Turning a 60-Year Archive Into a Social-First Franchise

Playboy's Heritage section had a problem most legacy brands run into eventually: decades of genuinely great material—in this case, over 500 Playboy Interviews spanning some of the most well-known politicians, musicians, and cultural icons—that existed in long-form format, buried behind a paywall nobody under 30 was clicking into. 

Instead of working on yet another digital re-creation of a past print interview and hoping that people would pay for archive access to finish it, I created a new franchise to support the original franchise. I pulled eight of the sharpest, strangest, and most surprising quotes (one for each decades of the Playboy Interview) and repackaged them into a punchy back-of-book magazine feature built to be repurposed on social media as an interactive quiz, where followers could guess who said what. Magazine readers would got the answers as a subscriber perk; social followers had to sign up for archive access to get answers. 

The new franchise did exactly what it was designed to do: raise the cultural relevance of the Playboy Interview for a generation that thrived on bite-sized, social-first, interactive, celeb-centric content. A 10,000-word conversation became a scroll-stopping guessing game that showcased the breadth of the original franchise and the unexpected hot takes of the celebrities we know and love. The new franchise converted casual social scrollers into website readers, and website readers into magazine or archive subscribers.