Dive Brief:
- Flipboard is providing its advertisers increased targeting options based on user behavior and personalization choices.
- The new targeting service allows marketers to choose from 34,000 keywords that will tie ads to user choices and article content.
- It recently offered a new video ad product, Cinema Loop, that plays a silent excerpt loop of full video ads.
Dive Insight:
Flipboard's audience is seeing its options for news consumption multiply with the addition of Apple News, Facebook's Instant Articles and other apps. In response to the increased competition, Flipboard is offering marketers an increased level of ad targeting based on 34,000 keywords that tap into user preference and article content.
Dave Huynh, Flipboard's head of ad product, said told Fast Company, "For a long time, we've been really good at emulating the beauty of print ads. What this allows us to do is recreate that experience where the content and the ads are very, very closely linked. We're replicating the value of the print model on a massive scale, but on mobile."
The new targeting capability is called Interest Graph Targeting, and according to a statement, "signifies a next phase in Flipboard's advertising business as advertisers can now get their full-page ads, Promoted Stories or videos and Brand Magazines in front of their audience in the right context as well as in the right mindset."
Last year, the social magazine app got a full makeover and was relaunched with a more heavy focus on topics. With the changes, Flipboard let users personalize their experience by picking from more than 30,000 topic areas what interested them most, which in turn allowed the app to better know readers' preferences. Data generated from the topic-based system coupled with "billions and billions of user signals," as Huynh explained to Fast Company, informs their Interest Graph Targeting.
Fast Company reported that the magazine app will soon be ready to take the data to help power ads as well.