Complex Media Network Partners With UK’s Protein

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Complex Media Network is joining forces with British based media company Protein Networks, a move that will internationalize the U.S. men’s lifestyle and entertainment portal. The deal between the two includes the sharing of complementary, original content and the creation of international marketing campaigns.

“We’re a vertical ad network but I don’t think we’re a very traditional network,” Rich Antoniello, ceo of Complex Media Networks, tells Audience Development. “Every one of our sites is 100 percent exclusive and this is the way we only do best in breed sites—we’re not trying to get massive reach numbers through just having 500 or 600 relationships with different sites.”

In the last three years Complex Media Network has tripled its audience, increasing from 9 million to 28 million unique monthly visitors and the company has gone from 92 million to 282 million page views. According to a news release from the group, Complex.com draws more numbers than GQ.com, Esquire.com and Details.com combined. 

Antoniello says that Protein takes the same approach in Europe, one of the reasons why Complex Media, which runs over 60 different sites and publishes the bi-monthly Complex magazine, decided to form the partnership. The magazine’s site, Complex.com, attracts 2.2 million unique visitors per month. The magazine has a circulation of about 345,000.

“They get to a very large audience through highly selective, highly qualitative consumer first driven Web sites,” Antoniello says. “What they do is they also work with these sites to create unique campaigns—they’re almost like a marketing firm plus an ad sales unit plus a publisher. That’s what we do and that’s what they do and that’s what I like about it. They’re looking to protect the consumer, they’re looking to enhance the advertising message and we need that approach to be consistent when we exit this country.”

Protien produces campaigns for Nike, Samsung, Hennessy, Range Rover, Burberry, Sony Playstation and Nokia, among others, and reach over 80 million individuals around the globe. The company works with online publications like LOOKBOOK.nu, RCRD LBL, We Heart It, Unlike, Fact Magazine, Beautiful Decay, Today & Tomorrow, Superfuture and Dezeen. Antoniello says the partnership with Protein will be representative of the same quality level Complex produces.

“They feel very comfortable having their sites represented by us here,” he says. “This is a longer-term potential strategic conversation as well—because they’re so similar from a business perspective, I’m not saying we’re going to be acquiring them anytime soon but this could be a potential crawl, walk, run approach. In looking at their approach and their business, maybe it’s something that goes beyond just the strategic partnership we have now and can go, potentially, into a much larger, deeper acquisition and other things along those lines.”

Protein, which launched in 2009, gets about 700 million page views. The partnership was struck when a mutual publisher suggested the two companies talk about monetization and content sharing opportunities. 

“They sell to an ultra exclusive audience and they frame it appropriately and they help advertisers craft customized marketing messages that go with that as well,” Antoniello says. “It’s not just that the content’s very similar but it’s the approach around how the communicate that content to both the consumer as well as the advertiser, it’s very similar to our approach as well.”

The high level of engagement, a formula that Complex has been consistently following, is one of the reasons the partnership was struck.

“We’ve been doing this now for four years with the same consistent business model and we’ve never chased reach and I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve had a lot of success,” Antoniello says. “We always concentrated on high quality consumers with a ridiculous amount of engagement and now you have a lot of people who are changing their business model to try and chase what ours is. Engagement was not the conversation in the network world four years ago and now it is, reach used to be the conversation and now we have both of it.”