Monday Wake-Up Call: Salesforce co-founder is buying Time. Plus, why Alex Bogusky rejoined CP&B
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Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. You can get an audio version of this briefing on your Alexa device. Search for “Ad Age” under “Skills” in the Alexa app. What people are talking about today: Time magazine is getting new ownership, again. Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne Benioff, are buying the venerable magazine from owner Meredith Corp. for $190 million, as Bloomberg News reports. Once the deal closes, the magazine will be a personal family holding, but the Benioffs say they won’t take a role in journalism-related decisions. In a tweet, the Salesforce chairman and co-CEO called Time “a treasure trove of our history and culture.”
Can the Benioffs do for Time what Amazon CEO Bezos did for The Washington Post five years ago? As Vanity Fairrecently wrote, Bezos has been seen as the “shining hero of dead-tree media, the face that all struggling print publications see in their dreams at night.”
Meredith Corp., owner of Better Homes and Gardens, acquired Time Inc. earlier this year; it intends to shed some of Time Inc’s most iconic titles because they don’t fit Meredith’s emphasis on lifestyle brands. Besides Time, what about the other former Time Inc. publications that Meredith is still trying to sell? Recode asks: “Are there any other billionaires out there to buy Fortune or Sports Illustrated?”
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