Display Exploration

A design strategy for display advertising, prepared for Hearst Newspapers

Goals

Improve Ad Experience for Users

• Consistent and reliable ux conventions for ads

• Design that complements websites

• Advertising can inform and enrich reading experience, not just disrupt it

Improve Ad Experience for Advertisers

• Better and consistent ux means better performance (probably!)

• Quick to market (re-use assets that already exist for social media and other platforms)

• Flexibility and optimization (swap images, test headlines, all without supplying new creative!)

Native Display

Our native ad framework allows advertisers to broadcast their messages in a way that complements the reading experience. Those messages find credibility and value through visual association with news content.

• Repurpose creative prepared for Facebook and Instagram

• Easily performance-optimized

• Eventual self-service platform using our existing customer data

Single Image

Storybooks

Storybooks allow an advertiser to tell a full story in a single screen, without asking the reader to leave the article page experience. Building on our native ad framework, these formats can be thought of as stories within stories.

Designed to be highly engaging, these formats make use of a unique visual language that is distinctly tactile and material.

Standard Display

As much as we’d love to fully wean our business off of awful programmatic creative and to maintain control over the look and feel of all advertising on our sites, we’ll probably need to accommodate some traditional display advertising while we wait for certain folks to catch up.