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.
For the bulk of publishers, Google is, as ever, the one to watch. It’s already got agentic features within its Chrome browser, but that’s the tip of the iceberg, some say.
Adaptability stopped being a nice-to-have for publishers years ago; it became a survival skill. Here’s a look at Digiday’s guide to what’s in and out for 2026.
