LAS VEGAS — The New York Times has intrigued many with sponsored articles it has run under the “Paid Posts” scheme it launched in 2014. Now it is finding that branded articles carrying video are consumed most.
“A lot of our best-performing stories have had video as part of them; many of them are multi-media,” Times advertising EVP Meredith Levien tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The ones with video are absolutely out-performing everything else.”
Levien says the Times has clocked over 40 marketer campaigns under “Paid Posts”: “It was a big big growth business for us – it’s a big contributor to our digital ad growth this year.”
The program has mostly prompted buzz around Netflix’s Paid Post for its Orange Is The New Black show, a feature article about women in prison, the series’ own plot line. Campaigns since have been notched up for Holiday Inn and Cole Haan.
“What we’ve been able to prove in a year is that, even with very clear labelling (as sponsored), if a story is high-quality, we can get terrific engagement for it,” Levien adds.
We interviewed her at the MEC session at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all our coverage here.
