What the ‘Pivot to Video’ Looks Like at Condé Nast

Credit: Flickr by SimonQ

It took three men two hours to shoot a 63-second overhead instructional video of Laura Rege, a recipe developer, making a cake for Bon Appétit — what people in the food-video industry call a “hands and pans.”

At the Kitchen Studio, Condé Nast’s new 7,000-square-foot space in Industry City in Brooklyn, four to six of these “hands and pans” videos are shot daily. It is the type of video on which Tasty, BuzzFeed’s famous recipe offshoot, has built a very large audience. Condé Nast’s food brands, Bon Appétit and Epicurious, have heartily embraced the format too.

Now, the company wants to double its current video business. To do so, it will have to move beyond what’s worked in the age of Facebook video, and make something new.