NewsBeat

16 NewsBeat August 2016 By JUSTIN ELLIS What's actually working in digital advertising? 8 publishers on how they're bringing in money any publishers' digital revenues have been on an upward swing in recent years — but it's not enough to fill the gaps left by print. I asked several publishers what's working for them in digital advertising in this uncertain environment. What types of formats are performing well? How is that a change from recent history? Do they have any plans to counteract ad blockers? I spoke with executives from Slate, The New York Times, Vox Media, The Atlantic, Mashable, The Seattle Times, Newsweek, and Wired. Their thoughts on digital advertising are below, slightly edited for length and clarity. Slate Matt Turck, interim publisher/chief revenue officer, Panoply: These big, clean ads, that are either at the top of the page (see the ad above) or within the read as you move down the page, tend to be what our advertisers are gravitating toward. Their business is based on measurement, and they tend to be performing better. There are several examples of that — our parallax units, for example, where the images animate as the user scrolls over. They tend to be very large; on our site, they're 1440 x 700. Those seem to be very effective. It's another area where we're having some success. We use the natural editorial positions on the site to drive the user to that content. It is clearly demarcated that it is M sponsored content; it's actually a different color. But we still bring the reader to that content the same way we bring them to high- quality content in Slate. We're talking about a lot of things as far as ad blocking is concerned. It's a concern for us and a concern for the industry, but we have made no decisions on what we plan to do there. If it's not one thing, it's another, especially for an industry where we're not charging our customers to enjoy world-class content. We gotta pay for it some way. I beg and plead with people to not use ad blockers so we won't have to charge you for content. The New York Times Michael Zimbalist, senior vice president of advertising products and research and development: Our native advertising and branded content businesses continue to show robust growth. Advertisers want to reach our audience, who are among the most curious, intelligent and influential people in the world. Who knows better how to reach our audience than us? Our best ad products build on the same techniques and insights that help inform our news presentation. In the case of Mobile Moments, for example, we used the insight that our audience's news needs change throughout the day, and using that insight, we designed an advertising program with dynamic creative that can be [scheduled by time of day] in harmony with the news presentation. Five years ago, it was pretty much all standard units adjacent to content, with limited storytelling capabilities. Today, we offer advertisers the ability to tell stories with the same depth and breadth of our news report. Right now, our plans for ad blocking are to be vigilant — closely monitor the situation to understand what impact, if any, it is having on our business — and to strategically focus our ad product development on innovations that are additive to the user experience. Mobile Moments is a prime example of that. It's non-interruptive and respects the user experience. That's super important to all we do. Newsweek Thomas Hammer, senior vice president of sales, IBT Media: What we're really focused on and what's really performing and resonating, is branded content and video. I think we're at an inflection point, in terms of digital advertising and mobile advertising, where the brands really want to get closer to the core audience and core consumer. We're using our editorial staff and our content curation to build experiences that pull in the brands themselves. Whether that be an automotive brand, or a [consumer packaged goods], or confections or whatever, they're really focused on getting back to that core audience through branded experiences and native content across our different channels, whether that be desktop, mobile or print. There is somewhat of an inflection point in digital advertising. It's changing. I've just spent seven and a half years in a pioneering mobile video Executives from The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, Wired, Vox Media, and Newsweek say native advertising continues to be a success. But many are still trying to find the right approach to mobile ads.

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