The technology used to create and deploy the ads has never been used in this way before. Hence, the strategic thinking and creative are both groundbreaking within the news competitive set.

This campaign is a complete and total first.

By serving ads with imagery and headlines that matched the breaking news alerts and stories users were consuming, MSNBC’s creative accomplished several goals:

1. Prove to consumers that MSNBC was covering the breaking news story

2. Begin to create association between the MSNBC brand and breaking news (versus muscle memory to turn to the main competitor)

3. Break through the clutter of traditional banner ads

Before the Digital Disruption campaign, the cultural hold that our competitors had during breaking news was consistently shown in ratings. When a breaking news scenario would arise, we would see viewership peel off to our competition. MSNBC needed to build new association and muscle memory for MSNBC among depth seeking news consumers in breaking news scenarios.

In the current media landscape, consumers expect news to find them where they are: on their smartphones. Digital news agencies now send out proactive push notifications to consumers when a breaking event arises. Hence, it became necessary for MSNBC to reach consumers digitally, where they first hear about the news. MSNBC partnered with a dynamic creative management platform (Velvet, by the agency RED) to create and serve contextual digital ads alongside breaking news stories on these digital news platforms, including Apple News, The New York Times, Twitter, and The Huffington Post.

This system allowed MSNBC to instantly update ad headlines and images so that they would be relevant to the articles viewers were reading. These contextually relevant ads would signal to consumers that we were covering the story in real-time, and drive viewers to tune in to MSNBC for more in-depth coverage.

Following the campaign release in 2018, MSNBC gained 5.4 million digital viewership minutes and won 80% of breaking news days over its main competitor with an average 25.7% higher ratings.