Another Contextual Ad on NYT.com

With all the dire comments on the future of online advertising, the one place marketers need to keep their eye on is the New York Times online. They’re the ones who seem to be experimenting with new models and solutions.

Last fall I pointed out an example from IBM, where the “ad” was links to NYT.com Opinion pieces that talked about IBM’s solutions. Smart and believable.

A few days ago I saw this as I was reading a business article. This “News for Marketing Professionals” seemed to know who I was, and it showed up in a place where I would have a good reason to click on it (as opposed to showing up in the Sports section).

Looking closer, I noticed that LinkedIn had sponsored the ad. I have an account at LinkedIn where I’ve identified myself as a marketing professional. LinkedIn teamed up with the New York Times to sponsor links I should have interest in which should:

• Make me smarter
• Show me how LinkedIn is helping my career

The best part, however, is that LinkedIn didn’t use marketing messaging. It used content from the site it advertised on.

This might be easier to do on big, content rich sites like the Times. I’d love to see some ad network figure out how to do this through multiple content providers.

Keep watching, I’m sure there’s more coming.

IBM Advertises NYT Content

I saw an interesting online ad on the New York Times over the holiday break. While the buzz today is about how the Times is now running display ads on the front page of the paper, IBM has run advertising on the Times’ site promoting Web content from the Times itself. I had to look at the ad a couple of times before I realized it was a paid placement. What it did was to link to four Thomas Friedman articles that spoke about IBM’s technical solutions, such as how Stockholm uses IBM to reduce inner city traffic.

What a great idea! Use content, from the pub itself, as advertising for the company described in the articles. We’ve all seen that technique used as third party PR, but this was the first time I’ve seen it done this way.

I ended up reading three stories about IBM’s technology from a source I frequent by advertising on that source. Too bad I’m not in the market for the technology, because that was the best online advertising I’ve seen in a long time.

Click here for a full view of the page with the ad in context.

IBM built its ads on trusted and valuable content placed in a setting that would maximize that trust. I hope we see more of that.

Well done, Big Blue!