Dive Brief:
- Yahoo chose this week’s Cannes Lions festival to announce Yahoo Tiles, a new mobile ad format that features 360 degree images and video, according to Marketing Land.
- By tapping on a mobile ad, users will be taken to a mobile landing page that includes rich media as well as dynamic and interactive features.
- The company also announced Yahoo Storytellers, a content marketing studio for brands and agencies that offers Yahoo’s editorial expertise, data and native advertising via Yahoo Gemini.
Dive Insight:
Yahoo's move to deliver a mobile ad format comes at time when mobile ad spend is projected to eclipse desktop by 2017, with the mobile format eating into traditional display advertising.
The Yahoo Tiles ad format is designed to offer a better mobile ad experience through immersiveness, including the 360 degree rich media experience that is popular on mobile devices, and offering advertisers more mobile real estate for ads.
Yahoo released some testing results on Yahoo Tiles that found the format created higher engagement levels for advertisers. In one case, the format led to a 5x increase in the amount of time consumers spent viewing and interacting with the ad.
Yahoo described the new ad format: “Yahoo Tiles enables brands to tell visually compelling and immersive stories on mobile devices in a post-tap environment. When consumers click on a mobile ad, they are taken to a custom mobile landing page that can feature 360-degree content, including video and images, as well as dynamic and interactive features such as video, swipeable images, and social feeds. With its lightweight design, Yahoo Tiles delivers a more engaging and seamless consumer experience for mobile native, video and display ads.”