News International has revealed that it is going to launch a digital commercial products unit to help drive new advertising innovation for clients and agencies.
The new department, to be headed by NI Commercial’s ex-head of technology Mark Peters, work collaboratively with brands and agencies in order to provide new insight into NI’s digital consumers and also to experiment with new digital advertising approaches.
Peters said: “Tablets are obviously central to NI’s digital strategy and that’s where we’re initially going to focus the majority of our work. We need to understand our audience better and we then need to work out the best ways of giving brands the opportunity to reach them most effectively.
“This isn’t something we can do in isolation. We’re signing up the most innovative and forward-looking brands and agencies to work with us in helping to define the future of digital newspaper advertising.”
The unit’s first project will be to leverage the recently-launched Times seven-day app to create new advertising opportunities for brands.