Specle signs exclusive two-year contract with Condé Nast

Specle has signed an exclusive two-year contract with Condé Nast to handle the delivery of all print, tablet and mobile advertising for all of the publisher's titles.

Advertisers and agencies can submit ads for print and digital editions of Condé Nast's titles through a new ad portal (adportal.condenast.co.uk), which will become the mandatory route for submission of all Condé Nast Britain's advertising from 1 July.

Sarah Jenson, production director of Condé Nast Britain, said: "Given we now have to copy chase and quality control ads for a number of mobile and android devices, in addition to existing print and tablet ads, it makes sense for the company to set up one ad delivery solution for all of our print, tablet and mobile advertising, for the ease of our clients, and in order to ensure we continue to deliver the highest quality possible."

Tom Beckenham, chief executive of Specle, said that - in addition to streamlining the process of delivering print advertising for Condé Nast's portfolio of titles - the ad portal would "open the floodgates for digital edition advertising".

"The Specle ad portal makes it increasingly attractive to advertise in digital editions as it simplifies the process and reduces the cost of producing full screen ads for mobile and tablet," said Beckenham.

"It enables all the print agencies out there to create responsive HTML5 advertising with tools they're already familiar with using. We've created our own engine to integrate with Adobe DPS and allow advertisers to preview their files in their Adobe Creative Cloud account on any device."

He added: "One of the big obstacles to buying ads in digital editions is that the [external] production costs are quite high. Only a few of the big agency groups have teams internally that can produce HTML5 ads full screen; this portal will enable people to create their own.

"One of the problems with digital editions has been the fact that if you try to do anything interesting as a publisher, you get burned because it becomes harder for the advertiser. This will allow you to do digital editions without [affecting] the advertisers."

Beckenham said that other ad delivery providers would be able to deliver through the Specle ad portal using an API once it becomes the mandatory means of file submission. He added that similar deals were in the offing with a number of other publishers.

"The interest in these portals is enormous - we're visiting publisher after publisher at the moment," said Beckenham. "We're very focused on print and we do lots of print advertising, but from a development point of view a lot of what we're doing at the moment is focused on digital editions, because it's been a big problem area."