Three more top ad managers are following Michelle Myers out the door at Time Inc., to what they believe are greener pastures at Condé Nast.
Myers is said to be have been lured with an offer in the range of $500,000 to jump to Lucky from the publisher’s post at People StyleWatch, where ad pages grew by 25 percent last year.
Myers replaced Gina Sanders, who was named CEO of Condé Nast’s Fairchild Fashion Group after Richard “Mad Dog” Beckman jumped to e5 Global Media, a new company that recently bought The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Adweek.
Now Julie Arkin, who was the ad director at People StyleWatch, is moving to Lucky as associate publisher.
Kim Conrad and Sarah Menninger, who were job-sharing as beauty directors at StyleWatch, will split the job of executive beauty director at Lucky, sources tell Media Ink.
The new moves came the same day that Time Inc. filled the publisher’s job that Myers abandoned.
Karin Tracy, associate publisher at Time Inc.’s InStyle, which has also been performing well in recent months, will replace her.
Condé Nast appears to be doing a better job at selling itself to outsiders than Time Inc., though both had particularly brutal years in 2009.
Condé Nast saw morale plummet as management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. engineered widespread downsizings at the company, controlled by the Newhouse family.
The defections are also seen as another black eye for Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, who instituted a bonus plan that tied the fortunes of every magazine to how well Time Inc. performed for the year.
Under the previous plan, half of an employee’s bonus was tied to individual performance goals, and half to how the magazine fared in meeting its budget.
The new standard made 70 percent of the bonus pool dependent on the company as a whole.
The net result was that for many managers and executives at bigger or more profitable units, bonuses were down by 50 percent from what they expected.
Mort’s cuts
Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire real estate mogul who is said to be toying with running for the US Senate, is still looking to cut costs at the tabloid he’s owned since the early 1990s.
Late last year, Zuckerman eliminated the company’s 401(k) match on employee retirement plans. (The company long ago eliminated its pension plan, so under the current plan, the only money going into the retirement plan is from the employ ees.)
Now, he is instituting a pay cut for managers and executives making more than $110,000 a year.
Managers making $110,000 to $175,000 are slated to see their pay checks shrink by 3 percent.
Executives making $175,000 or more a year will see their salaries cut by 5 percent.
“We are clearly in a very challenging environment for newspapers and are trying to position ourselves to best meet all of those challenges,” said a Daily News spokesman.
Employees who are operating under collective-bargaining agreements, including the pressmen and the drivers, are not affected by the pay cuts.