Toronto-based Jones Media will be the exclusive Canadian partner of digital media company Ziff Davis, the companies announced this week.
Ziff Davis specializes in men’s lifestyle, technology and gaming, reaching over 125 million unique visitors per month through sites such as PCMag.com, men’s lifestyle portal AskMen.com, gaming site IGN.com, Geek.com and others. The company often touts its affluent audience; it says it delivers 1.5 million Canadian men earning $100,000 or more on average.
This deal marks the first time that all of Ziff Davis’s properties — which offer various kinds of native, video and display advertising — will be represented by one entity to the Canadian audience.
“Ziff Davis is committed to building its offerings in Canada.” said Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah. “While we’re already number one in all three of our verticals in Canada, this partnership signals our goal of delivering exceptional results for Canadian marketers. We believe Jones Media will be critical in delivering on that promise and evangelizing our brand in the market.”
The acquisition of what will be its largest publisher client marks a major expansion in business for Jones Media (which also announced its partnership with SpotXchange this week). The Canadian publisher representative, which counts Beyond The Rack and HMV among its other partners, only celebrated its first anniversary in April. With this deal, it will have 23 million unique visitors monthly among its publishers, and deliver 800 million video impressions, 500 million display and 300 million in mobile.
The Jones/Ziff Davis deal did not emerge from formal RFP process, says Jones Media.
“We’re very excited to welcome Ziff Davis to the Jones family,” says Cathy Fernandes, a partner at Jones. “We want to deepen the current, existing advertisers that have been working with various properties within Ziff Davis and build on it. We can dig deep. We can do native advertising. We can do huge integration programs across the network.”
Jones has experience with serving integrated content to targeted users of Beyond The Rack, providing editorial geared toward premium buyers based on purchases. The firm hopes to leverage Ziff Davis’s deep range of product endorsements and advertiser relationships to design native campaigns that integrate ads with specific content.
