Reading an article on social media? New twist: The ad comes with it too!
More publishers are taking up a New York Times idea that allows advertisers to tie their ads with specific articles as they are distributed on social networks.
People: Top-selling magazine
The Times launched the product, called Ricochet, last April to let advertisers choose specific NYT articles to bind their ads to articles for a certain time.
Now, starting in May, Time's People magazine, Ad Age, and Conde Nast titles The New Yorker, Glamour, Wired and others are getting on the bandwagon with their own articles . They will begin using the technology - and sharing revenue with the Times.
It is the first product from the Times' R&D Ventures group to be made available to other publishers.
As Michael Zimbalist, Times VP for research and development , put it, "This is an entirely new concept in digital marketing that creates a whole new class of inventory: socially-driven inventory."
For advertisers, Ricochet campaigns will only be as good as the magazines' ability to distribute the individual pieces of content on their own - whether on social networks or through paid channels such as Outbrain.
For publishers, the technology seems like a good deal: it essentially helps them get paid to let advertisers distribute their work for them.
Publishers set their own prices and share the resulting ad revenue with The Times. Each publisher decides which pieces of content an advertiser can bind their ads to.
Ricochet will be a self-serve marketplace for advertisers by May 1, Zimbalist said . The advertisrs will be able to search the content database by topic, upload their ad creative, choose from different page layouts if a publisher offers them, and set the duration of the campaign.
The would-be advertiser using Ricochet picks out an article touching on a topic core to the brand's business. A unique URL is then created for that article, which the brand can distribute on social networks or blogs .
When a brand's Twitter follower, or Facebook fan encounters the link then clicks on it, they will see the article surrounded by display ads for the brand.