The walls around Condé Nast Digital finally came down late yesterday.
The changes, which were widely expected to take place in advance of a publishers’ meeting set for this Friday, have been slowly easing out this week.
Two key things happened as part of yesterday’s move: Big ad packages will now be sold both in print and digital format by one ad sales team rather than by two separate — and sometimes adversarial — teams.
And in another piece of the same puzzle, individual publishers will have control of all digital ad sales of their brand on the Web, the iPad and other mobile applications along with the print ad sales.
“There have been a lot of land grabs going on,” said one insider in the run-up to the big announcement.
Surprisingly, there seems to be no head-rolling accompanying the announcement — at least not at the moment.
Said one insider: “I think they’ll end up doing it slowly, through attrition. If you don’t like your new responsibilities, you can leave.”
CEO Charles Townsend said the changes will start immediately and work out through 2011.
One of the biggest winners is Lou Cona, the chief marketing officer who oversees the Condé Nast Media group, which sells the big, multi-title ad buys from major advertisers for the print magazines. He will now handle sales of digital ads as well to those advertisers.
Under the new arrangement, Drew Schutte, the senior vice president and chief revenue officer of the Condé Nast Digital group, will become part of the Condé Nast Media group under Cona.
The one with diminished power is Sarah Chubb, the president of Condé Nast Digital, who has headed up the company’s digital operations on both the editorial and business side since 1996.
The announcement yesterday capped a week of furious changes for Condé Nast, which never before has concentrated as much corporate firepower on digital.
Earlier in the week it was announced that Adobe Digital Publishing Suite was going to be handling the process of making Condé’s magazines tablet-ready for the iPad and other devices.
“We have always intended to deliver our content on a variety of platforms and devices, and the Adobe Design Suite will help us efficiently achieve the author once, publish anywhere goal,” said Joe Simon, the company’s chief technology officer who broke the news at the Adobe Worldwide conference in Los Angles on Monday.
The New Yorker and Wired already use the Adobe system for their iPad apps, so it was not a total surprise that Condé Nast was leaning that way.
Earlier iPad versions of GQ, Vanity Fair and Glamour, which were developed in-house by Condé Nast Digital and were seen as having few extra visual bells and whistles, will now be retooled using the Adobe system.
The big winner in that shuffle is Scott Dadich, who had developed the Wired app with Adobe software when he was creative director of the San Francisco-based magazine, and is now the editorial digital guru charged with helping all Condé Nast chief editors develop their Web brands as the recently appointed executive director of digital magazine development based in New York.
Rumors are still swirling about the sudden departure of W creative director Jody Quon, who seems to have resigned under fire last week after growing behind-the-scenes tension with some members of the new team that had been put in place by Editor-in-Chief Stefano Tonchi.
According to one story making the rounds, the flash point had some connection to the nude Kim Kardashian cover, which featured the reality TV star wearing only body paint and left nothing to the imagination.
Quon was the photo director of New York magazine before she was recruited this past April by Tonchi as part of a high-profile team charged with refashioning the magazine after the ouster of longtime editorial director Patrick McCarthy.
Tonchi, who arrived after editing the New York Times supplement “T,” has put out three issues of W.
Some speculated that Quon was heavier on reality-based photographs, and her Rolodex may have been light on the cutting-edge fashion photographers who graced the oversized glossy magazine in its heyday.
Tonchi did not respond to calls from The Post, but earlier had told sister publication Women’s Wear Daily he was “very, very sad” that Quon was leaving.
He said he got back from the European fash ion shows and realized something was coming unglued.
“I really came back 10 days ago and there was a lot of tension in the office, much more than before.” But he declined to go into specifics.
Quon could not be reached. A spokeswoman for W said that the split had nothing to do with the Kardashian nude nor any perceived dearth of top fashion photographers in her contacts. kkelly@nypost.com