AND THE WINNERS ARE…: Condé Nast chief executive officer Charles Townsend handed out awards Tuesday night at the Michelle Bernstein restaurant in Palm Beach, Fla., at the company’s annual publishers’ meeting. Susan Plagemann was named publisher of the year, after Vogue saw a 9 percent uptick in ad pages in 2011. Plagemann has been earning good reviews from her bosses in her brief tenure at Condé (she left Marie Claire in 2009 to join Vogue) and won the peak performance award last year.
Fairchild Fashion Media’s Gina Sanders won executive of the year, and New Yorker publisher Lisa Hughes and editor David Remnick won the collaborative leadership award. Publisher Giulio Capua won the business turnaround award after Architectural Digest finished the year with a 9 percent ad-page gain, and its January AD 100 issue was up 116 percent, according to Media Industry Newsletter (January is the final month of the 2011 fiscal year at Condé Nast).
Plagemann’s team at Vogue took first place in the outstanding business performance award, while the business side at Vanity Fair took second place — 2011 was Vanity Fair’s most profitable year ever — and Howard Mittman’s team at Wired finished third a year after it took first place.
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In other Condé Nast news, a source told WWD that publishing director Bill Wackermann will no longer oversee Bon Appétit, just two months after he dropped his oversight of Brides. It appears the publishing director job at Condé Nast just keeps shrinking now that Wackermann oversees only Glamour and W. He is expected to spend the vast bulk of his time at Glamour as he prepares a March redesign to make up for a 7 percent ad-page drop in 2011 (its March issue saw a 9 percent gain).