Vox Media announces first-party marketing platform, Forte

MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2019 (New York, NY) – Vox Media, the leading independent modern media company, today announced Forte, a platform that combines first-party data across 125-million monthly unique visitors from 13 topically diverse editorial networks. The platform is informed by audience intent and behavior, including referral sources to predict consumer interest and action, coupled with proprietary knowledge of creative ad performance against consumer mindset.

“Forte is a next generation solution in how marketers can reach audiences, moving away from a reliance on third-party data. It can optimize to the needs of any marketer in real-time and it serves as an immediate solution to browser policy changes and privacy regulation,” said Ryan Pauley, Chief Revenue Officer at Vox Media. “The future of this industry belongs to the brands and media companies that have deep and direct connections with their audiences. This platform puts Vox Media in a place to confidently succeed in a world where third-party data will likely cease to exist.”

Forte, strengthened by the merger with New York Media, offers marketers access to Vox Media’s direct-to-consumer relationships at nearly every passion point – inclusive of subscriber and commerce data – and serves as a sustainable solution as the industry awaits the impact of changes to browsers and privacy regulation. The platform allows marketers to connect with audiences based on how they arrive to and engage with Vox Media’s diverse editorial portfolio, synthesizing user behavior with creative signals, drawing from a unique knowledge set Vox Media owns from creating 12,000 custom proprietary ad units, representing a data set of 11-billion impressions in the past 3-years and brand KPI performance against considerations such as color, action words and video lengths.

The platform extends beyond advertising, as Vox Media’s audiences will see an improved user-experience across its networks. With a deep understanding of intent from New York Magazine subscribers, shoppers on The Strategist, fans of Eater’s ongoing event series, or members of Vulture Insiders, Forte will provide users recommendations and relevant content.

“Forte identifies user interests faster and more effectively by drawing from engagement signals,” said Megan Walton, VP of Revenue Product at Vox Media. “As a result, it delivers an immediate and nuanced understanding of how and why users come to our brands in the moment. From there, we can achieve multidimensional outcomes, including advertising effectiveness and more relevant content recommendations.”

This is the latest technology Vox Media has built in-house, aimed at powering the media and marketing industry at large. The Forte platform is designed to power data on Vox Media’s owned and operated platforms and will eventually extend to Concert, the publisher-led advertising marketplace built in 2016 and Chorus, the audience-building publishing platform licensed to publishers such as Funny or Die, REVOLT and Chicago Sun Times.