One aspect of commercial content is the holy grail of producing engaging, non-distracting, even deep content in traditional online ad units. Let’s be fair – that hasn’t always been easy.

Even with industry standard units IAB display guidelines 2012 getting more innovative and basically bigger over recent years it is still hard.
This writer has worked with clients putting rich content, as opposed to rich ad copy, in expandable leaderboard units – the wide ones you see atop many websites. Albeit even then many still need to click off to another environment, whether owned by that site’s publisher or the client that’s advertising.

Maybe one of the best examples has been video-in-MPU units. For example, on one successful campaign we worked with a major tech brand to provide vendor white boards in these small ad squares. Arguably it was a lot of info – which you had to watch to understand – for such a small space. It also meant a big hit in ad serving costs, given they weren’t click-to-activate. (From memory they were click-to-unmute.)

Well we’d like to draw attention to one use of content in MPUs that we like. We’ve seen the unit on LinkedIn (must be elsewhere too) and here is a screen grab:

If you go to a live version of this, you’ll notice first that it’s uncluttered and promises views from the bank’s chief economist.

When we’ve clicked through, the info was up-to-date (daily) and of a high quality. Note: Those in charge of advertising at UBS couldn’t have gone into this programme without this exec – and a wider line up of top people – being signed up for the type of daily workload and engagement this would take.

And because it’s audio-only, publishers don’t have to contend with the same bandwidth issues and consumers of the content can get on and do other things while listening to the three or four minutes of wisdom.

One downside: If the content is really this good, where can someone find it outside the campaign, outside the box? You can subscribe but wouldn’t it be nice to have it living on a site somewhere? (Maybe it is. Tell us UBS!)
But the bottom line is positive. This is a great example of brand content, serving a user need and all delivered within existing constraints on a publisher’s property.