Matt Bean · Product / Content / Brand

Section 01 / Content Leadership

Creative Systems.
Built for Scale.

Editor-in-Chief three times over. Rebuilt brand strategies from the ground up and grew digital audiences into the tens of millions at Sports Illustrated, Men's Health, and Entertainment Weekly. Every call on what content to make, for whom, and when, traces back to a deep read of audience segmentation: usage patterns, funnel signals, the whole picture.

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Content Leadership, End to End

I've run editorial organizations at four magazines and two venture-backed platforms, and the job is always the same underneath: figure out what an audience actually wants, then build the team, systems, and cadence to deliver it at scale.

At Men's Health, I took the brand from 12M to 25M+ monthly uniques, growth north of 50 percent year-over-year. At Sports Illustrated, I doubled the digital audience from 15M to 30M and launched its first live daily sports talk show. At Entertainment Weekly and Sunset, the job looked different: reposition legacy brands at real inflection points, rebuild the newsroom and its systems, and find new formats and channels without losing what made each title distinct. That kind of step change comes from the fundamentals: sharp storytelling, brand clarity, platform-native content, relentless audience acquisition.

Brand leadership doesn't stop at editorial. At Tonal, I helped architect the athlete-partnership strategy end-to-end: which athletes we brought on, how their stories were told, how we built the social ecosystems around them. That included leading content and social strategy for LeBron James' integration and Michelle Wie West's partnership.

Sports Illustrated Kids feature, A Boy Helps a Town Heal
Emmy Award statuette
Recognition

Emmy Award

Executive Producer — "A Boy Helps a Town Heal"

I spearheaded a company-wide effort at Time Inc. to build longform storytelling tools on immersive HTML5 and CSS3 toolsets. One of the resulting Sports Illustrated pieces was nominated for, and won, a 2013 Sports Emmy Award for New Approaches to Storytelling.

Fourteen-year-old Jack Wellman of Newtown, Connecticut, demonstrated resilience and compassion beyond his years in earning the SportsKid of the Year award.

Talent

Coach Bio Videos

Oversight over a new suite of branding and creative direction on coach bio videos.

// Selected Work

Content case studies

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