Interested in being a Pictory sponsor?
What’s special about Pictory advertising?
Pictory ads are magazine-style and seek to bring good advertising to the web:
- they’re 1000-pixel-wide and inline
- the photographer and designer of ad are credited
- the ads are linkable
- the sponsored content is carefully woven in with the narrative
Here’s an example.
Who’s right for Pictory sponsorship?
We were thrilled to launch the ad model in December 2010 in the form of a sponsored theme with Levi’s. We’re interested in talking to other international brands with an innovative take on photography, design, and storytelling.
In addition, Pictory sponsorship is a good fit for brands that:
- are looking for an innovative social media buy
- want to feature great photography/design/storytelling
- want to kickstart a user-generated content project (I can help set the right tone)
- are interested in high quality content to convey brand ideals
Who should I contact?
laura (at) pictorymag.com
What’s the philosophy behind it?
In the past year or two, the Internet got BIG. It started with the Big Picture blog pushing photos to 1000-pixels-wide, to spill right up to the edge of people’s screens. Dozens of web design trend pieces shouted that large design was the way to go, and things changed so fast that even Flickr, with its 500 pixel wide images, felt conspicuously small before its redesign last spring.
In the meantime, the web design community’s standard for successful advertising has stayed tiny. Ads are considered a blight on the reader and are hidden or marginalized on many high quality sites, and have been for years.
I don’t want to hide ads on Pictory. I want them big and beautiful, and I want them to tell a story. Think about your favorite advertising, the kind of stuff that fills the pages of F*** Yeah Ads or design blogs. They’re probably billboards, subway ads, magazine ads, and television spots. Good advertising has been largely forgotten on the web. And it makes sense — between the short attention span of Internet users and the focus on quantitative measures of success (like CPM), there’s been no room for creativity. Brand advertising — the kind that makes you laugh or cry or feel something — has been mostly left behind on the web. When we do see immersive, impactful ad campaigns, they’re usually executed as site takeovers that interrupt or postpone the reader’s experience.
We’re entering a new era of Internet. People spend about 4:00 minutes a page on sites like Pictory and The Bold Italic, and more with iPad content. I think it’s time to try something new. Something compelling, but integrated into the reading process. It’s not enough that the ads just be big — they have to be worth spending time with. Which is why I’ve also credited the designer and photographer of each ad. It’s good for the design and photography communities, and it encourages quality work. I’ve also made sure that people who want to can link to the ad to share it. These may sound like small things, but they’re efforts toward creating a suitable habitat for interesting advertising on the web.