Product
Building Puck: A Media Brand for the 21st Century
Creating a platform to serve audiences, journalists, and advertisers.
In early 2021, the Puck team approached Postlight with an exciting, ambitious vision. They wanted to build a new kind of publishing business uniquely suited to the current moment in media and the evolving needs of audiences, journalists, and advertisers alike. Puck assembled an all-star roster of journalists — individual talents that could attract premium audiences and advertisers — and they crafted a beautiful, evocative brand to create a cohesive experience across sections like Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and more.
To bring Puck to life and go to market, they sought out a platform created with the needs of all three constituencies in mind: audiences, journalists, and advertisers. We set out to translate Puck’s vintage-inspired brand to modern-day digital design, marrying state-of-the-art monetization features and business analytics with the best modern storytelling tools on the web. This is how we built it.
Scalable design
Puck arrived with a beautiful brand in hand, so one of our first tasks was to expand this foundational documentation into a scalable design system that could serve Puck’s three main constituencies. The Postlight team designed storytelling experiences for journalists and audiences, integration capabilities for advertisers, and revenue-generating features for the business — all of it infused with Puck’s trademark sophisticated whimsy.
A suite of systems
Puck’s innovative approach to monetization is built on aligning the needs of standout journalist talent with the audiences they build and making those connections available to the best advertiser brands on the planet.
The platform that would power this business required thoughtful selection and creation of content management, marketing, and measurement systems. However, the Postlight team also implemented systems to process subscriptions and payments, account management, analytics, and performance reporting services.
Going to market
When it was time to go to market and launch Puck to the world, the Postlight team created and executed a robust go-to-market plan that drove massive interest and subscriptions at launch. In the months following, we’ve used the data generated by the systems we put in place along with feedback from real readers to prioritize initiatives that continue to drive strong results for Puck today.
Take a look at our work, explore Puck, and let us know what you think!
Michael Shane (he/him) is the Senior Director, Head of Digital Strategy at Postlight. Want to talk about digital change at your org? Get in touch: hello@postlight.com.
