Wayne Mensah is Commercial Director at Time Out. New Digital Age caught up with him to talk brand trust, the return of real world experiences, and how AI is reshaping the publisher’s relationship with advertisers.
What makes Time Out’s audience particularly valuable to brands?
The brand exists to help people have amazing time in cities all over the world, so users come to us specifically for that. That builds an incredibly trusted brand, with people arriving in an inspiration mindset and ready to make decisions.
We also sit in the realm of culture and passion points, food, music, places to go, which is easy for a brand to get wrong on its own. Brands lend our credibility to reach people through those passions, and if they get it right, they win customers for life.
How has that trust translated onto the media plan, given younger planners and buyers have grown up with TikTok rather than magazines?
When the print magazine retired, we lost our physical presence in cities, so the job now is making sure content translates correctly for whichever platform it appears on.
Whether that is TikTok or one of our live events, every format is really there to enact real world experiences. Clicks and views are fine, but the point of a newsletter, a video or anything else is to get people out into the world, and that only works if they trust the brand behind it.
Are you seeing generational shifts, with younger audiences moving back towards physical, real world experiences?
Definitely, and we are seeing it through our work with brands too, with many more bespoke print editions being commissioned. A huge part of the business is now built around hospitality and real world experience, including Time Out Market, our permanent retail spaces.
Our Joy Revolution research, and the follow up Joy Evolution, found that people fundamentally want experiences with other people. We are all constantly on our phones, but what matters is time spent with real people doing things they find pleasurable.
How does that philosophy shape the work you do with advertisers?
Whether it is P&O Cruises, Uber Eats or Pepsi, every campaign is about encouraging people to go and explore the city. Brands are borrowing our credibility, so we stay authentic to what Time Out talks about.
There is always a continuum between what a brand wants, a pure brand message, and what Time Out would do editorially, and the best work lands in the middle. The braver a brand is about genuinely adding value to readers’ lives rather than just hitting its own KPIs, the more resonant the campaign becomes.
There was a phase built around reach and clicks, blanket messages going out to as many people as possible. That is turning a corner now, with brands wanting deeper, more meaningful engagement instead.
The advertisers who come back to us again and again, Uber Eats being a good example, get more from it because we can build longer, more meaningful conversations with our audience over time.
What about AI? Is it a threat to publishers or an opportunity?
It is largely an opportunity.
There are operational efficiencies to be had in how a business is run, and separately, large language models need trusted material to give to people, which is exactly what Time Out provides.
AI can never actually tell you how a burger tastes, so it still relies on brands like ours and genuine human experience to serve audiences.
How important is YouTube to the business now?
It is a real growth area and a platform where we can be genuinely creative, through formats like Yes Chef, where we visit a chef in their kitchen for a quickfire set of questions, or one of our editors leading a themed crawl around a part of London.
We are seeing a sweet spot of around eight-minute videos, and we monetise it the same way as any branded content campaign, embedding partners like Intrepid Travel, who recently sponsored our global cities survey, within the storytelling.
Is television next?
Not yet formally, but the data is telling us something interesting, a large number of people are already watching Yes Chef on their televisions.
That raises real questions about how we adapt the format, and whether we eventually create new shows in the mould of the old Time Out and Time Out TV collaborations from years gone by. We are right at the start of that journey, but it is clearly a direction worth exploring.
