Last chance to save 35% on Mediaweek! Join ADWEEK this October 29–30 in New York City to discover the media tools and strategies driving success for media buyers, sellers, creators and enthusiasts.
Over the past three months, The New York Times has been using generative artificial intelligence to align a brand’s campaign message with the most relevant articles and interested audiences, executives told ADWEEK. And it’s seeing promising campaign results.
The gen-AI-powered ad tool, called BrandMatch, uses large language models to decode an advertiser’s brief, uncover more specific audience segments and match that brief to the most relevant articles to run ads against. The publisher would not share specifics about how it defines its audience.
“Premium and proprietary ad products like [BrandMatch] have contributed to the success of [our] ad business,” said Joy Robins, global chief advertising officer, New York Times Advertising. “It allows us to help solve for challenges that advertisers previously hadn’t had solutions for. How do we help them reach the perfect audience if you can’t define it with the existing targeting segments?”
The Times ran BrandMatch tests between April and June with six brands, including Paramount+ and Ferragamo, across the tech, finance and luxury sectors. These campaigns outperformed the publisher’s performance averages and benchmarks, netting an average click-through rate of 0.40%, while native display units saw an even higher CTR of 0.72%. The publisher said this was meaningfully higher compared to campaigns without using BrandMatch targeting. Brand lift increased by an average of 8.4%, while consideration and preference experienced a 3.1% lift.
Brands and publishers are increasingly experimenting with gen AI to improve tailored ad-targeting capabilities. Last year, the Times hired Zach Seward, co-founder of Quartz, as editorial director of AI initiatives to test gen AI within its newsroom. The publisher updated its terms of service last August to prevent AI bots from scraping its content, and it is currently locked in a copyright battle with OpenAI.
The Times has over 10 million paid subscribers and more than 100 million registered readers. According to Robins, it reaches 50 million to 100 million people weekly.
Evolution of preset category targeting tools
The publisher already offers first-party audience targeting and contextual-targeting solutions. However, with these, advertisers select from a limited set of predefined targeting options such as gender, age range or household income, resulting in “very finite, investable assets,” said Robins.