Flipboard brings together people around shared interests, and our platform is the home of a growing number of communities. This presents a golden opportunity for brands that can use interest-based marketing and proprietary data to connect with engaged audiences, even in the imminent era of a cookieless web. Now brands advertising with Flipboard can run their campaigns on contextually relevant partner sites through a new Interest Collective program. 

Today, we launched the Travel and Tech Interest Collectives, with the Finance Collective soon to follow. To create these Interest Collectives, Flipboard is teaming up with publisher partners to bundle inventory in key verticals, creating a highly engaged audience at scale around top interests. The Interest Collectives bring together select content from Flipboard curators, creators, email newsletters and high-quality relevant publisher partner sites. 

For instance, the Travel Interest Collective combines the audience of Flipboard’s popular travel destination with the visitors of renowned travel sites such as Atlas Obscura, Explore, Fodor’s and Frommer’s, helping brands connect with people who are looking for destinations, attractions, travel-planning advice and places to stay. 

We hear from publisher partners such as Pauline Frommer, editorial director at Frommer’s, how our partnership has led to significant referral traffic and deep engagement from an audience interested in travel. So it means a lot to us that she sees our Travel Collective as a mutually beneficial collaboration that offers new monetization opportunities in their direct sales efforts.

Similarly, the Tech Interest Collective attracts an audience that’s interested in all things tech, including gadgets, AI and startups on Flipboard and partner sites such as 9to5Mac, Digital Trends and VentureBeat. The Finance Collective, which we’ll launch later this summer, consists of publications like Moneywise that provide the latest financial news, money-saving advice and smart investing tips, allowing brands to align with savvy readers interested in market trends and wealth management.

An Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) study found that integrating contextual and audience targeting led to a 68 percent increase in ad effectiveness. Along with the benefits to advertisers, publishers participating in the Interest Collectives are able to show high quality ads to readers, increase their advertiser mix and diversify their revenue. When an ad is served from the open marketplace, publishers have limited control over the context or quality; Interest Collectives restore their ability to ensure high quality and relevant ads.

The Interest Collectives build on the ability for advertisers to connect with audiences in contextually relevant ways via Flipboard’s Interest Graph, which is informed by the platform’s 30,000 topics and indexed via machine learning algorithms based on content from more than 4,000 publishers. This creates an opportunity for brands to scale strategic contextual targeting: advertisers can reach relevant audiences across platforms, formats and devices. 

— Shannon Yeager, lead manager publisher partnerships, is getting ideas for her summer trip in The Travel Exchange