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June 1, 2016, 5:04 p.m.
Business Models

Time Inc. launches Extra Crispy: Breakfast #content with a hefty side of marketing jargon

A website focused solely on the joys of breakfast? Duh, of course there’s more to it than that.

Maybe you weren’t in the mood to hear about Bacon Critic on Twitter all day, but that’s too bad for you, because on Wednesday, Time Inc. launched Extra Crispy, a breakfast-focused vertical run out of its Brooklyn-based “creative lab” The Foundry. And yes, Extra Crispy is hiring a bacon critic — or, to be way more accurate, Extra Crispy is running a contest to find a person who can report on bacon in a three-month freelance gig, for a fee.

“Pay is commensurate with experience,” Meredith Turits, the “senior strategist” for Extra Crispy, who works on brand development at Time Inc., said in an email Wednesday. (Experience with criticism? Experience with bacon?)

extra crispyOkay, so the Bacon Critic gig may not exactly be the dream job that it appears to be at first glance, unless the best jobs are commonly touted in the header of press releases. If Extra Crispy feels a bit like a marketing stunt as well, that’s because it kind of is. But it is at least a stunt with a team of 18 (!) and a whopping 51 breakfast- and brunch-related stories at launch, some written by freelancers like authors Jami Attenberg and Heidi Julavits. It also has a twice-weekly email newsletter called Fresh Squeezed.

The 18 employees listed on Extra Crispy’s staff page aren’t all working solely for Extra Crispy; some of them work across The Foundry as well. “We were looking to bring in a team that could help the brand scale and evolve quickly across not only edit, but multimedia and culinary as well,” Turits said.

The site will feature eight to ten pieces of content per day at launch, and it will run indefinitely — it’s not a pop-up site. (Win the morning!)

Extra Crispy is the second vertical from Time Inc.’s The Foundry; the first, The Drive, launched last September, and the company says it now gets 2 million monthly uniques.

Time Inc.’s native and branded content efforts are also run from The Foundry, and the Extra Crispy press release notes:

[The] brand is uniquely positioned to develop creative marketing solutions for its advertising partners through native and branded campaigns in addition to traditional media. The launch sponsor for Extra Crispy is Arla Foods, a Danish dairy company, currently fifth-largest in the world, which is launching its cream cheese and sliced cheese in the US.

“We’ve learned a lot about where millennial readers like to engage with niche content, and the formats with which they like to engage,” Turits said. “Video is a priority for Extra Crispy, as well as creating tailored content for each social platform.” In other words, nope, it’s not just about breakfast.

Bacon photo by Chris Yarzab used under a Creative Commons license.

Laura Hazard Owen is the editor of Nieman Lab. You can reach her via email (laura_owen@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@laurahazardowen).
POSTED     June 1, 2016, 5:04 p.m.
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