Fotopedia has two pieces of news today. The iOS-only travel magazine company is launching its newest app, this time with a focus on Italy, as well as a new ad format. The new AdStories advertising format, which will make its debut on the iPad and iPad mini across all of the company’s apps today, is meant to be highly visual and to make the ads “part of the show.”
Fotopedia has been experimenting with a number of ways to bring interesting and relevant ads to its global audience of about 15 million lately. With AdStories, as the name implies, the focus is on giving advertisers the opportunity to tell longer and highly visual stories about their products. An adventure travel company, for example, could show an itinerary for a trip as a 10-page slideshow. All of these ads end with what senior Fotopedia VP Christophe Daligault described to me earlier this week as a “call to discovery.” This could be a call to forward a link to the slideshow to your friends or a request to like the company on Facebook. Fotopedia also worked hard to ensure that it’s as easy as possible to share links to these ads on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
The idea here is clearly to make the ads part of the experience by using the same beautiful imagery that Fotopedia itself has come to be known for. As Daligault told me, Fotopedia allows advertisers to target their ads according to the readers’ interests, location and language. The company is launching this new format with three launch partners: GeoEx, Mountain Travel Sobek and Tirawa.
For the time being, advertisers will have to contact Fotopedia directly to run these ads, but the company plans to make them self-serve in the coming months.
As for the new Italy app, Daligault told me that it’s the company’s first app to use new iOS 6 features like built-in Facebook and Twitter sharing. In addition, the Italy app will feature an improved map view. With this app, Fotopedia is also adding Italian and Portuguese to its line-up of supported languages, bringing the total to nine.
