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Vox Media announced this morning it has acquired Punch, a James Beard-award-winning spirits and cocktail publisher created in 2013. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Punch will remain an independent editorial brand within Eater, the Vox Media title covering food and restaurant culture. Its seven staff, including editor-in-chief Talia Baiocchi, will stay with the company, and Baiocchi will report to Amanda Kludt, editor-in-chief of Eater and svp at Vox Media.
“It became very clear, as we started building the business, that in order for us to actualize our ambitions for Punch that we needed a partner like Vox,” Baiocchi told Adweek. “We were attracted to its storytelling, its journalism and its people, so it really checked all our boxes.”
The acquisition comes amidst a flurry of mergers reshaping the publishing industry, spurred in part by publishers’ efforts to expand their trove of first-party data and offer ad-buyers greater scale. Vox Media has made four acquisitions or mergers since 2019, including Coral, Epic, New York Media and Cafe Studios. Equally, the pandemic has had a major impact on the drinks industry, with bars and restaurants closed and more people turning to publishers to perfect their at-home sundowner.
The Goldilocks audience overlap
Punch hopes to pair well with Eater, as the two publishers share complementary areas of coverage.
Eater no doubt hopes to expand its audience by folding in a new swath of readers who have a proven appetite for culinary content, but who are not currently Vox Media consumers. Punch currently attracts 550,000 monthly unique visitors, whereas Eater averages 15 million per month, according to Vox Media. Combined, the two publishers will reach over 1 million free newsletter subscribers.
In an acquisition like this, both parties want to walk the line between audience acquisition and redundancy, said Rob Ristagno, the founder and CEO of growth consultancy Sterling Woods Group.
“You hope to hit that Goldilocks overlap, where the readership is neither completely identical nor completely different,” Ristagno said. “If you can find that happy medium, then the acquisition will really help you recognize some revenue synergies.”
In exchange for broadened reach and a new audience, Punch will help Eater expand its drinks coverage and open up new revenue opportunities, such as book sales and licensed products.
Punch co-founder Aaron Wehner, now the evp and publisher of Crown/Random House Publishing, has helped the cocktail site publish 10 books and gift products, including The Essential Cocktail Book, Easy Tiki, Spritz and trivia game Another Round. Punch will bring its book-publishing connections and expertise to Eater, opening the door for food and restaurant-related imprints.
In a related event, Vox Media announced on Aug. 16 that it had hired Eric Karp, formerly svp of global brand licensing at BuzzFeed, to build out its product licensing line from scratch.
Alcohol ads are going digital
The pandemic has had a dramatic impact on the beer, wine and spirits industry.
Alcohol brands have historically spent twice as much on television and nearly four times as much on out-of-home advertising compared to the average brand, according to a Business Intelligence Report from Zenith. Both channels have seen substantial drops in viewership due to changing consumer behaviors.
With bars and restaurants closed, consumers also drank less alcohol and bought the drinks they did consume from vendors where they cost less. Overall, ad spending on the alcohol industry dropped from $7.6 billion in 2019 to $6.7 billion in 2020.
In response to changing consumer habits, beer, wine and spirits brands have begun diverting more of their budget to digital media. Analysts predict digital advertising will account for 30% of alcohol ad spend in 2023, up from 21% in 2019.
This shift to digital puts publishers like Punch in a position to capitalize, as brands, breweries, bars and distilleries look to reach consumers online. Punch, whose content attracts an audience of cocktail aficionados, provides an endemic platform for brands to reach spirits enthusiasts, said Kludt, the Eater editor-in-chief and Vox Media svp.
“Punch has incredibly strong relationships in the trade,” Kludt said, “and paired with the scale that we have at Eater, I think it’s a winning combination.”
