Dotdash Meredith’s Leah Wyar grows flagship brands, including People, amid industry challenges

At Dotdash Meredith, Leah Wyar bridges editorial and sales, two departments typically kept separate within media, to craft more successful advertising partnerships that are helping boost revenue and website traffic in a challenging environment. As president of entertainment, beauty & style, Wyar oversees media brands including People, InStyle and Entertainment Weekly, which collectively attract more than 100 million monthly users. She first joined Dotdash in 2019. After the company acquired beauty publication Byrdie that same year, Wyar helped grow its audience from 3 million to 10 million in 2021. Wyar spent most of her career working at beauty publications. After Dotdash bought Meredith in 2021, forming the largest digital and print publisher in America, she became president of the entertainment group. It was a move she turned down at first, but has since become “one of the more fulfilling moments of my career.” She’s since excelled in the role. In 2023, People was one of only two top 10 U.S. media brands to grow year over year amid a challenging environment. Following a relaunch led by Wyar, InStyle ended the year with 25 new deals and 30% growth among its top 10 accounts. It also added a new digital product, InStyle Now, that celebrates fashion icons. This year is shaping up to be another strong one. Several Dotdash Meredith brands are celebrating milestone anniversaries (People turns 50 years old, InStyle turns 30 and Byrdie is celebrating 10 years). People has already surpassed its 2023 red carpet ad bookings by 47% and tripled non-entertainment advertisers from last year. “Last year was so, so, so challenging because we had not just one [Hollywood] strike [but] two strikes,” Wyar said. “[Strikes] basically flatten the industry; for half of the year, people weren’t out promoting. I remember calling a meeting to just say like, ‘How are we going to survive this?’ We came up with a lot of contingency plans. There were a lot of workarounds that we had to do to get that growth going.” Read about Ad Age’s 2024 Leading Women here What advice would you give to your younger self? Play the long game by taking risks—basically that just means say yes to every interesting opportunity that comes your way, even if it scares the crap out of you. (Scratch that: especially if it scares the crap out of you!). I’ve said yes to things that—on paper or even logically—I shouldn’t have had any business saying yes to. But going for it and having the confidence to know I could figure it out (with a whole lot of help from others) pushed me to what I thought were my limits over and over again. There’s no ceiling on this thinking. It’s not just something you can do in your 20s or 30s. It’s something that builds more and more confidence, allowing you to continually evolve your entire career. What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken? Leaving the print business, where I had been extremely comfortable and saw success for 20 years to start a brand new sector at a digital media company, which most legacy media people were unfamiliar with. I have to say the first year was excruciatingly hard; it was like working a full day plus going to grad school at night; I was truly taking in so much information, Googling things under the table, proactively learning new things. But I think if you can show up doing the hard work, you eventually find the best ways for you to contribute. If you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing and why? I have a psych degree, so people often guess therapist. Truth be told, on more than one occasion I pursued a teaching opportunity. But in my fantasy world, I dream of serving in some capacity in a labor-and-delivery room. I loved the magic of giving birth—if I could do it 10 more times I would. What should the industry do to encourage more women and people of color into its ranks? One of the things we started several years ago: On-site diversity pledges. When Byrdie decided that DE&I was a central pillar, which includes recruiting initiatives, it was one of the first Dotdash brands to put out a public diversity equity and inclusion pledge with measurable goals that helped us better reflect our readers and the talent we want to attract and retain. Byrdie, for instance, reports how inclusive our models, product shades and overall visuals are to what percent of product roundups include Black-founded and/or Black-owned brands to how we engaged the knowledge of our anti-bias review board. Now, all of the Dotdash Meredith brands are committed to holding DE&I pledges with measurable goals that are regularly updated. How will AI impact your job in the future? I’m lucky enough to work at a media company that believes humans are the best tool we have for content creation. At this point in my career, I simply wouldn’t work any other way. I believe AI can be incredibly helpful from a tooling perspective; but content creation is out of the question for me at this stage of my career. Read about Ad Age’s 2024 Leading Women here

Dotdash Meredith’s Leah Wyar grows flagship brands, including People, amid industry challenges

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