The New York Times announced an advertising update to its platform, marking the first time that all the brands in its portfolio, including The Athletic, are fully integrated into its ad machine. The Times’ ad team also said it would open new targeting categories that reach “superusers” and lifestyle content, while avoiding politics and hard news.

The goal is to make advertisers “aware that news is more than just politics and war, but actually is an array of lifestyle topics,” Joy Robins, global chief ad officer at The New York Times, said in an interview.

At the same time, Robins notes that “it is always so important whenever we talk about ‘news avoidance’ to first bring up the fact that there is no evidence that actually appearing next to news topics has any impact on advertisers’ favorability. ... In fact, in some ways, we’ve seen it help enhance [advertising].”

On Wednesday, The Times announced its new suite of ad targeting options that included the lifestyle content controls to reach Games, which include popular titles including Wordle, review section Wirecutter, Cooking and The Athletic. The New York Times, like many publishers, is evolving its ad products for a new era in digital advertising, in which programmatic advertising has been affected by the loss of data signals from browsers and devices. For instance, Google had planned to turn off third-party cookies in Chrome next year, which could have dramatically curbed how much data ad tech companies and publishers could track to target ad campaigns. Google has pared back its plan after meeting resistance, but still intends to make third-party cookies optional next year instead of unilaterally killing them.

As for The Times, it shut off some third-party cookies in 2018, around the time that Apple began shutting off the trackers on Safari. Since then, The Times has relied more on first-party data, and contextual signals to power its ad platform. The Times has valuable first-party relationships with 10.5 million digital-only subscribers, according to its latest quarterly report, in which it posted $8.6 million in third-quarter digital ad revenue, up 8.8% year over year. Subscribers are locked into various portions of the newspaper’s coverage, with some subscribing to just news and others joining sections such as The Athletic. Still, even with millions of paying digital subscribers, The Times also has more than 150 million registered users, according to Robins, which represents a group of users that share some first-party data signals without being part of the paying subscriber pool.

Robins and Valerio Poce, executive director, ad product marketing at The New York Times, discussed the new capabilities within the ad platform, saying it was the culmination of integrating The Athletic into its first-party ad targeting mechanisms. In 2022, The Times bought The Athletic, and now says the sports site is enmeshed in its ad tech.

“We completed that in October, which means that now every single part of the New York Times is first-party data enabled,” Robins said, “and it allows advertisers to just buy across the portfolio in really new and compelling ways, whether that be advertisers who just want to target a specific audience segment … or we’ve also developed a product that is just specifically lifestyle-targeting enabled.”

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Like all publishers, The Times has to develop ad products that can target and measure all these readers visiting the site in different contexts, to access different types of content and from different browsers and devices.

“Most of our first-party data and the targeting products associated with it are basically built in house,” Poce said. “A lot of the signals that we need to build those audiences are captured through voluntary surveys. We have surveyed something like 50,000 readers between subscribers and non-subscribers, and we take those responses, and we model them across our entire readership to build targetable audience segments. And we also have other segments that are built more on the contextual targeting side, meaning how our readers engage with different content that we have.”

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Part of The Times’ ad update, with “superuser” targeting, was intended to beef up the value of highly engaged visitors who aren’t necessarily subscribers, Poce said.

“Let’s say we already have an interest-based segment, that is ‘people interested in luxury fashion,’” Poce said. “A luxury advertiser will come to us and target that segment specifically. In addition to that, we can also target the most engaged readers of The New York Times portfolio.”

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CLARIFICATION: The New York Times disabled a portion of third-party cookies in 2018 to shift more toward using first-party data in its advertising technology platform.