When Amazon chief executive and founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in late 2013, he said his motive was to bring the distinguished newspaper into the digital age, reports Marketing Land.

According to Marketing Land,

“To help accomplish that aim, Bezos gave a specific mission to Jarrod Dicker, who joined the newspaper in September of last year as head of ad production and technology after stints at The Huffington Post and Time, Inc.

““The editorial team [was] strong, and the engineering team was strong,” Dicker told me. But there was “a huge gap on the ad side of the business, in innovation.”

““Bezos is all about users-first,” he added, so “I was brought in to build consumer-first type approaches for advertisers.”

“That initiative led to the founding in December of 2015 of the Post’s RED (Research Experimentation & Development) Group, which Dicker heads and which is intended as a “bridge between editorial, advertising, and the core technology group.”

“Based in both New York and Washington, DC, the RED Group is all about improving the user experience of digital ads by developing tools that the Post can use, and that can be white-label licensed to ad partners or other publishers.

“In eight months since its launch, the RED Group has created six tools that Dicker said seek to “make existing ads better” for web and apps.”