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Category: Branded Content

All of our branded content, native advertising and paid, custom, sponsored content content.

Notable content includes How branded content drives business outcomes, The Best Native of 2021 (and the six years prior 20,19,18,17,16,15).

What is native ad content?

Native ad content is the term used to describe paid content, that has either been placed or produced by a publisher on their website or application. The criteria making it native is that: It is designed to fit in with the publisher Created or curated fort he audience On an external website Other terms sometimes used interchangeably are sponsored post, paid content, advertorial, branded content. Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
April 14, 2015

The Best Native Advertising Examples

You’re looking for the best native advertising examples, under the IAB native ad guidelines, there are six main types: Infeed units, ads designed to fit in the flow of content, i.e. Facebook promoted post. Paid search units, ads designed to look similar to search results, i.e. Google Adwords. Recommendation units, ads that look like content links under an article, i.e. OutBrain. Promoted listings, ads (often on ecommerce sites) with promoted views. In-Ad, hard to describe. Custom/Can’t be contained, custom ads… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
January 25, 2015

The best disclosures are native: a study on effective disclosures on custom native ads

In a recent study we completed, we found that the most effective form of disclaimers are in the content themselves. When disclosures were in the content, peoples ability to identify it as an ad went up 89%. The outtake: native disclosures work best for custom native ads. However, the overall identification was still only half of participants. We believe the way to lift it from here is repetition in the article, however we haven’t found enough examples for further testing yet. Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
January 23, 2015

Best practices for placing native ad content

In this post we share a few insights we get by providing analytics for native ad content.  Keep in mind this is a nascent industry so standards are still being developed but this is a place to start. Evaluate the technology stack You want to check for a few things: On your native ad content, how long do you get this space for? Also are other advertisers going to get to bid on ad space on it? We see too… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
November 11, 2014

88% brand recall on custom native ads

As a by-product of a recent study, we found that of the participants that identified sponsored content as an ad, 88% could recall the brand in the article. An astonishing result. We recruited participants to read sponsored content and answer a short survey afterwards. Of the questions, one was to identify who the ad was for. There were a two key content types: 1) Thought leadership in the brands area. 2) Interview series brought to you by the brand. Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
October 7, 2014

How Evernote should use Native Ads

I’ve long been a fan of Evernote – the note keeping app, I joined way back in October 2008 but only seriously started using it the next year, and that’s the typical use case of Evernote. The percentage of people who pay in the first month is like one half of one percent. But if they use it for a year, that goes up to seven percent. In the second year, it goes up to 11 percent. Our oldest cohort, the people… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
September 23, 2014

Netflix goes native: A whitepaper on Netflix’s Native Ad Investment in the New York Times & Wired

A recent article on DigiDay concluded that only 9% of marketers are very confident about their Native Ad metrics. Thus Netflix’s well documented recent investment in Wired and New York Times Native Ad products provides an opportune case study to bring these measurement challenges to life. This whitepaper is aimed to help brands evaluate their own native ad investments and learn more about native ad measurement. Using Nudge, we were able to get a picture of how each… Continue reading

Ben Young
Ben Young
July 7, 2014

A whitepaper on Netflix’s Native Ad Investment: New York Times & Wired

A recent article on DigiDay concluded that only 9% of marketers are very confident about their Native Ad metrics. Thus Netflix’s well documented recent investment in Wired and New York Times Native Ad products provides an opportune case study to bring these measurement challenges to life. This whitepaper is aimed to help brands evaluate their own Native Ad investments and learn more about Native Ad Measurement. Using Nudge, we were able to get a picture… Continue reading

Willem Ockhuysen
Willem Ockhuysen
June 25, 2014

What are native ads?

The Native Ad Market is growing rapidly, I’ve heard comments such as ‘I’ve never seen a shift happen so quickly’. The numbers suggest a $4.6b market by 2017. So what are native ads? But before we race ahead – what are Native Ads?  73% of marketers admit to being confused by it. Simply put, they are ads which are native to the platform they are displayed on. Instead of picking a one size fits… Continue reading

Willem Ockhuysen
Willem Ockhuysen
May 29, 2014