re on another show and then they do a digital segment and then a Twitter live feed all in the same day. [That’s] how we think whenever we have talent coming in for something, whether it’s a digital piece or whether they’re working with the studio — we might have them come into the L.A. office and have them do a piece for another brand or another division.
[Another] piece in terms of synergies is the [advantage of] having all the different types of medium formats under one roof. We essentially have every kind of media business model that exists today under one brand which is crazy, because we also have an agency so that makes us a little different from our blue-chip predecessors like Disney.
The ability to have that is also a matter of knowledge and data-sharing. So, for example, if Virtue finds that the demand from a majority of clients focuses on a specific type of audience set, they can share that with our commercial team. Our commercial team can actually go back and work with our content team to develop the right type of content and then go to our other clients and potentially say, “This is probably what you should be focusing on.” The other piece of that, and how you relate that back to Viceland, is creating the right type of branded production advertising that will be able to catch that type of audience and retain them as consumers.
How have you thought about integrating the sort of the branding work which has been a core part of Viceland, for example with Beerland, into the studio strategy?
On the studio side, it’s a little difficult in the sense that brands haven’t moved into the notion of creating branded film yet, so that would be very new for the entire market. Product placement is definitely something that we have explored with our clients. So when we are talking to our clients, they’re essentially getting access to not just the digital piece, they’re getting access to Vice.
I’ll use The Torture Report as an example: before it was sold to Amazon, we built it up, we did magazine coverage of it, we did a digital interview piece with them, we did promos on Viceland. We were able to essentially market the whole thing because we essentially have a machine at our fingertips.
[If brands] want to come in and potentially attach themselves to a short-form film or a script, they can. That would require them coming in and contributing to the budget. That would be awesome if they did, but the market and the clients just aren’t there yet.
Beerland was great for us because it was the first time that people were like “Oh wow, this can actually work.” Branded TV production, which unlike interstitial TV advertising tells a story like our partnership with Cadillac for Hustle, was kind of new. So we were breaking the mould there and we need to break the mould again [with studio] on that piece.
What has been the biggest learning trying to grow the film studio business?
The challenge definitely was in terms of being able to get the funding for the studio. The way that studios work, you have to finance all of your projects and you have to underwrite all of that. That essentially means you have to pay for the product before the movie makes any money. The question that came up a lot was, “How are you going to beat the big guys?”
We weren’t trying to compete with the big guys, and that messaging was important. It’s about building a studio [out of] the ecosystem that Vice has naturally been able to build up over the last 25 years. And I think that’s a different model, because we’re not trying to produce the next Avengers. That was a little challenging, but you have to find people who believe in the vision.
Could you could speak more on how you think about international expansion?
I think the growth area really comes from trying to understand the younger audiences in different countries. A lot of the same kinds of artistic ideas and movements happening with this generation in the States are also taking place in other parts of the world. So for us, it’s really about Vice being a part of those moments.
We want to make sure we’re in the area, with boots on the ground in the places in which these really important things are happening — India, Singapore, Latin America. APAC is a big growth region for us. The Middle East is big for us. It’s no longer about how many offices and how many countries you’re in, it’s about whose voices are you capturing and how many people can you relate to.
Are they are any other projects that you’re working on that you’re excited about?
One thing I do is a lot of work in the community, so I’ve been working with foundations that are focused on journalists protection and rights, especially in the current socio political climate.
The second thing is engaging with the Brooklyn community because that’s where we’re headquartered. [For example, I’m] working with local programs to introduce students to careers in media, especially students who come from urban neighborhoods.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media from an organization other than your own?
I really love The Athletic. I think their ability to go to market having built themselves organically and have paid subscribers is pretty amazing to me. One reason I love it so much is because sports content especially is a unifying factor, meaning it’s content that everybody can connect over, not divisive or controversial.
