NYT's Homepage Takeovers; Still More FBX Stats

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

Home Page Yield

The New York Times has done Web page takeovers, but this past Sunday it experimented with an iPad takeover, according to Mashable. The ads promoted Showtime’s Ray Donovan, and featured autoplay interactive video ads. “We’re confident readers will find this beautiful and well done,” said Todd Haskell, the Times’ group VP of advertising. Read more. And, read AdExchanger’s May interview with Haskell here. Digital aches for TV’s storytelling capability.

Gauging The Exchange

Facebook News Feed ads are more successful than right-hand side placements. We’ve heard this before, but now AdRoll has some data to back up the claim. In a study of 547 advertisers, the FBX retargeting company found “News Feed retargeting had a click-through rate (CTR) 49x higher than RHS (Right Hand Side campaigns) and 21x higher than standard Web retargeting” and “News Feed CPCs were ½ that of RHS campaigns and 1/5 of Web retargeting.” Read the report here, or the blog post here.

Squaring Offline With Online

Square may have started as a mobile-transaction business, but its newest product puts it in direct competition with eBay. It’s called Square Market and it allows merchants to create storefronts that are optimized for mobile, and it ties in to brick-and-mortar stores as well, according to Mobile Commerce Daily. “Square wants to take eBay/PayPal business with a much lower cost model, the same way warehouse clubs took business from retailers with everyday low price,” said Steve Timpson, president of Siteminis. Read more. Square’s media biz is just around the corner.

Native Ad News

Yahoo continues to make headlines as Marissa Mayer works on bringing the company back to the top of the market, this time by introducing more personalized news feeds. But as PaidContent’s Jeff Roberts points out, Yahoo will also need to monetize the content. Patrick Albano, VP of sales for Yahoo, said, “As the Web becomes more relevant, our native ads will have to be even more relevant.” Are native ads a moneymaker for Yahoo News? Read more.

Real-Time Hyperlocal (RTH?)

In a feature piece, Starcom MediaVest Group’s Derek Thompson talked to Street Fight about the importance of hyperlocal advertising. “The ability to integrate third-party ad-serving is a critical component. And the ability to manage and optimize accounts in real time in terms of delivery, execution and results is also extremely important. Those are two things that I think are kind of the minimum requirements to get going,” Thompson said. Read more.

Facebook’s Got A New Policy

In an effort to ease brand safety fears, Facebook is implementing a new policy for which Facebook Pages and Groups are allowed to have ads on them. According to a blog post, the process will be manual to begin and eventually will be automated. The main focus will be keeping ads off pages that feature violence or explicit content. From the post: “While these changes won’t have a meaningful impact on Facebook’s business, they will result in benefits to people and marketers.” Read the blog post here.

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