New York Times plans to make its mobile ads more native, less interruptive
“Mobile advertising as a whole is just fairly crappy,” said Sebastian Tomich, The New York Times senior VP of advertising and innovation.
Mr. Tomich isn’t saying anything controversial. Most people seem to agree that those thin horizontal banners pinned to the bottom of publishers’ mobile sites haven’t won many fans. Neither have the full-screen interstitial ads that can overtake a smartphone’s screen while swiping between articles on many publishers’ mobile sites, including the Times’. So the Times is doing away with them.
“We’re retiring at some point late this summer — maybe early fall when we can run the last one that’s already been sold — we’re retiring mobile interstitials. We’re trying to move to a place where the less desirable mobile ad units, where we actually free our experience of them,” said New York Times chief revenue officer Meredith Levien.
In place of the interruptive mobile ads, the Times is adopting a mobile ad format that’s akin to Facebook’s and Twitter’s in-feed mobile ads.
The New York Times plans to roll out a new ad format in September to its smartphone apps and mobile site in the US that mimics the in-feed placement of the social networks’ mobile ads and applies the publisher’s editorial insight to how they’ll be targeted and what multimedia bells and whistles they’ll feature.
Called Mobile Moments, the ads will be customized to the seven moments in a given day that are most important to readers, as identified through a 12-month study conducted by the Times’ editorial product team. Those moments include the beginning of the morning — which accounts for 25 per cent of the Times’ mobile traffic, per Mr. Tomich — lunchtime and the end of the day.
The publisher’s advertising team “had a full seat at the table from the moment we started doing this research,” said Alexandra Hardiman, the Times’ VP of mobile products. That meant that as the Times editorial team came up with ways to capitalise on these mobile moments by doing things like introducing morning and evening briefings, its advertising team was able to draft its own ideas and bounce them back and forth with the editorial team so that when the mobile moments ads begin to roll out next month, they won’t stick out any more than they need to, though they will be clearly labeled as advertisements.
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