NewsBeat

18 NewsBeat August 2016 It's a difficult circumstance, but it's something, again, when it's great content — and content, unfortunately, in that idiomatic phrase, is king — we have to be very upfront in terms of ad blocking and understanding what is the true audience that is coming through. The Atlantic Hayley Romer, vice president and publisher: We are seeing incredible engagement across the site right now. In particular, the performance, which we measure through engagement, of our native ads and custom content has increased tremendously. For example, we have seen a 164 percent increase in metrics like page views, time on site and social actions taken year-over-year. Additionally, high-impact units with non- standard pixel sizes are in huge demand, and are showing a 94 percent increase in engagement on our site over last year. We attribute it to a number of different things. First and foremost, our commitment to quality is unwavering. People engage with quality content, and by now, our readers are accustomed to getting great value through content created by Atlantic Re:Think. To underscore that point, we continue to invest in talent across the board, and specifically on our content and design teams for Atlantic Re:Think. We also completely re-imagined TheAtlantic.com this year, and have evolved the way in which our readers discover custom content on our site. Organic traffic to our custom content has increased by more than 480 percent. Everything is different from five years ago. Five years ago, we primarily ran standard IAB units on the site, and perhaps some of the (at the time) newer rising star and rich media units. But about four years ago, we began to see a clear need to create more engaging, higher-impact ads, which were more interactive than traditional ads. At the same time, we began really creating custom work for our partners. For us, the demand for big ideas that drive engagement for brands is overwhelming. The ways in which those ideas ultimately manifest themselves on our site in terms of advertising vary. That said, it feels like at the moment there is not a marketer on the planet who is not looking for more opportunity to run their video ads. Ad blocking is something we are obviously watching very closely, both in terms of our audience and the industry as a whole. We have not yet made specific, long-term plans to counter it. I suspect we will have more on this in the near future. Vox Media Joe Alicata, vice president of revenue, product, and operations: Our custom high-impact and premium native offerings are performing extremely well. We attribute the growth to our continued focus on premium experiences, design, and storytelling in both high impact display and native. What makes them special is they are beautifully designed by our teams deeply integrated in our sites for our audience and they maximize effectiveness for our partners. Telling stories has always been key to our growth here at Vox Media. The biggest difference between now and five years ago is we are now taking our platform, Chorus, and the insights learned from years of edit, product, design, and revenue working together, and now helping brands tell compelling stories with great success via branded content. We are seeing a huge demand for both our premium units on desktop and especially mobile, as well as branded content. (Continued from previous page) Our goal and mission is to make advertising that is good for audiences and advertisers alike. Our approach is paying off for both, through Vox Creative making better, more integrated campaigns and an ad product suite built by our team that is increasingly focusing on performance. Wired Robbie Sauerberg, general manager, advertising, said that "premium and custom large-scale ad executions" are the advertising areas that are growing the fastest for Wired. One reason for that growth? Bringing together more resources for performance and design. "We've embedded our editorial UX team into the design process in order to create elegant templates for large-scale ads that live and breathe with the site's responsive content experience," Sauerberg said. "By doing this, we've driven ad performance beyond anything we've seen before." In looking at the difference between what ad products are available today compared to the recent past, Sauerberg pointed to the "polarization shift from IAB to entirely-custom ad experiences." "Advertisers are much more comfortable with completely new executions, ranging from custom native content programs to proprietary ad templates," he said. Companies now expect better metrics around ads, and as a result products that perform well consistently. "Wired's natural strength is delivering brand awareness in new ways for advertisers — while tailoring each experience to keep readers interested," Sauerberg said. Finally, Sauerberg said the magazine is exploring options to counter ad blocking: "We have a series of tests running to convert ad blockers to white-list our site." — Reprinted from NiemanLab

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