Los Angeles — Users who follow The New Yorker magazine through one of the popular social media iPad news apps Flipboard, will start noticing advertising as part of the mix. Magazine publisher Condé Nast has endorsed a deal to sell advertising with Flipboard, an iPad app that produces a magazine-like experience out of a user’s social feed, according to news first reported by Mashable.
Starting today, the popular free app, combining feeds from social sites, including Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, as well as from Bon Appetit, Wired or The New Yorker will encounter one full page ad for American Express for every three pages of content they read. A second campaign for Lexus will begin in October.
Flipboard is a social media-powered magazine for the iPad
Last December Flipboard forged alliance with Condé Nast and several other publishing partners including ABC News and Dow Jones’s own All Things Digital to create FlipBoard Pages, an HTML-5 based framework that delivers a more magazine-like experience with content owners curating the feeds available to Flipboard users and designing the look and feel of the content. Condé Nast advertising will run on the pages associated with this partnership.
Flipboard’s Christel van der Boom called the partnership with Condé Nast “just a beginning,” noting that the the company has content partnerships with 30 publications.
The deal signifies a sensational step for both parties with Flipboard delivering advertising for the first time and Condé Nast marketing advertising outside its own platform. Josh Stinchcomb, Condé Nast Media Group’s VP digital sales, described the partnership as part of the publisher’s bigger strategy of reaching out to customers wherever they congregate.
Moreover, Flipboard’s newest ad program is a product of the Flipboard Pages project, which emphasizes and converts magazine Twitter and Facebook feeds into specially-designed magazine-style pages. Condé Nast was among several top media companies, including Hearst Magazines, News Corp., ABC News, the BBC and others across 30 publications, to join Flipboard Pages when it launched in December. In an interview, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told paidContent that the company is currently in talks with all its Flipboard Pages partners about placing ads within their feeds on the iPad reader.
“In many cases, people often turn to magazines for the advertising,” he said. “That is not the case with web ads. It has a lot to do with the format of online ads. The fact that the ads are eating into the content whether it is a skyscraper or a pop-up. With our ads, it will have a similar look and feel to what is in a magazine. In a lot of ways, it will be regarded simply as additional content.”
The advertising is all full screen, noted Stinchcomb. In terms of the creative, some marketers may select to use an existing print ad or develop something exclusively for Flipboard. For the most part, the advertising is designed to serve as an extension of what’s on the web and print. It is also a way to connect the iPad app editions of Condé Nast’s titles to the web and the print versions, Stinchcomb said.
“We consider the Flipboard ad program as an extra cross-marketing vehicle,” Stinchcomb said. “This is about being where our readers are and bringing our advertisers along with us. Flipboard’s advertising program represents a great chance to promote our paid digital edition apps. With one click, we can get users to subscribe to New Yorker edition and eventually, our other magazines.”
Moving forward Conde Nast’s Stinchcomb says that the company has plans to rope in more advertisers. Participation will be limited to a maximum number of four advertisers per month per brand per issue. Furthermore, Flipboard and Condé Nast will share adverting revenue, with the majority going to Condé Nast according to Stinchcomb. Neither party would provide more details about the revenue split.