Smart sections - Renewing the value of content (Round 4)
Summary
Smart Section leverages newsroom expertise and high quality journalism by using zones usually allocated to sponsored links. Optimised via data, these ‘in-house’ ads provide increased reader loyalty, leading to the integrated and seamless sale of host content and explicit collection of user data to feed newspaper sales.
The solution
This project aims to address the global issue of differentiation for newsrooms providing high-quality or specialised news: the systematic presence on their pages of advertisements that are identical from one site to another across the web leads to a strong trivialisation of their offer, and data leakage. By recapturing these spaces and inventing new offers it enables readers to accept the move to paid content, and helps gain trust about data protection.