Building the playbook before it became the playbook.
Employer
Demand Media - LIVESTRONG
Year
2012
Why am I including a project from 2012?
Because what we were building more than a decade ago has become standard practice in digital media.
Audience data shaped content strategy. Media became utility. Freemium membership created deeper relationships. Mobile created daily habits. Community drove participation and engagement.
As SVP of Product and Design at Demand Media, I led product strategy and design for LIVESTRONG.COM from its earliest stages.
What began as a health and wellness publisher evolved into a connected digital platform built around audience data, editorial, utility, membership, mobile, and community. We used behavior to understand what people needed, then built products and experiences that gave them reasons to return—while creating value through advertising, sponsorships, and subscriptions.
My role: Product strategy and vision, product and design leadership, audience strategy, membership and monetization, mobile product development, and cross-functional leadership across editorial, engineering, analytics, sales, and the executive team.
Scope of Work
Building a media brand from the ground up
Demand Media partnered with the LIVESTRONG Foundation to create a health and wellness destination around a brand that already had enormous awareness.
We initially licensed content to establish the experience, then quickly built an editorial organization and began developing our own content and products.
I led product strategy and design, working across editorial, technology, analytics, sales, and the executive team to evolve LIVESTRONG from a media property into something much broader.
Letting the audience challenge our assumptions.
At first glance, a brand closely associated with Lance Armstrong and cycling might have been expected to skew male. Our data told us otherwise: roughly 65% of our audience was female.
Digging deeper helped explain why. Content around dieting, nutrition, pregnancy, and women’s wellness was generating significant interest.
Rather than build around our assumptions about the brand, we built around the behavior of the actual audience—using those insights to shape editorial strategy, product decisions, and new content opportunities.
The audience told us what they wanted. We listened.
Turning content consumption into a daily habit.
Audience behavior also revealed strong interest in calorie tracking, dieting, and weight management.
Working across the executive team, we identified and acquired an early-stage calorie-tracking product and integrated it into LIVESTRONG as MyPlate.
MyPlate expanded the experience beyond content into everyday utility, with a tiered membership model offering both free and paid access. We then extended the product to mobile, where meal tracking naturally created a reason to engage several times throughout the day.
Content brought people in. Utility gave them a reason to come back.
Turning an audience into a community.
We wanted LIVESTRONG to be more than a place people visited for information. We wanted people to participate.
We brought in a fitness expert to become the face of the community and built tools that allowed her to curate seasonal and trending content, surface conversations from the forums, and create fitness and diet challenges around shared goals.
Community added another layer to the product—connecting editorial expertise with real conversations, participation, and ongoing engagement.
Connecting audience value with business value.
Advertising, sponsorships, and membership formed the foundation of LIVESTRONG’s revenue model.
I worked closely with our sales organization to translate audience and product opportunities into programs they could take to market—developing concepts, pitch materials, and custom landing experiences for advertisers and sponsors.
It reinforced an approach I’ve carried throughout my career: the strongest product opportunities don’t force a choice between the audience and the business. They create value for both.
A product strategy that became the standard.
LIVESTRONG evolved from a newly launched health publisher into an ecosystem spanning content, data, utility, freemium membership, mobile, community, advertising, and sponsorship.
Many of those approaches have since become fundamental to digital media: understand your audience through behavior, use data to inform content, build utility beyond editorial, create reasons for people to register and return, and develop multiple ways to monetize the relationship.
We were building that playbook more than a decade ago.
LIVESTRONG.COM was the Webby Award Winner for the Best Health and Fitness Website from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
