Work History: The Conde Years

This post is part of a series about my professional experience, intended to help me find work. I’m writing the series in reverse chronological order. (See ‘related articles’ at the bottom of this post.)

The first job I found after moving to New York about seven years ago was with CondeNet, now called CondeNast Digital, i.e. the online division of CondeNast.

I started out as a sales associate, in which capacity I was in charge of planning, supervising, and optimizing online banner ad campaigns on a number of Conde properties, with a focus on Epicurious and Concierge. I negotiated prices with clients, researched target demographics and psychographics, and planned campaigns by matching client needs to media properties.

Part of the job involved data entry into Excel, which I found tedious, so I taught myself Excel VBA and automated most of the process, saving myself several hours of work each day. The Excel application that I created became a required part of the workflow for all sales operations at CondeNet, even in the satellite offices in other cities. The traffic and inventory system was altered in order to accommodate it.

Sales associates usually become full-on sales reps, but I was more interested in operations, so I was promoted to ad operations management. In this new capacity, I ran the actual banner ad campaigns at a technical level, learning a great deal about DFP (the publisher-side Doubleclick product), and ad serving in general. I continually optimized the process, and I was the departmental lead on the implementation of a new work flow system. In less than a year, I was promoted again, this time to the tech department.

In my final role at Conde, my title was Manager, Business Systems. I was the official liaison between Technology and Sales, and I maintained the web analytics system, Visual Sciences. Managing VS required learning a great deal about HTTP requests, as well as VS itself, which is a lot more complex than, say, Google Analytics. VS spit out reports that were automatically sent to the company executives every morning, and if there was anything wrong with those reports, then I was responsible. I also spent a great deal of time meeting with the marketing director and explaining what the data meant. Based on my explanations and the response they got from marketing and other stakeholders, I would then make recommendations about how to improve the sites themselves so as to optimize the traffic. We had a number of goals, some of which involved increasing or redirecting traffic, and some of which involved funneling users toward a certain action, such as subscribing to a magazine. Conde sites run on JSP, and I found myself working with software developers quite a bit, so I studied Java in my spare time, eventually earning the SCJA certification.

I was also the main administrator on the Akamai portal. Which means that I was in charge of web caching. If you have a popular website, then the traffic load will crash it unless it is distributed in “the cloud.” I learned a great deal about Akamai and web caching in general. My magazine site, Revolving Floor, caches some of its larger files on Amazon Cloudfront, which is similar to Akamai, and it’s set up that way because I learned the value of web caching at CondeNet.

Once again, I found myself juggling an unusual combination of responsibilities. But the greatest thing about that position was the freedom it gave me to work with people in many different departments, and to learn as much as I could about the way things operated, at both a micro and macro level. Over the course of a single day, I might talk to the marketing director about customer acquisition goals, the VP of sales about the needs of a major client, a content editor about what type of users were engaging with a new feature, and a software developer about how to code a new page in such a way that it would play nice with the analytics system.

It was an exciting time, and I often think back on it with sentimentality. Being a part of CondeNet taught me the way that an online business ought to run, and that mental template has affected all the work I’ve done since.