Today (Wednesday 15 November), the Guardian’s advertising department and senior leaders including, chief executive, Anna Bateson and chief advertising officer, Imogen Fox were joined by brands and agencies from across the advertising industry for a breakfast briefing.
Embracing the idea that the Guardian is more famous for the advertising it doesn’t take (fossil fuels and gambling) rather than the advertising that it does, Imogen Fox and James Fleetham, director of clients, marketing and research, announced exclusive updates and shared the latest unique and innovative opportunities the Guardian is offering to advertisers.
Fox and Fleetham explained the four key things that they want Guardian Advertising to be known for:
1) The Guardian’s unique formula for advertisers:
Scale, influence and integrity is the unique formula that can only be found at the Guardian:
Scale: The Guardian is the most-read quality news brand in the UK (source: PAMCo, UK), with on average, 9m people around the world consuming the Guardian’s journalism digitally everyday across its app, website, audio and video (source: Guardian DataLake, Global).
Influence: The Guardian has over 1m paying supporters helping to fund journalism that they could enjoy for free. This shows the Guardian’s influence, and how much readers value its journalism and mission to keep it accessible for all.
Integrity: The Guardian offers a trusted media environment that represents the values of its audience. Doing the right thing in the right way has meant making decisions based on the organisation’s values, such as rejecting fossil fuel advertising and banning gambling ads - a decision backed by 73% of people in a recent YouGov poll.
2) Who the Guardian is for:
The morning’s talks and panels were focused on bringing to life five brand categories that Guardian Advertising are exceptional at displaying, building and creatively promoting. Fox and Fleetham explained that these are:
Brands connecting with big moments: The brands present in the moments when everyone is looking in the same direction. Festivals, football matches, film releases or watercooler TV - anywhere there’s joy to be had.
Everyday brands: The everyday brands that consumers can’t live without. From store cupboard favourites to supermarkets and high street banks.
Challenger brands: The brands that want to shake things up. The disruptors who believe there is a better way to do everything, no matter which industry they are in.
Brands doing the right thing: The purpose-driven brands. Working to make a positive social and environmental impact.
Premium brands: Everything from classic luxury to premium lines in the weekly shop, a fancy new face cream, or a posh biscuit.
3) The advertising that marketers can buy:
In addition to their formula, Fox and Fleetham announced three new advertising products unique to the Guardian and offering a better advertising experience for both readers and advertisers:
New fronts with scale: Whether visiting the homepage or a section front e.g. sport, culture or lifestyle, readers will no longer see MPU’s on these front pages. Available in their place are bigger, more premium and eye-catching formats that make use of the full width of the page. These new bespoke formats are also achieving better results with a click-through rate (CTR) that’s 35% higher, than previous standard front page takeovers.
New mobile formats with influence: Introducing the interscroller, a new mobile format unique to the Guardian and more memorable than any other mobile formats available on the internet. With a CTR of 3%, this new format is outperforming industry standards.
Guardian Light, the new ad format with integrity: The first ad solution of its kind to be launched by a publisher in the UK, Guardian Light uses technology from Opt Out Advertising to deliver ads to readers without using third or first party cookies, tracking or auction technology. Brands that advertise with the Guardian can now reach privacy aware users for the first time in years - an audience that others can’t reach. Find out more about Guardian Light in this Guardian blog that was published today.
4) The Guardian Advertising Awards:
The Guardian’s very first advertising awards were also announced. Free to enter, the new awards celebrate and champion advertising campaigns that have featured across Guardian channels over the last year, highlighting and celebrating unforgettable examples of scale, influence and integrity - Guardian Advertising’s unique formula.
Some of the most influential people in advertising are onboard to help judge the awards, including Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy UK; Nishma Robb, senior director, brand and reputation marketing at Google and Andy Nairn founder of creative agency Lucky Generals.
Entries are open now, find out more in the Guardian’s press release published today.
Imogen Fox, chief advertising officer, Guardian Media Group, said:
“The Guardian’s advertising business has become more famous for the advertising that it doesn’t take, rather than the advertising that it does - namely our decisions on not taking fossil fuel or gambling advertising. These decisions make us pretty unique and we’re incredibly proud to be driven by these values. We now want to shift the focus to the huge range of cutting-edge advertising that the Guardian is proud to carry across numerous platforms every day - and the innovative and unique opportunities we offer to advertisers.”
James Fleetham, director of clients, marketing and research, Guardian News & Media, said:
“We think most people know the Guardian and a lot of people like the Guardian, but not enough people in the advertising industry know what they can do with the Guardian. With that challenge in mind, we’re now ready to change that. Our unique formula of scale, influence and integrity, and the additional clarity of which brands the Guardian is for, will help advertisers to cut through and genuinely connect with people.”
If you are an advertiser interested in working with the Guardian, please contact advertising.enquiries@theguardian.com.
For more information on any of the announcements made today, please contact media.enquiries@theguardian.com.
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Notes to editors
About Guardian News & Media
Guardian News & Media (GNM) publishes theguardian.com, one of the world’s leading English-language news websites. Traffic from outside of the UK now represents about two-thirds of the Guardian’s total digital audience. In the UK, GNM publishes the Guardian newspaper – first published in 1821 – six days a week, and the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, the Observer.
