Financial Times now selling blocks of time to advertisers

The Financial Times is set to begin a new method of digital trading, selling blocks of time to advertisers, reports Angela Haggerty of The Drum.

Haggerty writes, “The publisher has been trialling a method whereby the amount of time users are exposed to ads is measured and clients can buy inventory using a currency of ad time rather than ad space. The FT has been working with New York firm Chartbeat on developing the method and it expects it to launch fully in the fourth quarter of this year.

“The FT’s commercial director of digital advertising and insight, Jon Slade, told The Drum that the IAB’s recently established standard viewability metric for display advertising was a welcome development, but that it didn’t go far enough.

“In April, the IAB settled on a requirement for 50 per cent of an ad to be viewable for a minimum of one second as an acceptable measurement for an ‘in-view’ ad.

“‘It’s great that the industry has at least settled on a definition, but we should go a lot further than that,’ he said. ‘We’ve done a lot of research into our B2B audience, our clients and agencies, and by far the majority of them would agree that 50 per cent and one second is a good start but it’s really not enough, and there’s more we could be doing to prove the value of display advertising.'”

Read more here.