How Semafor is redefining the head of video role

Kamika McCoy (0:10)

Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of The Digiday Podcast, a show for anybody who's wondering what exactly the head of video looks like in the TikTok slash creator era. I'm Kamika McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter here at Digiday.

Tim Peterson (0:25)

I'm Tim Peterson, Executive Editor of Video and Audio, a digital media and someone who is trying to figure out what the video role looks like in the creator era as someone in the head of video role for digital media.

Kamika McCoy (0:38)

There's a line to be straddled here. No, a big ask ahead of you guys. I talked to one person once who told me that they're producing at least dozens of videos per day. Tim, how are you managing this?

Tim Peterson (0:49)

Not doing dozens of videos per day for one. God, that sounds, that brings me back when I was writing six blog posts per day at the publication I was at before Digiday. Yeah, a dozen videos per day. Makes me wonder, like, how could those videos be good? But maybe they are, and maybe that's part of the, so for this week's episode, we have what to me feels like a very special episode. So not only is this a live recording we did at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida last week.

So for this episode, I spoke with Adam Banicki, who is the head of video at Semafor. And this was, it's funny, we joke a lot about how our summits are kind of like group therapy sessions for all the folks in the room. Can we go, this session felt like a, either like a therapy session or like a, yeah, kind of like a therapy session because Adam and I are in similar roles at our respective publications. So it was an opportunity for me to just hear from him how he's doing the job that I'm trying to do at Digiday Media.

Kamika McCoy (2:01)

That is incredibly interesting. Okay, I don't want to spoil too much, but can you give us kind of a preview of what he said?

Tim Peterson (2:09)

Yeah, so it's interesting because like, I don't know about you, do you normally think of the like head of video role at a publisher? Do you think of that being like a newsroom role, a business side role, an operations role? Like how do you, do you normally like default to thinking if it's somewhere particularly in the org structure?

Kamika McCoy (2:29)

Well, that's the thing. I usually think of this as two separate roles. There's one that sits on the editorial side of the house, and then one that sits on like the branded content side of the house. So it seems like he's maybe in the middle here.

Tim Peterson (2:41)

Yeah, he is, which surprised me because I've always thought of the, and maybe this is in part because in my role as executive editor of video and audio, I'm strictly on the editorial side of the house for digital media.

And so I've always just thought of heads of videos at publishers as being editorial roles, unless it was like head of branded video or head of like sponsored content, something like that. Adam is straddling both sides. So he mentions how he reports directly to Semafor, co-founder and editor and chief Ben Smith, but he also works pretty closely with Semafor's chief commercial officer, Rachel Oppenheim. And so he is kind of a nexus point between edit and commercial at Semafor in a way that was really interesting to me and struck me as really unique. And so I had all the questions in the world for Adam about, okay, what is this role look like? What is your day to day look like? How do you manage these things? How do you manage your time? How do you manage between reporting directly to the editor-in-chief, but also working closely with the chief commercial officer? And he was willing to get into all of that in a way that I found really helpful. And I think the listeners will find helpful too.

Kamika McCoy (4:02)

Yeah, I'm like foaming at the mouth for that last question. So with no further ado, we'll let you and Adam get to it.

Tim Peterson (4:15)

So how many months in at Semafor this month?

Adam Banicki (4:19)

Three months in now. Yeah.

Tim Peterson (4:21)

Everything you expected it to be, any surprises?

Adam Banicki (4:25)

No surprises, but well, I'll say it's been an impressive three months to get up to speed with a commercial team that is really strong and I feel like punching above their weight.

We are launching new shows. We'll have an exciting site coming into 2027 And yeah, it's been nice to see that those launches are coming together in a really strong way.