Vice Media’s Eddy Moretti has insisted any deal with Time Warner will not be at the expense of “selling out” its hard-won edgy image that has drawn youth audiences to its digital media brand.
Moretti, Vice Media’s chief creative officer, said that any prospective deal with Time Warner will only be done “for the good of Vice”.
Time Warner is in talks over a $2bn deal that would potentially see the HBO owner take a minority stake in the Vice Media empire – which includes an eclectic range of 10 websites, a news magazine show, a film production house, an advertising agency and a record label.
However, the fact that another media giant – Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox already has a 5% stake – wants to grab a slice of Vice Media has led some to question whether this could lead to it losing touch with its hugely valuable youth audience.
“We’ve been on this maniacal growth curve and learning curve for a decade,” Moretti said, speaking to MediaGuardian at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Wednesday. “Every time there is a big paradigm shift in the company – like [entering] the first international market, going into video, working with bigger media companies – people ask the question: Is this that point that the brand starts to lose its relevance?”
However, Moretti said that Vice Media has been a “20-year startup” – it launched as a magazine in 1994 – and that there has always been an acute awareness that the company is nothing without its brand.
“Every day we are in the trenches,” he said. “We have built this company brick by brick through a lot of perseverance and passion and the only thing we really have outside of an audience, video views and ability to monetise and do all this stuff, well, what we really have at the end of the day is our brand, if we screw that up we have nothing.”
He said that Vice co-founder and chief executive Shane Smith, who has said that he wants the company to be the “MTV of CNN” of digital media, a Time Warner of the street”, “won’t let that happen”.
“Shane is passionate chief executive and brand leader and brand artist and he won’t let that happen and it trickles down to all of us,” he said. “We’re all very, very proud of the company. We don’t want to be sell outs so if we do a deal like this [it] has to be for the good of Vice. We can’t give up now, we’ve worked so hard. Protect the brand, protect the audience. We are just at the beginning of what we could do in video.”
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email media@theguardian.com or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”.
• To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook.
