AOL Dolls Up Home Page Buys With Cause Marketing Module
Company offers its home page advertisers a bonus cause-related ad unit.
Company offers its home page advertisers a bonus cause-related ad unit.
In a bid to provide additional value for advertisers purchasing display campaigns, AOL has rolled out a new ad unit on its home page to allow brands to highlight philanthropic causes they might be involved with.
Brands buying a home page campaign with the portal will have the opportunity to make use of the unit – which is displayed under the main home page ad placement – but are not required to do so. AOL will fill the unit with causes from the Ad Council or Network For Good if no advertiser causes are filling it.
“We see this unit as added value for our homepage campaign advertisers,” Christa Zambardino, a sales director at AOL told ClickZ.
Toyota was the first brand to make use of the cause unit last week – in conjunction with a home page takeover – to promote its TogetherGreen initiative, through which it is funding projects in partnership with conservation group Audubon. Today the unit is displaying an ad appealing for donations to HelpAge USA, via Network For Good.
“It’s an evergreen placement, and we plan to promote a different cause every day of the year,” said Blair Cobb, senior manager of cause marketing at AOL. The company will be entirely agnostic, allowing advertisers to dictate which causes they promote. “It’s a vehicle for our advertising partners to say what it is they care about,” Cobb said.
AOL has been experimenting with its ad offerings of late, in attempts to increase the value of inventory on its properties for advertisers. The company has scaled back the volume of ads published on its pages, but also trialed new ad formats such as its Project Devil unit. The product allows advertisers to pull a range of multimedia and social content into a single giant ad unit, through a module-based platform.
The company recently reported its display ad revenue continued to drop in the third quarter of the year, but CEO Tim Armstrong said he expected “signs of a turnaround” for the company in 2011. Overall, revenue fell 27 percent in the third quarter versus the same quarter last year.
More about:
Lucy helps organizations leverage knowledge for in... View Tech Talk
TVSquared is the global leader in cross-platform T... View Tech Talk
Grata is a B2B search engine for discovering small... View Tech Talk
Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing ... Download Now
Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. ... Download Now
This report documents the findings of a Fireside c... Download Now
Customers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touc... Download Now
Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing habits. Streaming video, however, still comes with a variety of pesky frustrations that viewers are ...
View resourceData is the lifeblood of so many companies today. You need more of it, all of which at higher quality, and all the meanwhile being compliant with data...
View resourceThis report documents the findings of a Fireside chat held by ClickZ in the first quarter of 2022. It provides expert insight on how companies can ret...
View resourceCustomers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touchpoints – globally! Make sure your brand shines in those critical moments. Read More...
View resourceIn 2015, Verizon purchased AOL for $4.4 billion. Now, the mega wireless carrier is leveraging its wireless network as part of a new ad offering called...
View articleAs the world becomes more smartphone-centric, failing to master mobile marketing is no longer an option. Here are some of the best and worst ad format...
View articleDisplay is a long way from dead. In fact, new technology is making it possible for traditional display to be more beautiful and engaging than ever wit...
View articleAdvertisers have long used Flash to make interactive ads online, but the IAB is going to ditch Flash for HTML5 as the new industry standard. Read More...
View articleTo compete with Google and Facebook, Microsoft and AOL are training one another on their respective strengths: content and programmatic. Read More...
View articleThe move is expected to open up additional private exchanges, although insiders are not sure all media buyers will follow suit and shun open exchanges...
View articleAOL's $90.7 million acquisition of Gravity to personalize ads and editorial is good news. But is it good enough to enable it to compete with the likes...
View articleProject Devil 2 features templates with applications tailored to specific verticals like retail, entertainment, consumer-packaged goods, finance, auto...
View article