Penske Media Corporation publishes Billboard, Variety, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, WWD, Deadline, IndieWire, Artforum, and more. Most of these brands have influenced pop and entertainment culture for decades by having distinct identities, a loyal readership, and a visual language their audiences recognize instantly.

Running all of them on a shared platform while each brand grows on its own is a problem few media companies face at this scale. rtCamp has worked on PMC’s answer to it as augmented staff since 2019.

“Working with rtCamp is a collaborative experience, their engineers make the effort to really understand our engineering needs and best practices. They understand the complexity of running 25+ brands on a shared platform and consistently deliver work that has made our systems more maintainable, not just more functional.”

– Gabriel Koen, SVP, Technology, Penske Media Corporation

At a glance

ChallengeSolutionOutcomeEvery brand rebuilt the same components, and themes drifted between releasesBuilt Larva, a shared component library, then evolved it into Nova, a React-to-PHP frameworkBuild once, apply everywhere; onboarding reduced to styling and configuration14 redesigns over six yearsLaunched each brand theme on the shared foundationOn-brand redesigns without frontend rebuildsPiano paywalls across 9 brandsBuilt subscription templates per brand with Playwright testsTested, regression-protected revenue path1000+ email templates to move from SFMC to ZetaLLMs rewrote file by file; engineers reviewed eachMigrated in six weeks, every change loggedDaily incidents across 25+ live brandsRotated through PMC’s emergency on-call rotationIncidents resolved quickly, exceeding PMC’s resolution SLA

From Larva to Nova: PMC’s shared frontend

Every brand on PMC’s network once ran its own codebase. Templates and styles built for one brand were rebuilt from scratch for the next, and a bug fix meant pushing the same change to each affected site by hand.

Larva: the shared component library

PMC built Larva to fix this: a shared component library distributed to brand themes via npm, with a custom WordPress plugin handling integration and hydrating templates with live data. Brands pulled from the library and applied their own styling, all built to accessibility standards. 

rtCamp’s engineers joined the PMC team early to help create components and templates, and quickly became subject matter experts, contributing valuable input into the iterative improvements made to the design system.

ARTnews adopted Larva first and proved the model; IndieWire, Variety, and others followed, each inheriting a tested foundation so onboarding concentrated on styling rather than rebuilding.

Nova: the framework that replaced it

Larva worked, but a friction point accumulated over time whereby every update passed through an npm publishing cycle before brands could use it. Teams needing quick fixes patched inside a brand instead, and themes drifted from the shared source.

PMC evolved the system into Nova, a framework integrated into PMC’s core plugin monorepo with no separate release cycle, with input and assistance from rtCamp. The unified team of PMC and rtCamp engineers authored components in React and SCSS, and a custom transpiler converts that code into PHP, so pages ship as server-rendered markup. In Nova, every component follows a strict JSON schema with graceful fallbacks, so pages hold up when data is missing.

The Nova scaffolding tooling generates a new brand’s file structure in one command. Design tokens let each brand set its own colors and typography over one shared core. 

A single fix to a core component reaches every brand on the framework, and component variants give brands like Artforum unique behavior without diverging from the central library.

14 brand redesigns in six years

Over six years, PMC redesigned 14 brands on this shared foundation, and rtCamp’s engineers contributed to each launch as part of PMC’s redesign team.

Each brand brought its own editorial structure and visual language to translate into the shared system. 

GoldDerby went further: the site runs a custom prediction engine where readers submit award-season predictions through data-heavy table layouts found nowhere else on the network. 

PMC’s team led the prediction data architecture, and rtCamp helped build the frontend component layer that surfaces it. The tables render from the data the prediction engine supplies, so new award seasons and category changes appear through data updates and not frontend rebuilds.

Subscription infrastructure across 9 brands

A broken paywall or failed login flow affects revenue directly. PMC needed to roll out Piano, its subscription platform, across a growing number of brands. Three were already live: Billboard, Sourcing Journal, and Sportico. Six more needed onboarding: Rolling Stone, Variety, WWD, Robb Report, ARTnews, and Artforum.

rtCamp engineers joined the rollout, migrating brands off Cxense, converting legacy landing pages, and building the full subscription template set per brand: paywall, subscription page, registration wall, login, and account management. Automated end-to-end Playwright tests cover the subscription flows. Nine brands now share a tested foundation where a fix applies network-wide and platform changes cannot break the revenue path unnoticed.

Migrating 1000+ email templates with AI in the loop

When PMC needed to move its newsletters from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Zeta, every template, variable, and tracking link across 21 brands had to be rewritten: 1000+ files, an estimated five to six months of manual work for one developer.

The unified team used large language models (LLMs) and skipped the single-pass batch script. They worked file by file: the AI rewrote, engineers reviewed and tested on the live platform, and each lesson fed into the instructions for the next file. 

The team migrated all 1000+ files in six weeks of part-time work, logging what changed and why for each.

Keeping 25+ brands running, 7 years in

rtCamp engineers rotated through PMC’s emergency on-call queue, a structured duty cycle covering site errors, editorial blockers, brand presentation issues, and revenue-impacting failures in ads or subscriptions.  Because the engineers knew PMC’s full platform, no incident sat waiting for context; they resolved issues or routed them to the right owner before problems spread network-wide.

Over 7 years, a core group has stayed close to major initiatives while specialists rotate in as projects demand, so PMC skips long hiring cycles and keeps the right capabilities on call. Engineers match PMC’s time zones and work at every level, from solution design to delivery. The work continues.

rtCamp is a key reason we can run multiple brands efficiently and keep costs under control—and it came out of rtCamp working with our team as one group. Seven years in, I rely on rtCamp as much as I do my own team.

Gabriel Koen

SVP, Technology, Penske Media Corporation

Want to scale your engineering capacity without the hiring lag? See how rtCamp’s staff augmentation can provide senior, VIP-trained engineers within a week, including a 2-week free trial.

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