Two NBCUniversal execs — Lauren Zalaznick, chairman of entertainment and digital networks and integrated media, and Nick Lehman, president of digital — will co-chair the new digital advisory board. Board members include:

Amy Banse, Managing Director and Head of Funds at Comcast Ventures; LeahBusque, Founder, TaskRabbit; Beth Ferreira, COO of Fab.com;  Cindy Gallop, Founder & CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld; Megan Gardner, CEO of Plum District; Jennifer Hyman, CEO & Co-Founder of Rent the Runway;  Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something;  Nasreen Madhany, Global CEO of Neo@Ogilvy; Marissa Mayer, VP of Location and Local Services at Google ; Heidi S. Messer, Co-Founder & Chairman of Collective [i];  Alison Pincus, Co-Founder & Chief Partnership Officer of One Kings Lane; Amanda Richman, President, Digital of MediaVest USA; Jessica Schell, EVP of New Media and Digital Entertainment at Universal Pictures; Vivian Schiller, SVP & Chief Digital Officer at NBC News;  Chloe Sladden, VP of Media, Twitter; Colleen Soriano, SVP & Managing Partner, US Director of Digital Communications, Universal McCann; Rachel Sterne, Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York; Alexa von Tobel, Founder and CEO of LearnVest.com; Joanne Zaiac, President of Digitas NY Region.

Women at NBCU board members Gilt Group Chairman, Susan Lyne; iVillage President, Jodi Kahn; tech entrepreneur/investor, Esther Dyson; and Monica Halpert, former CMO of Bluefly, are joining the digital extension as well.

Amy Banse, managing director and head of funds at Comcast Ventures, will be speaking at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads in NYC on May 23. Register today.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock user [Mehmet Dilhiz].

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, alluded to the challenges that lie ahead for publishers: “Just because we’ve opened a shop doesn’t mean we’ve become retailers.” The lessons are worth learning: In the slightly tongue-in-cheek words of moderator Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the FT, “We’d all rather be Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) than some boring old newspaper company.”

Some takeaways:

The Single Thing With the Biggest Payback Social networking is not a panacea: “We get traffic from the social channel, but more from either e-mail or from people just having bookmarked the site,” said Gilt’s Lyne. “Personalization is probably the single thing you could focus on that will have the largest payback.” Some of that, she said, is self-generated: “Asking people to self-identify as liking ‘x’ brand, or wanting to read more about this or that.”

But Gilt has also started heavily personalizing all of the e-mails it sends out. There are now “literally hundreds of thousands of versions of the e-mails,” Lyne said. “It starts when you come in; we separate you by being male or female, and where you live. But over time, we look at your browsing behavior and your buying behavior–anything you’ve tried to add to your cart and not been able to, anything you’ve waitlisted–to get a sense of what your sizes are. We layer that on top of vertical data, so we get more data. We run it every night, so the next day your e-mail has been ordered in such a way that the brands you’re interested in and the sizes you wear are at the top. It’s all automated.” This process hasn’t yet been extended to Gilt’s website, because that is such a big undertaking. But “if we could change the site 800,000 ways, we’d do so,” said Lyne. “And in time, we will.”

Beyond Product Descriptions. “The type of content we seek to provide has to meet the needs of a parent or grandparent.,” said Andrew Kovan, chief of marketing and digital commerce at toy company Melissa & Doug. ” There used to be less emphasis on content, specifically, and more on content in general: Product descriptions, or four images. Now the content has to accomplish something, and it’s moving into the realm of video. How do we make sure we’re providing the right content in the right places to get that conversion–which may happen offline in our case.”

The Value of Niches. “As we’ve started to get more information about how people read articles on the site and the journeys they then take, what has started to become clear is that the value is not necessarily where you think of it,” said Grimshaw. “Some of our more niche content about commodities, for example, is actually incredibly effective at convincing people to subscribe. When you have that info, you start to look at those areas in very different ways and think of additional content to put around them–it’s not just a backwater. Picking out niche opportunities is key to getting this right.”

Lyne agreed. “When we do a sale on shoes, we end up with the women’s size 5 1/2 and 11 at the end of it,” she said. That used to be a “challenge, the leftovers.” Then “we realized, wait, we’ve got ‘x’ number of people we know wear a size 11. So why not create a private sale for them?”

What Content Means For Retailers “We photograph almost everything that we sell ourselves,” Lyne said. “At the forefront, we’re investing in styling clothes that will make them appeal to a certain consumer. So take certain brands that may have been perceived as a little more old-fashioned–by breaking up Carolina Herrera suits, showing the top with a pair of jeans and a great T-shirt–suddenly Carolina Herrera becomes a cool brand for 25-year-olds.” Moderator Edgecliffe-Johnson broke in–something he did more than once when Lyne was speaking about something interesting–to ask if Gilt is in competition with magazines. “Yeeeeeeeah,” said Lyne slowly. “It’s part of our sell to vendors: We’ll bring your brand to a new market base and bring back business intelligence to you. We give vendors a [free] breakdown after the sale, with the demographics of who bought what and which things were most popular.” In other ways, too, Gilt has evolved its sites after watching news sites. “Gilt Taste has a very heavy content component to it and we brought Ruth Reichl in to be the editor,” Lyne said. “Our thought was, let’s engage with that foodie community and celebrate artisanal food producers, so that over time people who come initially for content will also use us as a source for food.”

For Melissa & Doug’s Kovan, a large part of content is “the user-generated piece–images, videos, Facebook comments. I believe we have a responsibility to ensure that that content sets the stage for what happens when the customer buys the product.” Melissa & Doug just signed a content share agreement with Grandparents.com, and Kovan said he’s open to other such partnerships, which he believes can add value to both brands participating.

For The Financial Times, Small Changes Meant Twice As Many Subscriptions. “Customers are very sensitive to small things,” said FT.com’s Grimshaw. The company tested different subscription “barrier” pages–changing only some wording and content and keeping the price and package the same. “After two months of experimentation, we were selling twice as many subscriptions,” he said. “It was an astonishing revelation, that small changes in the design of one stage of that process could make such a big difference.”

Shopping As Entertainment. “We take a lot from media in our commerce business,” Lyne said. “We program our site every day and it’s new every day. We launch at noon with a completely new set of vendors. It’s the idea of being ready for an audience and trying to put your best face forward every single day, and assuming that at least a part of shopping is also entertainment.”

Loyalty Means Something Different Now. “The traditional way of looking at loyalty doesn’t match the ways people engage with brands anymore,” said Irving Fain, CEO of brand engagement software company CrowdTwist. “People may engage for days, weeks or months before a purchase is made. Now all the interaction that people have with content is a transaction that has value–watching a video and seeing a product in action, or sharing a link.”

The “real currency” now may be a shared e-mail address. “Getting people to say ‘Yes, I would like to receive e-mail from you’ is increasingly difficult, because, as you all know, your inbox is a nightmare,” Lyne said. “Every deal site in the world is offering you the best deals on the planet, there are multiple newsletters coming at you. Inbox clutter is an increasing challenge to anybody trying to develop an ongoing relationship with a consumer.”

The company says when Lyne joined in 2008 annual gross revenues were $25 million; that rose to $170 million in 2009 and this year it projects $400 million at a minimum and as high as $500 million.

But Gilt Groupe also has a large payroll with 500 staffers, much more competition as the private flash sale concept spreads — and $83 million in funding led by General Atlantic and Matrix. Ryan has been down the startup-to-IPO road before with DoubleClick. The three-letter acronym isn’t mentioned in the announcement, although it did come up earlier this year with WSJ (sub. req.) when StubHub’s Andrew Page came on as CFO. But the intent is clear. Ryan is counting on his operation skills to get them to the next level.

Lyne’s move seems surprising, because of her extensive background in entertainment and media. Before heading MSLO in the fall of 2004, Lyne was president of ABC Entertainment in charge of the network

Millard, who left her post as Yahoo’s (NSDQ: YHOO) chief sales officer a year ago to join MSLO, oversees the company’s online, publishing, and broadcasting. Marino handles MSLO

– Online Ad strategy: During the Q&A, Lyne was asked about the company’s online sales goals. “We have built an online ad sales force of 12 people and are beginning to train the rest of the sales team. We also plan to expand our online sales staff, we have to. Our sell through rate is 40 percent and all of our key sales positions are sold out. We are seeing improvements in sell through every month. Going forward, we’ll lean more on the broadcast model, meaning that if you want key positions, you’ll have to buy run of site too. We’re also selling others’ inventory. And we’re looking for partnerships outside our ad networks. These partnerships would be with larger outside entities where we can achieve significant scale. More about MSLO’s investment strategy and video plans after the jump.

– Call it a comeback: MSLO has mounted a successful comeback since our Stewart’s insider trading legal troubles a few years ago, Lyne said. Last year was key and “not just because it was a return to profitability.” The company began seeing strong growth across internet and TV properties and new merchandising launches. Lyne: “Looking at this year, it’s all about sustainable growth. We’re going to expand the brand portfolio, focusing on certain franchises, including weddings, holidays and food.”

– Investments: She mentioned MSLO’s investments in community site WeddingWire and in Emeril and how the company can capitalize on them now that it has the infrastructure to handle more growth. “Emeril is the perfect business for us, as we know how to grow a business around a personality.” As for MSLO’s content, Martha has emphasized the creation of “evergreen content,” which can be reused over and over. As a result of its ability to recycle its content, online ad revenue grew 31 percent in Q1, as traffic was up. “We’re taking the lead from our users and update the home page based on where we see the most use. Women follow a calendar: holidays, graduations, and we are programming for that calendar. Launching more features like photo galleries and driving more features from our TV show to the website. That’s why we’re seeing more traffic. Pageviews gained 43 percent, uniques are up over 50 percent.” Durting the Q&A, Lyne said the company is looking at sites that have tools that can enhance its current offerings and sites that can relate to MSLO’s user-base — in particular in the wedding and holiday categories — are priorities.

– The community: Martha’s blog generates 600,000 pageviews a month. “We’re experimenting with a four-week or six-week program, signed up users for an Easter program. Another example, this is the kind of thing you won’t be hearing about from other companies at this conference. We did a cupcakes contest that was featured on TV and on the web. It sounds bizarre; it helped us connect with consumers and advertisers. We invited users to upload photos to the site and drive 3 million pageviews. This is something we’re going to be building more of. Advertisers will be paying more of a premium for coveted space on our site, unlike a lot of other community sites. We bought 40 percent interest in Wedding Wire. Our wedding site had been a place that brides came to for inspiration. But they couldn’t really plan their weddings with us. These new tools allow them to do that. They can get a florist, send out invitations to sending out thank you notes. We will be able to use these tools in our other content segments.”

– Syndication deals coming soon: We are talking to everybody you would expect about syndicating our video, but nothing to announce yet.

– Emeril: Lyne: “A great fit… we know how to grow a personality-driven brand.” As for the finances behind it, CFO Howard Hochhauser: “Economically speaking, it was about $50 million deal for about 6x EBITDA. From a CFO’s perspective, it’s a beautiful deal.“

– WeddingWire: Lyne: “(It’s) a significant part of our efforts to accelerate development of the weddings franchise… Readers come to us for ideas an inspiration, but now as we built out weddings online, they’ll be able to come to use and enjoy a great set of planning tools.” As the company suggested on its recent conference call, the WeddingWire platform will be extended into other verticals.

– Ad market: Not much new to say since their recent earnings and conf. call, though Millard did make a point about the advantages of the company’s “omni-ness” — basically, ad buyers are quicker to cancel single platform purchases — buys that are solely online or solely in the magazine. But they’re less likely to pull out of multi-platform deals, giving MSO a degree of stability.

– Growth strategy: The company is looking for smaller internet companies that have tools and applications that “would allow us to jump ahead of our internet plan. … Planning tools in weddings and home living would be extremely valuable to us.” It also sees organic growth in both print and online.

– Digital: The focus for 2008 is to turn Martha Stewart readers and viewers into internet users, with more site enhancements coming to aid this. Traffic was up significantly in fall 2007, after a slow summer post-relaunch. Previously the company’s online platform was geared towards e-commerce, but it’s made a strategic decision that advertising represents the big opportunity. After an adjustment period, during which the company did a lot of SEO work, traffic has started to trend up, which Lyne believes is “more than sustainable.” She also mentioned the company’s new ad network as an opportunity for growth. After the presentation, I caught up to Lyne to follow up on this: basically, the network is a way to deliver more inventory to its advertisers, so it’s mainly looking for sites that have a similar traffic mix to its own. She specifically mentioned that it has a different philosophy than the Glam network, in that it’s not just letting anyone in. Currently, the size of it is about 25 million page views across 25 sites. I also asked her where MSLO is in terms of mobile. Right now the company isn’t doing anything in that area, mainly because the profits aren’t there yet, and it’s not clear how the MSLO brand works best in the medium. But the company has had conversations with partners, and it may do something in the future when/if it makes sense.

– Broadcasting: “The megaphone for our brand”. Consists of TV and radio programs. Company is able to repackage old content for new products, such as holiday specials. Radio programming is significant for promotional purposes.

– Branding and licensing: MSLO takes the cake in terms of what it puts its name on. It’s not just home goods, but other kinds of items, like homes themselves (in partnership with KB homes) and food (its own hormone-free ham is launching this year), with more items to launch in the future..

– Economy: The company has tried to diversify so that it’s not too tied to one area. Many of the company’s initiative are in “launch mode”, so growth in those areas is expected to be recession-proof