Digital Drivers - Todd Anderman

April 21, 2006

Todd Anderman
President
Dennis Digital, New York

Named President of the Dennis Digital division in May 2005, Todd Anderman has oversight for Dennis Publishing's interactive businesses, notably the websites and mobile assets of the men’s magazines Maxim and Stuff, the music magazine Blender and news/opinion magazine The Week. Anderman was previously SVP of Sales, Business Development and Licensing for American Greetings Interactive for five years and prior to that, SVP-Sales for RollingStone.com. Anderman is slated to participate on a panel on Dennis Digital’s mobile initiatives at MPA’s upcoming “Magazines 24/7” digital conference.

Q. What content is proving to be the strongest audience magnets?
A. Video. We redesigned the Maxim website last November and brought video to the forefront, including a Maxim video area containing 500 videos.  Since then our video streams have increased over 50 times.  Different categories reflect the content of the brand — entertainment videos, sports videos, stupid fun videos and photo shoots.    

Q. Would it make sense to have an umbrella Dennis Digital website for all your magazines?
A. We're not looking to make one central site, but we do connect the sites. If you're at the Maxim site and looking for music, we link to Blender, for instance.   

Q. Blender offers music videos and Maxim has movie trailers, but how important are original video and audio components to your various titles' digital mix?
A. As soon as we added video to Stuff’s site, that became one of the popular areas, and it will continue to be so in the upcoming redesign. There's also some audio on the site and we're looking to add still more audio assets as well as other forms of interactivity since the majority of the audience has broadband access. And Maxim has a gaming section with reviews, etcetera., but now you can play hundreds of games there as well.    

Q. Maxim's May issue is going mobile, with even the ads accessible via your readers’ mobile phones. Can you give us some specifics and indicate what this is so key to your overall digital plan?
A. We have a pretty big mobile business, selling mobile content, screensavers, ringtones and wallpapers to mobile customers via our partnership with Airborne Entertainment. So it made sense to expand that business. The May issue's mobile editorial content will engage the reader to interact with our editors and a number of advertisers, like Kraft and Jeep and Gillette, which is already on our site. We're looking at all of our other titles too. Mobile is part of everything we do.    

Q. Are there other things you'd like to do with digital content that you're not already doing?
A. We're already in satellite radio with the Maxim radio station on Sirius Satellite. There's also the web, video and community enhancements. With mobile, we're just in the first inning of a nine-inning game, especially with video growing.   

Q. Peering into your crystal ball, what do you see as the next big thing for your division?
A. We're investigating every emerging platform. We'll probably be involved with all of them to some extent. But we're concentrating mostly on the mobile and online arenas.