Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Grant Whitmore, vp of digital, said the company had been watching the success of digital-only publishers [read: BuzzFeed, Gawker] that have been made native advertising the cornerstone of their business.
“A lot of those companies are doing really, really well right now,” he said. “So we wanted to understand what we needed to do to keep pace with our newest set of competitors.”
Addressing a common knock that native advertising is unscalable, the units can run across Hearst brands, among them Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Esquire, and the content can run outside Hearst, if the client wishes.
Note that this is just Hearst’s magazine unit, not its newspapers.
