Following our successful reorganisation of IPC Digital Sales in November 2009, our focus has remained on the core proposition – premium advertising solutions across our 62 branded websites. These encompass a host of famous and compelling brands – including www.nme.com, www.trustedreviews.com, www.goodtoknow.co.uk and www.marieclaire.co.uk – and collectively reach more than 20 million users each month.
Our new structure has enabled us to introduce extra layers of targeting and finesse to what we already offered. At the start of the year, we introduced IPC Audience Channels, allowing advertisers to buy our aggregated audiences – Young Men, Upmarket Adults and Housewives with Kids, to name a few. This has been hugely successful. From June, through the introduction of a unique contextual targeting product, we are creating a further level of targeting as part of our product offering.
The contextual targeting capability allows IPC to offer contextually relevant virtual content channels bespoke to advertisers’ needs. A virtual content channel is one that does not exist as a hard wired channel on an IPC website like for example Recipes on www.goodtoknow.co.uk. Advertisers have the opportunity to advertise in exactly the sort of content that matches their message and are no longer constricted by the fixed vertical channels of a website.
IPC is the first big consumer publisher partnering with technology provider, Grapeshot, in offering this solution. Creating virtual content channels for advertisers complements the brand sell and allows us to build on a key pillar of IPC – unique quality content.
Grapeshot was chosen as IPC’s partner because of the sophistication of its contextual targeting technology. Invented by Dr Martin Porter who also developed the ‘Porter Stemmer’ algorithm used in all major search engines today, Grapeshot understands the essence of a page and doesn’t merely count keyword matches or keyword density like other contextual targeting technologies. Grapeshot goes beyond that and looks at the relationship of words and their significance on a probability basis, understanding the keywords on a page and then comparing them with those found across all the other pages on a website.
We see this as a major revenue driver and further evidence of IPC Media innovating in the digital space. The contextual products offer advertisers something new on IPC websites – aggregating content bespoke to their campaign and delivering content that doesn’t exist as a standard vertical channel. In terms of the benefits, it means that adverts will appear in the right context and will make for a much better user experience. We have also seen some very encouraging results in terms of campaign click through rates and whilst this isn’t a performance product this would suggest a user has more affinity to a contextually relevant ad. Prior to any significant study being undertaken, it is rational to hypothesise that ads that appear in a relevant context perform better for brand metrics.
Later this year IPC Digital Sales will be launching a behavioural and data targeting product which will be a slight differentiation to what else is available in market and further proof of IPC’s credentials as an innovative market leading digital publisher.
