By Michael Feeley

The Financial Times (FT) has launched a focused media campaign to promote its innovative ‘cost per hour’ (CPH) digital advertising currency. The new media campaign, which features in The Drum, was itself transacted on a CPH basis and aims to raise awareness of the metric among advertisers and publishers.

The development of the new CPH metric was informed by research which showed that brand awareness, uplift and association all increase the longer an ad is in view. However, under traditional CPM (cost per thousand) buys, all impressions are valued equally, e.g. an impression that lasts one second on a viewer’s screen is valued the same as an impression that lasts 30 seconds. CPH is designed to attach value only to impressions lasting more than five seconds whilst the user is engaged with the page and, therefore, to deliver greater brand impact for each dollar of advertising spend.

The FT, which developed the ‘cost per hour’ model in-house, has been selling CPH campaigns to clients for the last two years.

David Buttle, global marketing director for commercial at the Financial Times, said: “The launch of our first campaign for the innovative cost-per-hour metric is an important statement to both the buy-side and other publishers of our confidence in its continued success.

“Under traditional CPM buys all impressions are valued equally, however our research shows that some impressions are delivering far more in terms of outcomes for campaigns. CPH attaches the value to those impressions which are delivering these outcomes. As such, CPH closes the gap between what publishers have traditionally sold – impressions - and what advertisers really want to buy: the attention of their target audience and consequently, marketing outcomes.”

Buttle continued: “We have now sold 22 years of audience attention through CPH - with a large proportion of that being repeat business. This campaign is about raising awareness of the benefits of the currency, so that ad spend can deliver better outcomes for all.”