WSJ promising ad guarantee during election

The Wall Street Journal is offering advertisers a performance guarantee, timed to the upcoming U.S. presidential election, to dissuade them from pausing their ad campaigns during the period, reports Mark Stenberg of Adweek.

Stenberg reports, “The guarantee, which is offered in collaboration with the attention vendor Adelaide, will be effective for impressions measured between Oct. 15 and Nov. 15—a period that represents the two weeks before and after the election, according to Josh Stinchcomb, the global chief revenue officer of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones.

“‘During elections, we see not only a surge in attention but a surge in performance,’ Stinchcomb said. ‘That gives us the confidence to put in place a guarantee against that experience.’

“To measure performance, the publisher is working with Adelaide to assign every campaign an attention unit (AU) score, which is based on factors including the placement of the media, outcomes produced by similar media in the past, and other criteria. Any campaign that fails to meet this AU guarantee will be offered a makegood in the form of additional added-value impressions.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.