Time Inc. Gets More Native; Twitter Adds New Targeting

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Native Time Inc.

Time Inc. is going to start serving native ads to more of its sites courtesy of Sharethrough technology, according to Ad Age’s Michael Sebastian. Content is assigned a quality score, based on how much interaction it gets, so that higher scoring ads are shown more frequently to users. “We want to make sure it’s quality content,” Scott Miller, SVP at IBT Media (Newsweek’s owner), said. “That’s why we’re not rolling it out to every single site. We want to ensure the reader is going to get a lot out of this.” Read more. Meanwhile, at the Wired Business Conference, PandoDaily reports that the NY Times’ exec editor Jill Abramson called native ads “the buzzword of 2013 business model discussions at conferences.” Read it. Big publishers are desperate to stop the CPM slide.

Twitter Targeting By Device

Seems pretty basic, but Twitter announced that its adding the capability to target ads by device, OS version and Wi-Fi, according to a company blog post. The new targeting options extend to the reporting tools as well, allowing advertisers to make decisions about future campaigns based on those metrics. Twitter hasn’t quite caught up to Facebook in terms of targeting options, but the company has been slowly adding on capabilities. Read more. In theory, Wi-Fi should enable better targeting as AcquireWeb’s Al Gadbut explained in an AdExchanger interview earlier this year.

Photo Performance

Publishers are seeing better performance with tweets that include images, Digiday is reporting, but it could be short lived as users’ Twitter feeds become cluttered with pictures, lessening the impact. On Facebook, for example, some publishers find that text-only posts are garnering more reach than posts with story previews. “It seems like everything is trending towards photo tweets performing better as long as the photo selected is a good one,” The Atlantic’s Chris Heller told Digiday. Read more.

Facebook Ad Performance

Add another chapter to the “Do Facebook Ads Work?” book. Travel trade Skift reports that TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer was “disappointed” with some of his company’s Facebook ad campaigns saying at an RBC Capital Markets investor conference, “We weren’t able to get the same traveler in shopping mode to come over to TripAdvisor in any scale that matched Google.” Read more. On the other hand, the campaigns to promote TripAdvisors new “Cities I’ve Visited” app were successful.

Brand Google

Google is adding on the marketing firepower with the hire of P&G exec Kirk Perry who was president of family care at P&G, and “was named president, brand solutions at Google, a new role reporting to Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora,” says Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth. Read more. Learmonth says Perry will be targeting TV ad dollars that Google wants moving to online, i.e. YouTube.