Quartz’s Jay Lauf: ‘Serving the reader first is central to our strategy’

At the Digiday Publishing Summit Japan in late June, Quartz publisher Jay Lauf shared how the 4-year-old publisher creates attractive banner and native ads for premium audiences. Its directive for advertising is simple: It must be beautiful to look at and easy to opt out of, like magazine advertising.

“What if you could marry the best of a magazine advertisement with all of the trackability and the power of digital?” asked Lauf. As such, said Lauf, Quartz has never run a standard IAB ad — they resize ads they receive from advertisers and do not work with content marketing platforms like Outbrain. As a result, he said, they can boast a 90 percent retention rate for advertisers.