Get the most important digital marketing news each day. See terms.

Yahoo Introduces new mobile ad format Tiles, focused on 360 images, video

Richer ad user experience and new content focus seek to lift ad quality.

Greg Sterling on June 21, 2016 at 9:28 am

At the Cannes Lions festival yesterday, Yahoo announced “Yahoo Tiles,” a new mobile ad format for the “post-tap world.” It offers 360-degree imagery and video on the Yahoo Gemini and BrightRoll ad platforms.

Here’s the company’s description:

Yahoo Tiles enables brands to tell visually compelling and immersive stories on mobile devices in a post-tap environment. When consumers click on a mobile ad, they are taken to a custom mobile landing page that can feature 360-degree content, including video and images, as well as dynamic and interactive features such as video, swipeable images, and social feeds. With its lightweight design, Yahoo Tiles delivers a more engaging and seamless consumer experience for mobile native, video and display ads.

Yahoo said that early efforts with Tiles have yielded higher engagement for advertisers: “One QSR advertiser saw a 4x lift in user engagement when designing an experience for users to swipe through multiple flavors of their product. In another instance, a CPG brand built an immersive 360-degree dinner experience to draw in the consumer and saw a 5x lift in time-earned, or the average time a consumer spent viewing and interacting with the ad.”

The ads offer a larger canvas and are more “immersive” than conventional mobile landing pages. Yahoo is the latest in a growing list of mobile ad platforms to try to create better mobile ads, as well as to start integrating 360-degree images or video. Opera also recently introduced a new 360-degree mobile video ad format.

Also yesterday, Yahoo announced what it’s calling Yahoo Storytellers, “a full service content marketing studio for brands and agencies that leverages Yahoo’s editorial expertise, extensive data, and native advertising through Yahoo Gemini.” The new program seeks to bring together a broad range of Yahoo assets to help brands create more compelling ads:

Advertisers will have access to a full suite of capabilities including: content consulting services and curriculum-based workshops, development of premium video and a full range of editorial content. Yahoo’s custom content studio will produce premium content for brands by tapping into leading journalists and Hollywood-pedigree creators like A Very Good Production, Believe Entertainment, and more.

Mobile advertising in particular is making slow progress in addressing complaints about generally poor-quality mobile advertising. Mobile ad creative in particular has to date been largely a replication of desktop display ad formats. Things like 360-degree images and video landing pages can help bring mobile ad creative out of the shadow of the PC.