Episode #33 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Brandon Wenerd

Marshall Nyman [00:00:02]:
Hello and welcome to the performance marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Nyman, founder and CEO of Nymonco. Each episode, I will be bringing you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space where they will highlight their experiences within the industry. Today I have Brandon Winnard, publisher at Bro Bible. Welcome to the podcast, Brandon.

Brandon Wenerd [00:00:20]:
Hey, thank you so much for having me, Marshall.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:23]:
Of course. Super excited to have you on today. Let’s jump right into it.

Brandon Wenerd [00:00:26]:
Awesome.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:27]:
Would love for you to introduce yourself to the audience.

Brandon Wenerd [00:00:29]:
So, hi, I’m Brandon. I’m the publisher of a website called brobible.com dot. That is a men’s lifestyle website that we cherishingly describe as like if Esquire and ESPN had a baby.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:46]:
Amazing. And how did you get your start in the marketing space?

Brandon Wenerd [00:00:49]:
Well, really, I’m a. I mean, I’m a writer at heart. I started working in media when I was in college in 2006, interned at a travel magazine where I learned a lot about SEO and kind of the back in the day ways that travel kind of exists in this world between brand and performance marketing, and then linked up with the bro Bible team in the bro Bible founding team in 2009 to get this thing off the ground and just decided that we wanted to go all in on building out a men’s lifestyle site for the millennial generation. We felt like men’s lifestyle properties at the time, like Maxim, GQ, Esquire, et cetera, they just didn’t really appeal to our generation that much. It felt a little bit like technology was changing and media and publishing was changing. It was time for something that felt a little bit more authentic and voice to, you know, of talk about the things that we were interested in. So we started bro Bible. And being a part of that founding group meant that, you know, we had to wear a lot of hats and wearing those hats on one.

Brandon Wenerd [00:02:12]:
On one side of the side of the coin, we were really invested in kind of content and what the product of bro Bible actually is. But then also on the other side, be very heavily emotionally invested in the business aspects of what bro Bible was, too. How we activated with brands, how bro Bible drove value to, by leveraging our audience to, you know, buy things, consume things, and, you know, how we can be partners, too, with the brands that were important to our audience, both for audience equity and whatnot. So kind of my long winded way of saying that I sort of fell into it. It’s not something that I feel like I intentionally went out to do, but have kind of settled in this role where you know, now I oversee a lot of our business development and the stuff that keeps the lights on and partnerships and that sort of thing, and I love it.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:13]:
So, Bro Bible started in 2009. What were the early years like there?

Brandon Wenerd [00:03:17]:
It was very. I mean, it was a. It was one of the best times of my life, is the only way I can really describe it. Um, you know, and I think there’s a lot of factors that went into that. Um, Internet publishing as a whole was very new. It was a very rowdy, Wild west, uh, space where we were just trying to throw as much spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck, both with content and with business strategy. So what we really, you know, out of the gate, we had a really hard time monetizing with, like, programmatic ads and display ads and that sort of thing. So what we really figured out how to build our business around, and this was like, New York City, 2010 to 2012, was getting our audience offline and activating that audience in various kind of social events where we could sell sponsorships and that had a 360 integration on the site, too, or ticketed events and that sort of thing.

Brandon Wenerd [00:04:26]:
So it was interesting because the core direction of our business, even though we were doing at the time, like 2.5 million unique visitors a month, even though that was the core of, even though we had this big national audience, the way that we build a business on that was offline for the most part. And that was a really, really special. That was a really special muscle for me to learn. Out of the gate is the value of offline and putting people together and having a real world presence versus just scalable digital assets and properties or content that can kind of easily be commodified, because bringing people offline is really, really, really hard, but when you can do it, it becomes kind of a bit of a superpower. So that was a really, really interesting aspect of it. And we were young, in our mid, in our twenties, in our mid twenties post grad, you know, it was so much fun to just be in New York City and bring all these cohorts of people together of the same age, kind of in the same trajectory in life, and just kind of figuring out what they were doing with their careers and their lives and that sort of thing, and having bro Bible be in the center of it as a news organization for information around the root around, you know, about our generation and our interests, but then also having it be a business for this kind of generation, too, to grow up. And so, yeah, it was fun back then.

Marshall Nyman [00:06:17]:
And then in 2012, bro Bible was acquired. Tell us about that.

Brandon Wenerd [00:06:21]:
Yeah, so we, you know, we were doing some awesome growth on the site, and, you know, we needed to figure out how. How we were going to monetize with ads and with branded content and that sort of thing. And this group called Woven Digital, was great at wrapping up a number of different properties, like bro Bible. At the time, it wasn’t a big group of us. There were about six sites altogether. But when you wrapped all of their sites up as a comscore play, we’re talking massive, massive reach, um, across the board. And they would then take that out to agencies, media buying agencies, to be able to sell that inventory directly at great cpms. We had a wonderful relationship with them where we just kind of felt they needed an asset.

Brandon Wenerd [00:07:14]:
They were a great sales team that really knew the ins and outs of digital at that point in time, and they needed. They just needed to own things. So we wanted to be kind of a part of that vision, and it was a great place to make a house at home. While things were really, really rapidly changing in digital publishing and things were starting to take off, this is also the era when vice started to charge out of the gate. BuzzFeed started, um, the Vox properties, like SP Nation, Vox.com, etcetera, you know, and then, of course, in New York, just one block over from us was where the Gawker offices thrillist was on the same block as us. So, like, we, there was kind of this thing happening in publishing that we knew we had to. We had to join up with an entity that could kind of help us keep pace with where things were going in the Internet at the time.

Marshall Nyman [00:08:23]:
But then in 2018, you took back control with the original partners. What led to that?

Brandon Wenerd [00:08:28]:
Yeah, so woven eventually became Uproxx. It changed brands when it acquired the property, uprox.com dot. They raised money in that process. And then I kind of the same contractions that have happened with all of these scalable digital publishing, let’s call them plays, happened to us. I actually think it kind of happened a little bit earlier to us than it did with Buzzfeed and some of these other places that had a little bit more Runway. The goal with Uproxx and woven was to be like a mini digital, Viacom, Hearst continuous like type thing, sort of. I hate to call it a network, but, you know, brands that reach millennial men and have a lot of advertising alignment around, around it, and, you know, when the company raised. When that company raised money, things changed.

Brandon Wenerd [00:09:37]:
They invested in building a studio. They took some big shots great brand of content and, you know, it sort of worked, but it also sort of didn’t. After six years, it was kind of becoming. It was very apparent that, you know, we weren’t really sure what the future of the brand looked like. But meanwhile, bro Bible still had a lot of traffic to it. And we knew that traffic could be monetized in different ways other than this glossy branded content. Elaine, that Uprox was very focused on with its bigger sales team. We bought bro Bible back out of Uprox with the goal of monetizing our day to day traffic with programmatic and then building out more, a smaller, more scrappy vision for what our branded content extensions look like.

Brandon Wenerd [00:10:40]:
And that was kind of the hat that I wore within our partnership group to lead the charge on. And I’m really, really proud of how that’s worked out. Now, five years later, we’re a independent, nationally known publisher that reaches millions and millions of people a month. And we have the ethos and core of a small media business that’s scrappy. But we still do some big things and get national attention for those big things and we’re really, really proud of that.

Marshall Nyman [00:11:21]:
What do you do in your role at pro Bible?

Brandon Wenerd [00:11:23]:
So I lead a lot of the partnership and a lot of the partnerships and I’m pretty focused on what revenue opportunities look like. I do still write and I do still create content every now and then, and that’s just something that I feel like needs to be a part of me and what I do. But a lot of what I do is talk to brands about how we can, how their marketing goals can align with bro Bible in whatever seasonality they’re focused on build out. I have a small scrappy partnership team here to build out proposals and then execute the production of what this looks like. And a lot of it is branded content, but increasingly it’s social assets, it’s affiliate from a standpoint of being focused on kind of commerce initiatives that we feel like make a lot of sense for bro Bible, specifically around like gear, outdoor supplies, automotive and men’s fashion. And yeah, just kind of focus on like the things that move the needle and keep the lights on and keep bro Bible a business. Not just a content publisher, but a business too.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:47]:
What are some new or exciting things you’re working on at pro Bible right now?

Brandon Wenerd [00:12:52]:
I’m super, super focused on like on how we can ramp up our UGC video production and have it be a really viable asset to brands. I’ve always been really proud of the videos that we’re able to produce in collaboration with brands. Over our 15 year history, um, it’s been a really important extension to what our kind of deal size is as a, as a content studio. And um, and I think right now we’re doing a great job at like going from this era where video was this very glossy um, high production value thing to it fitting in the same formats and tones that the creator economy tends to lean into and can be leveraged with strong calls to action for performance initiatives. A lot of it is focusing on products but also weaving in narratives and that sort of thing. So I’m really excited about how that video is scaling. We’ve been able to add some new hires to the team on executing that from a production standpoint, which is something that I’ve always wanted to do over the last couple of years. And then in addition to that, also really excited about how we’re growing our email product.

Brandon Wenerd [00:14:20]:
We’re making a significant push on that in the next six months just because we’ve always had one. But it’s never been as much of a focus as it has been in this current era. Um, I think it’s going to be a great place for brand extensions and uh, also for people to just get a little bit of a day to day fix on what is happening on our, on our property. And uh, yeah, that’s kind of where what I’m really excited about, I’m excited about video. I’m really excited about video. Um, I’m really excited about um, our email. Oh, and then one more thing. I’m also super excited about the direction of our Instagram as well.

Brandon Wenerd [00:15:04]:
We went from being this kind of meme, funny Instagram account to being a really viable and vibrant information community, specifically around sports and showbiz, sports figures, cultural figures, that sort of thing. And it’s working really, really well. Our Instagram is the highest it’s ever reached anybody at this moment in time. We’re reaching 29 million people a month on our Instagram, which is proportionally is 461,000 followers. So I’m so proud that we’re able to reach that many people with it at the moment.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:51]:
Probably recently acquired a few new properties. Tell us about them.

Brandon Wenerd [00:15:56]:
Yeah, so last November we, or, sorry, last December we closed on a property called Motorbiscuit.com, which was an automotive website focused on the kind of what I would call like the water cooler talk around the automotive industry. So anything ranging from new vehicle releases from the oems and then also like lighthearted stuff, like a viral video of you know, somebody doing something insane in a Ferrari or that sort of thing. It’s been awesome to have it be a part of our business and network because there’s just so much rabid interest in automotive. And it’s, it, it also gives us a new affinity that hasn’t really been front and center within bro bible, uh, but to have it live on its own property where it’s doing right now, it does over 2 million unique visitors a month. Um, so we’re really, really proud of it. It has a great small and scrappy team. We’re sending their, uh, editorial team to a lot of events that the oems are throwing for like party launches and that sort of thing. To create original content.

Brandon Wenerd [00:17:29]:
We’re increasingly doing brand deals around original content on lanes where places like Polaris are sponsoring things. So we’re really, really happy about the vibrancy of that brand. Our focus right now is still very much so on the website, but eventually would love it to have a little bit more vibrancy on social, but it just, these things take time in order for them to be executed in a way where it’s really going. Well, it’s taken 15 years for pro Bible to get to that point with social. So we execute in a very deliberate, but sometimes slower than normal way. But we just have our systems and how we do things.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:16]:
What are some things that brands or agencies should take into consideration when first introducing a product to your team?

Brandon Wenerd [00:18:24]:
I would say, well, for Bro Bible, the one thing that I think is really important is understanding the consumer need is obviously pretty front and center on that. We like to talk with our audience, not at our audience. And I don’t think that where I feel like media brands lose is when they try to be the arbiter of cool. I think if they are conversational about how a product can have a life, can have a use case in a consumer’s life is a great place to start. I also think, like, the other thing that is important too, especially in performance. Like there sometimes there’s not a lot of cohesion between the brand world, brand side of things and the performance side of things, where in the performance world, the product is kind of expected to just market itself. But the brand side of any business is so important to that vision. And I think when we get more intel on the things that are happening on the brand side of the business, it makes it easier for us to build narratives around products.

Brandon Wenerd [00:19:46]:
So what I mean by that is like LeBron, if, if LeBron James, you know, has, is the spokesperson for some company that he’s worked, that he’s working with. And then I. That product, that company is also shipping a product. It’s so much easier for us to talk about LeBron James as the spokesperson of that and why that endorsement deal might have fit than necessarily as going really hard on a review or that sort of thing. I sort of feel like the review culture of the. Of commerce content has. I think that it’s, like, killed. I don’t know.

Brandon Wenerd [00:20:40]:
I feel like it’s been more harmful, should I say, than good at this point in time in opening the doors to wider brand vision, stuff for marketers to tell, to storytellers like myself. So I’m more interested in stories and narratives than I am, like, reviews, because. And, like, just because it. For us, that lands way better with our audience than, you know, us putting out 800 words for someone to read on something and may or may not, that may or may not be successful at getting someone to click through, but a story or a narrative is way more successful at getting someone to click through to be able to make that decision. Sorry, that was long winded.

Marshall Nyman [00:21:36]:
How important do you see diversification of traffic for publishers?

Brandon Wenerd [00:21:40]:
I mean, it’s. Dude, it’s literally everything right now. I feel like the Google algorithm or the Google algorithm changes last fall, I think, really put everybody. They gave everybody an existential crisis. That first big core update, I think it was the September core update in 2023. And I know we took a hit, but what was great about it was that it allowed us to, and it allowed us to reassess what we really, really were good at and what we really wanted to build, double down on editorially. And honestly, a lot of that wasn’t commerce content. It was a lot of news and views on athletes, sports, movies, entertainers, that sort of thing.

Brandon Wenerd [00:22:42]:
And since then, we’ve recovered very, very well at doing what we do with Google and also with some other platforms. So, look, diversifying traffic is insanely, insanely important. The open web is a. I don’t even know how to describe it. It feels like you’re walking through. It’s just very, very different these days. It’s noisy. Um, there’s.

Brandon Wenerd [00:23:16]:
Everybody is vying for attention on there. Um, so if you can find lanes where you can actually get attention that aren’t on the open web, then I feel like, you know, you have to, like, double and triple down on it because it then can become your brand. Um, that’s why we’ve gone really hard on Instagram, and that’s why we’ve gone really, we’re going really hard on email because, um, those are the most visible, or Instagram in particular is our most visible channel right now. And while yes, it doesn’t monetize at all like the website does, the amount of brand attention it does for us to build branded content products around it is so important that we’re able to build a lot of scalability out of those and create a lot of performance marketing initiatives with brand partners too, and working with it. So like the dwindling, diminishing returns from the website, the ship is balanced out by the ways we have wind in our sails and all these other aspects of our business.

Marshall Nyman [00:24:21]:
What is a common misconception that brands have when trying to work with a publisher like bro Bible?

Brandon Wenerd [00:24:29]:
Well, one, I think that the review thing I think is one thing that a lot of brands, I think, really think that we would be excited about. If you actually look on Bro Bible, we have a policy where there hasn’t been anything published since like 2022 that actually says review in the headline. Because we just have made a very deliberate choice to not do reviews only because, you know, what makeshi bro Bible’s audience come back is that, you know, we’re not trying to be like insane experts on things. Like, we’re enthusiasts, we’re people that have strong opinions and dabble in a lot of things, but we’re not trying to be experts at like pointing out all the details on products in order to thread the needle for someone to buy. That said, we do love things where we can talk about like what the value prop of it is and like what your, what our reaction was. Like. A reaction to me is not the same as a review where you have to be, you know, hyper critical and that sort of thing. So when brands pitches for like review opportunities, I’m always a little like, eh, it’s not really what we do, but we are happy to still talk about products and provide our feedback on it for our audience.

Brandon Wenerd [00:26:06]:
We just won’t do it as a review. I think the other thing too that brands need to keep in mind goes back to my point on the brand marketing side of things. Obviously there’s been a lot of discussion about performance marketing and brand marketing. We kind of sit in this funnel between both of those worlds for a lot of brands. And I love it whenever performance marketers come to me with a lot of insight and intel on what the brand team is doing and like what, you know, what things the brand is sponsoring, what spokespeople the brand is working with, what integrations the brand may have had with like an NFL player or like, what’s, what celebrity may have posted about it or any of those kind of things. That stuff is gold to me because it’s great content that can resonate with a wide audience. And it’s a natural place to triangulate all the tenants of like, great brand marketing and seeding a purchasing decision with what we do as an information source at Bro Bible. And then that third cultural tenant that like, just people know about and lives in people’s minds in some kind of way.

Brandon Wenerd [00:27:33]:
So that’s a big, big thing for me, is like, I love hearing from performance marketers and affiliate marketers on what the brand is doing, uh, in order for us to create a more compelling narrative.

Marshall Nyman [00:27:50]:
And what has been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Brandon Wenerd [00:27:54]:
I like, I mean, I love, I love the community of the performance marketing team and I love the. I also love the challenge of being able to drive sales when, you know, or being able to drive people from bro Bible to a purchasing point. Because that to me is, that’s kind of goes back to what I was saying when we used to do events offline. It was so awesome to take all these people that were just commenters on a blog and have them be in a room together. I think that same thing applies to performance marketing and affiliate marketing. When you have this thing that reaches all these people and certain tech and content levers and ad tech levers can be pulled to drive them to an action, I just think that’s so incredibly exciting. And I also just think there’s a great community in performance marketing that doesn’t really exist so much in a lot of brand marketing. And I know it’s out there to some people, but I personally haven’t found that community in the influencer and talent marketing area either.

Brandon Wenerd [00:29:21]:
So I think that performance marketing is just. Of course, it’s so fundamentally important to brands that, you know, I feel like it’s cool that it can take all these different shapes and do all these different things in order to unlock value for a business fundamental. And that’s why I just feel like it’s really important. I think there’s a lot of great things that happen in it.

Marshall Nyman [00:29:51]:
A big thank you to Brandon from Bro Bible for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into his background and how you can best work with bro Bible. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Brandon Wenerd [00:30:02]:
LinkedIn man, I’m not trying to be a LinkedIn creator, but I like, but I love LinkedIn. It’s a lot of fun. And you can find my email or just drop me one. It’s Brandon rowbible.com. always down the jam.

Marshall Nyman [00:30:18]:
Again, thank you to our guest, Brandon Winnard and to our producer, Leon Sonkin. If you’ve enjoyed this content, please give us a like and a follow. Thank you for listening in. I am Marshall Niman, host of the performance marketing spotlight and founder and CEO of Nymonco, signing off. Have a great one.