Quartz’s Jay Lauf: ‘Serving the reader first is central to our strategy’

Quartz has never run a standard IAB ad, and for the sake of its readers, it wants to keep it that way.

At the Digiday Publishing Summit Japan in late June, Quartz publisher Jay Lauf shared how the 4-year-old publisher creates attractive banner and native ads for premium audiences. Its directive for advertising is simple: It must be beautiful to look at and easy to opt out of, like magazine advertising.

“What if you could marry the best of a magazine advertisement with all of the trackability and the power of digital?” asked Lauf. As such, said Lauf, Quartz has never run a standard IAB ad — they resize ads they receive from advertisers and do not work with content marketing platforms like Outbrain. As a result, he said, they can boast a 90 percent retention rate for advertisers.

Want to hear more about how media companies are evolving to expand into new markets? Listen to other sessions from the Digiday Summit Japan below.

  • Bloomberg Media’s reticence around platform publishing is tempered with a healthy desire to experiment with two to three that really work.
  • How the Financial Times balances advertising with a subscription model in the AIPAC region.

To hear more about media is changing straight from the people making it happen, subscribe to Digiday Live on iTunes or Stitcher.

More in Media

Time has started serving ads to AI agents

Time is selling ads targeting AI bots, betting that markdown pages will make its content (and advertisers) more visible in AI search.

Media Briefing: Threatening to quit Google’s crawlers is just publishers’ new hope

Bold Call: Google’s AI era is fueling fresh calls for publishers to cut off access to their content, but dependence on search still holds most back.

Kai Cenat’s Streamer U was a ‘masterclass’ for brands looking to tap content creators

The creator bootcamp brought in big brand partnerships and big engagement metrics, which could bring more brands to the streaming sponsorship table.