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Bridging commentary on the art & science of content; content marketing, branded content, native advertising and the analytics, attribution and intelligence that powers it.
Native Advertising

Native Can Convert, Here’s How

Advertising is created to inform & persuade; in a digital universe persuasion is quantifiably measurable. As marketers, we’re programmed to have specific media for specific tasks. Awareness, conversion, etc. But, as we’ve run a lot of campaigns in partnership with publishers and agencies, we’ve found that native content can be actually very powerful at typical “bottom of the funnel” tasks. Nudge sees a range of 1-3% of post-consumption conversion as defined by the client. It’s not a huge surprise but… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 22, 2016
This Week in Native Ads

This Week in Native Ads 09/16

Dmexco is in, in big time this year! I attended last year and thoroughly enjoyed it but unfortunately couldn’t make it this year. Will share the best post analysis next week. -Ben Campaign of the Week: 12 Free Apps that will Enhance Your Life Source: USA Today Why we like it: We like this USA Today piece for StraightTalk, helping reach a mainstream audience with real utility – apps that… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 15, 2016
This Week in Native Ads

This Week in Native Ads 09/09

Good content is good content is good content, that’s the stream of conversation with this week. Mirroring last week – people don’t really care where content comes from as long as it’s good. -Ben Campaign of the Week: The Tech That Took Down A Titan Source: Wired Why we like it: For the launch of Season 2 of Narcos, Netflix comes out strong with this Wired piece on the technology that helped take… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 8, 2016
This Week in Native Ads

This Week in Native Ads 09/02

Facebook announced it is pre-fetching to help speed up advertisers pages, and slow pages will factor in to the bid price. What often isn’t discussed is that Facebook Mobile ads are a way to get around ad blockers… so a go-to for advertising arbitrage, in the short-term good for Facebook but really they want that revenue on their books. This bolstering is only going to continue. Facebook recent moves: Facebook ushers in a new wave of transparency, sharing pubslisher… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 1, 2016
This Week in Native Ads

This Week in Native Ads 08/26

I loved Chad Pollitts post this week, How to Scale Native Advertising for Distribution for a couple of reasons. The first time I’d heard of this concept of Native 2.0 — the second wave of native. The idea is that more tools (like Nudge) help scale the disparate sources and bring scale to content. Second, the article itself is native content! Content so good you want to share it. It’s a great B2B reference, taking a thought leadership… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 25, 2016
This Week in Native Ads

This Week in Native Ads 08/19

We saw the surprising stat, 68% of publishers using editorial staff to create native, I’ve yet to dig in to this – but haven’t seen this first hand. Typically editorial have shifted across. But it does touch on a good point, if you’re a smaller publisher – how do you resource your native team. Keen to hear your thoughts, outsource? Partner? Client writes it? Otherwise check out the LinkedIn story – leveraging b2b data for native ads in the… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 18, 2016
This Week in Native Ads

This Week in Native Ads 08/12

The hot story this week is Facebook’s public stance on blocking ad blockers, launching a unblockable format… only to be re-blocked by AdBlock Plus days later… I think we’re only seeing the beginning of this story. -Ben Campaign of the Week: The Secret Life of a Long Island Military Installation Source: Atlas Obscura Why we like it: Stranger Things is the Netflix show blowing up – and this partnership with Atlas Obscura… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 11, 2016
This Week in Native Ads

This Week in Native Ads 08/05

This week we included a head to head of Facebook vs Twitter, identifying which of the two drives the highest quality traffic to your content – I won’t spoil that scroll down to see. Branded content outperforming pre-roll isn’t a huge surprise but good ammo to have in your arsenal and finally the latest trust study looks at the text link ads. Come on guys! If it’s an ad you have to disclose it – end of story. -Ben… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
August 4, 2016
This Week in Native Ads

This Week in Native Ads 07/29

Campaign of the Week: Defy Hunger Together Source: Wall Street Journal Why we like it: Together with the WSJ, Mini is going on a journey across America in support of Feed America, watch as they visit different communities and raise funds along the way. It’s an easy to grasp story with a public benefit and a different cadence to what you normally get on the WSJ.  … Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
July 29, 2016
Native Advertising

Native Content Best Practices

Make the most of your native content investment by embracing these best practices. Make the brand integral This story couldn’t exist without the brand being present, it should feel natural for the end consumer to make the connection to the brand. A great example of this is a collaboration between Puma and Refinery29. Read our write up here. Content Length Half the battle is getting attention, once someone has decided to click on your content, look to hold it. Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
July 25, 2016