Polo Ralph Lauren is one of The New York Times’ most loyal ad customers. A regular in the print paper, on the website, and increasingly in mobile as well, it’s proven willing to follow its media partner into uncharted waters and to spend big on premium digital ad space.
The latest example is a sponsorship and rich media ad takeover of the Times’ iPad App. It uses an HTML5 “magalogue” execution to present a blend of articles, videos and other content promoting its Olympics sponsorships. (View a demo courtesy of Medialets, which produced the ad). Thanks to the buy, NYT is making six sections of the app free to non-subscribers.
The campaign marks the second time Ralph Lauren has bought the immersive ad format — exactly the number of times NYT has sold it. AdExchanger spoke with Todd Haskell, the publisher’s group VP of advertising.
Will you sell this to advertisers other than Ralph Lauren?
We’d be open to working with other clients. There are very few brands that have the brand equity and assets to do something like this. Ralph Lauren, across all of their different brand pillars, creates an enormous amount of this stuff, so they can do this.
How does implementation happen for an ad like this, and what role do your in-house technologists play?
Medialets does a really nice job of the rich media work that goes into this, in terms of development. Ralph Lauren supplies all the assets. What we do is make sure the infrastructure of the app and the technology delivers a great reader experience, and most importantly, that we deliver a content experience within the app that leads to engagement with the brand.
How long’s the turnaround, from sale to serving the ads?
We have a deep relationship with Ralph Lauren. They run in the newspaper every week, they run on the website. We’ve been talking about this for many months. It went into high gear three to four months ago.
How much do you charge for it?
It’s a premium product and it’s at a very large scale, so it’s not cheap. But I think the fact that it’s their second is a testament to the value.
What level of reporting do you offer?
This type of program is delivered with full accountability and transparency for the advertiser. You hear a lot of discussion in the tablet space about making sure that the advertiser knows exactly what they’re getting when they do a tablet solution. Specifically the magazine publishers have struggled with… reporting transparency and accountability.
We feel complete transparency and accountability is table stakes. The Ralph Lauren [people] have complete visibility into the exact delivery of ad impressions, how they are used, engagement, time spent with different elements of them.
