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BEST SELLERS
Sales Executive Hall of Fame: Lisa Hughes, VP/Publisher, The New Yorker Possessing excellent typing skills was once a prerequisite for landing an entry-level position in advertising and publishing. If you couldn’t type, you couldn’t break in. This didn’t stop Lisa Hughes, a limited typist, to say the least.  But then the Harvard grad perhaps had more drive when she was starting out than most. “I loved books and magazines,” she recalls. “[After graduating from college,] I interviewed with a lot of book publishers. Everyone had to take a typing test, which I failed. And you couldn’t get through the door of ad agencies unless you passed a typing test.” Through “a friend of a friend,” Hughes nabbed a job interview with Christopher Kimball, the publisher of a small, Westport, Conn.-based Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. After chatting with him for an hour, she was offered an ad sales rep position. The job provided Hughes with hands-on immersion in advertising sales—an invaluable, rapid education that she might not have gotten at a larger, institutional company. “It was a great group of people—totally entrepreneurial,” she recounts. “I don’t think there was anyone there over 30 years old. The advertising sales department was two people: me and another person a year older than me. I had the whole country as my territory.” Enter Condé Nast Fate soon intervened in a whimsical way. “Shortly after I started [in December 1982], Cook’s Illustrated Magazine was bought by The New Yorker, which was not owned by Advance at that point,” she says. “The New Yorker also bought Horticulture Magazine. They had these two satellite magazines. I spent half of my time in The New Yorker office in the circulation department—all the ad agencies were in New York so I would go there to see my clients." Within a year, The New Yorker [and thus Cook’s Illustrated] was bought by Advance. And so began Hughes’ long and celebrated affiliation with Advance subsidiary Condé Nast. Soon she would have meetings with the late, iconic CEO of Condé Nast Publications, Steve Florio (a 2008 posthumous min’s Sales Hall of Famer), and future Condé Nast International CEO Jonathan Newhouse, who became Cook’s’ advertising director. “They must have thought, ‘Who is this 12-year-old?’” she jokes. Hughes moved eventually to Mademoiselle, where she worked as account executive under another industry legend, Ron Galotti. Hughes joined Galotti when he left Mademoiselle to become founding publisher of Condé Nast Traveler. In 1998 she was named VP and publisher of Condé Nast Traveler and worked there until this past February, when she migrated to The New Yorker, becoming its VP and publisher. Hot Shot Throughout Hughes’ career at Condé Nast she has been the architect of numerous creative initiatives. One of her most high-profile efforts, which she executed while at the Condé Nast Traveler, was the Hot List Party, now an eagerly anticipated industry mainstay. “The Hot List was an issue that started when I was there by [then editor-in-chief] Tom Wallace in 1998,” she says. “This is a big issue summing up what’s hot, what’s new and next. The party was to bring it to life. It’s really become a great way to support what we considered a tent-pole issue. A lot of advertisers participate in the party, and it’s a great way for them to debut new products and talk about innovation.” From Door-to-Door to The New Yorker Worst job: “I was selling Cablevision in Yonkers door-to-door. I had just gotten back in September 1982 [following college graduation and a summer of travel]. All of my friends were working in investment banking, so I took this job. It was terrible and it was entirely by commission. People would invite you in, give you a cup of tea and I would try to sell them an upgrade [on their cable service]. It cost me more to get to work.” First ad sold: “I think it was a classified ad for a cooking school in Vermont for Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. The experience of learning how to sell and build a relationship [with a client] was invaluable.” Campaigns she’s most proud of: “In my early days at Condé Nast Traveler, I sold a single sponsor, Banana Republic, which was an onsert, for what was originally editorial. It was a $750,000 deal. I remember running upstairs to Steve Florio’s office and saying I sold this. Steve was thrilled. He loved that sort of thing.” Surviving the current recession: “We’re lucky because we have strong revenue from circulation, being [that The New Yorker is] a weekly and a magazine. We have the highest renewal rates in the industry: 85% of our readership renews every year at full sub price. We’re in a good shape. Certainly we would like our ad pages to be stronger. Who wouldn’t?” Back to Best Sellers page COMMENTS
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