Dive Brief:
- NBC News has developed two new display ad formats in-house that are designed to remain in view for more than the IAB-mandated guidelines of one second, according to a report in Digiday.
- One format is described as a custom display unit and the other a "ping pong" unit that scrolls through images as users scroll down a page. Both offerings are rolling out on two NBC News verticals — Mach and Better.
- The new ad units resize to fit devices and prioritize ratios rather than pixels, meaning they fill a certain portion of the screen rather than fixed amount of space on a page, Moritz Gimbel, NBC News' VP of digital product, told Digiday. He also said that NBC News was "able to think about advertising at the inception" instead of making the advertising element of webpage user experience an afterthought.
Dive Insight:
The developments from NBC News are an indication that more publishers and media players are beginning to take advertising innovations into their own hands in order to create formats that better accommodate the online user experience and more naturally integrate with a digital environment. Intrusive ad formats that degrade or slow down that user experience such as interstitials are often cited as one of the largest reasons for the adoption of ad blocking technology, being holdovers from more interruptive channels like TV and seriously affecting publishers' bottom revenue lines.
NBC putting a premium on viewability also comes as marketers are becoming keenly aware that much of their digital ads aren't connecting with intended audiences at all. A Forrester Research report released in April suggested U.S. marketers wasted over $7 billion on low-quality ads that were either fraudulent or unviewable last year.
The new units were designed by NBC News with help from Code and Theory, and are based on a template that NBC News can roll out on additional verticals quickly, per Digiday. A third title called Think is expected to join Mach and Better in a few weeks, with more verticals in planning, the publication said.