"The New York Times" is actively recruiting partners and plans to test a new advertising targeting solution using advanced Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technology starting from the next quarter, according to executives at the company. Axios reported that the newspaper plans to widely offer this innovative tool to marketers in the second half of this year. It is worth noting that this strategic move was initiated by "The Times" before the landmark copyright infringement lawsuit filed against OpenAI and Microsoft. Joy Robins, Global Chief Advertising Officer, emphasized, "This highlights our strong belief in GenAI and its potential to have a significant impact on our business when applied responsibly." The new technology being developed internally by "The Times" will intelligently recommend the best ad placements based on specific information or goals of advertising campaigns. Additionally, the tool will be able to target niche audiences that were previously difficult to reach, such as specific groups based on interests, desires, and perspectives. For example, a car company aiming to target a family-friendly audience can use this tool to precisely match their ads with relevant content on "The Times" website and app related to technology or pets. Mohit Lohia, Senior Vice President and Head of Digital Advertising, revealed that "The Times" is currently leveraging multiple large language models (LLMs), including proprietary and open-source models, to power this new tool. He emphasized that this technology has broad applicability and can work in synergy with any LLM. As one of the media outlets with the largest news audience globally, "The Times" has over 10 million paid subscribers and more than 100 million registered readers. Lohia stated that this massive user base, combined with their "exceptional content" and "highly organized data," provides a solid foundation for the advertising department to explore this new GenAI product. Currently, "The Times" is recruiting select advertising partners to participate in a closed beta test, which is expected to begin in early Q2. Once results are obtained from the initial experiments, the newspaper plans to promote the new tool to more advertisers. These beta partners are from "The Times'" Product Council, a team composed of marketers from various industries who assist the company in testing new products and technologies. While brands themselves cannot directly use this tool, they can collaborate with "The Times" advertising team to apply it to their respective advertising campaigns. It is currently unclear how "The Times" will price the advertising campaigns targeted using this new tool, but Lohia pointed out that these decisions may depend on the experimental results. The new tool aims to enable advertisers to more easily plan and optimize their advertising campaigns in real-time. "The Times" has already built a context-based advertising targeting solution for marketers, which is based on first-party data collected from users. However, these existing products require advertisers to explicitly select targeting criteria before running their campaigns, limiting the potential for real-time optimization. The new tool aims to address this issue and help advertisers avoid the awkward situation of misaligned ads with content. With the decline of third-party tracking cookies, more publishers are exploring the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence to improve real-time ad targeting. While "The New York Times" continues its legal dispute with OpenAI, it has been heavily investing in technological innovations for all its products. In December last year, the newspaper hired a Director of AI Initiatives to experiment with GenAI tools in its newsroom. Lohia emphasized, "This has always been our top priority, and we have invested significant resources in the past three quarters. It is a crucial endeavor."