Aug 21, 2019 2 min read

Gallery Media Group’s CCO Talks Consumer-Focused Publishing, Experiential Video Strategy

In the fifth episode of season two of The Rough Cut, Storyhunter co-founder Alex Ragir sits down with Mary Kate McGrath, Chief Content…

In the fifth episode of season two of The Rough Cut, Storyhunter co-founder Alex Ragir sits down with Mary Kate McGrath, Chief Content Officer of Gallery Media Group, owned by social media icon Gary Vaynerchuck’s VaynerX, during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Gallery Media owns digital publishers such as PureWow and One37pm, as well as manages a network of dozens of podcasts, influencer and Instagram accounts.

Alex and Mary Kate discussed building a consumer-focused digital media company, the importance of quality over quantity, and how to develop experiential content.

Below are edited highlights from the conversation:

Your Content Needs to Make the Consumer’s Life Better

“I think a lot of brands, people or companies think about themselves first and the consumer second and that has always boggled my mind. I love telling stories and delighting people. I’m super curious. And if you have that kind of mindset and you’re committed to the consumer, then how are you not going to have a better product? If your content doesn’t make their life better in a fundamental way, they won’t come back for more and you won’t have the authority to ask them anything on your behalf.”

Quality Before Quantity

“Every conversation you start at dinner is “What are you binging on Netflix?” or “What are you watching on Hulu?”. Quality video ,regardless of time or length, is the norm, and now people are starting to pivot away from just feeding social feeds with video content, thinking thats’ what the consumer wants, when it’s really not what they’re consuming. I think people now are starting to listen and think ‘Maybe it’s not necessarily short video clips and little memes that you can’t really monetize’. Instead you have to bring the quality.”

Drive Content Through Experiential

“We had a Super Bowl party for One37pm and we treated it as more than an experience for those people [who were there]. The amount of content that we grabbed from that night, that’s the ticket. You have to think about experiential as a content moment, not as an event. Don’t sell experiential as experiential. Sell the content and drive it through experiential. I think that’s the future: we’ll give you an enormous amount of content from this one experience.”

Previous episodes of The Rough Cut:

Season Two:

Barri Rafferty, President & CEO, Ketchum

Stacy Minero, Global Head of Content Creation, Twitter

Ari Halper, Chief Creative Officer, FCB New York

Mickey Meyer, President of Network, Group Nine Media

Season One:

Courtney Coupe, VP of Content, Great Big Story

Stone Roberts, VP of Global Video Strategy, Refinery29

Jason Beauregard, Head of Studio, VaynerMedia

Zahra Rasool, Editorial Lead, Contrast VR

Warren Cohen, Head of Video, New York Post