Introducing New Formats For Forbes’ Digital Ad Suite

By Matt Herrmann, VP, Creative & Design
Published June 7, 2022

Over the past four years, we’ve been working hard to introduce new formats, simplify our menu, and push continuous innovation on our industry-leading digital ad product suite. 

As we look ahead, we see untapped potential to develop unique advertising solutions that deliver the results and value our advertisers are looking for – all while ensuring an unobtrusive user experience. Digital ad solutions that can:

• Address the needs of our brand partners of any size or vertical and provide opportunities for storytelling.

• Find new ways to capture our audience’s growing interest in the e-commerce space using product imagery paired with brand creative.

• Provide a best-in-class ad experience for our audience and brand partners. Formats that are more interactive and intuitive, but also highly performant.

We’ll continue to explore new formats that help us work towards these goals and bring our vision to life on Forbes.com. Starting this week, we’re introducing three new formats to energize these efforts: Shoppable Spotlight, Shoppable Story, and Fluid XL Trio.

Shoppable Spotlight

The Shoppable Spotlight captures consumers’ attention and gets advertisers closer to their customers through a shoppable experience. 

On average, brands that add products to their video campaigns, achieve over 60% more conversions at a lower cost. (Source: Google internal data, Global, March 2021)

Each ad features a dedicated area for brand creative – static or video – and features three products tiles. Tapping on these tiles will redirect the user to their respective product landing pages.

Desktop users will be served this ad in all standard rotational slots. Mobile users will experience the creative in-stream and can swipe through the product tiles.

Shoppable Story

The Shoppable Story is an impactful, mobile-specific opportunity that promotes a campaign or collection through brand creative and product tiles. 

Upon scrolling through a Forbes article on a mobile device, the user will enter a full-screen interstitial. The user can tap product tiles – or the “Shop Now” button – to navigate to their respective product landing pages.

Fluid XL Trio

Fluid XL Trio offers advertisers an impactful presence on the Forbes site through a combination of static and video creative.

The desktop experience features video creative between two static images. The trio of creatives offer a greater opportunity to storytell and leverage brand messaging. Mobile users will experience the video in-stream with a static, sticky banner at the bottom.

This is our 4th product in the Fluid XL set, which has seen tremendous performance well above industry benchmarks.