Aleszu Bajak of Mediashift writes about Quartz’s sponsored content strategy.
Bajak writes, “Quartz’s sponsored content model, which is spreading quickly, takes advertising one step further. Advertisers should trust a news organization’s instinct, they say. Quartz knows what its readers want and how they want it, and they’ll get your brand in front of those readers, even if it seems the message has been edited, augmented or bent to the readers’ interests. ‘The client and agency are actively interested in engaging readers with content we have but that is interesting to the readers,’ says Grenier. ‘We are creating a subtle halo around the brand rather than directly lighting up brand features.’
“If the bread and butter of Quartz’s advertising team is building compelling sponsored content, then its ace in the hole is the web technology that ensures ads are seamlessly displayed on the Quartz site. Apostolis Haitalis, director of creative engineering, gave Storybench a rundown of the technology Quartz uses to create a unified structure for all of their advertisements, or units, as he calls them.
“‘We’re using Yeoman to create the folder structure and boilerplate code for all our units,’ says Haitalis. ‘We use Grunt [a workflow automation plugin] to run certain tasks like minifying our code and creating a server to run units and test them. And we use Slack for deployment.’
“These software and plugins allow Quartz to leverage the latest technology for delivering dynamic, interactive graphics. They key here, explains Haitalis, is that Quartz’s development team packages all their technology into discreet modules that are simple to reuse for each new ad.”
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