Why the biz side of Forbes is at the CES

Tim Peterson of Adweek writes about why the business side of Forbe magazine is at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Peterson writes, “This quarter the publisher plans to roll out a new design style to its mobile site and eventually its tablet site, said Forbes svp of digital ad strategy Mark Howard. Right now users can check out Forbes.com in the traditional, broad desktop format, which they’ll also see when checking out the site on their tablets, or view the more vertical mobile site on their smartphones. But the forthcoming design will be horizontally swipeable.

“The swipeable design is inspired by the reading experience on Flipboard, on which Forbes has been distributing its content. The design’s corresponding advertising approach will also be similar to the news aggregator’s tablet app. Rather than run rich-media units like horizontally oriented tablet apps such as AOL’s Editions iPad or Yahoo’s now-defunct Livestand, Forbes prefers Flipboard’s static units, which Howard said are ‘light’ and don’t ‘bog down’ the reading experience but still get in front readers’ attentions.

“‘Creating the ad experience as part of the swiping experience, that behavior is key for us to be thinking about how we want to modify our content in an environment that we control,’ said Howard. He continued, ‘You have formats like the full pages in the tablet environment that are getting 100 percent of the attention during that period when that ad is in front of that person.”

Read more here.