Rebirth

One big thing

This week we see Brian Morrissey call the rebirth of native advertising or primary engagement media as he calls it. In tandem The Cut dealing with journalists also doing their own branded content deals on their social channels. Both pieces are a must read.

What they point to is the coalescing around direct commercial models and direct consumer engagement. Limiting of cookies is also forcing limitations on commercial models. And as The Cut shows, maybe you can’t work direct with the publisher, maybe you work direct with the journalists, ala talent, who has built their own brand. With the help of the distribution from the publisher.

Of course, with more fragmented buys and relationships, it makes all the more reason to use measurement, that consolidates your performance in one place 😉

But seriously, that is an emergent problem of more engagements like this. Standardizing performance. And ensuring that you are getting value. And finding pockets of opportunity. And that works both ways, for the buyer and the seller.

• The rebirth of native advertising.
• The Cut confronts its spon-con standards.
• Outbrain secures Axel Springers business.
• Morning Brew tops 4 million newsletter subscribers as it looks to expand with M&A.
• LinkedIn Pages can now publish Newsletters.
• How Web3 changes the content model and Examples of ‘emoji’ marketing.
• Twitter’s working on collaborative tweets to facilitate new opportunities for creators.
• Freakonomics Radio gets its own SiriusXM channel.
• Meta shares new view of the ‘Wendyverse’ and branded content spaces in VR.
• What’s the alternative to spending $7 million on a super bowl ad.
• The FT launches FT Edit, 8 selected stories each day for 99p/month.
• Russian tech giants Yandex’s data harvesting raises security concerns.
• [Long read] You don’t know much about Jay Penske. And he’s fine with that.

Deals/M&A

• MGID acquires Italian native advertising company Metup.
• Nielsen agrees to sell to consortium for $10b.
• Netflix acquires video game developer Boss Fight Entertainment.

Campaign of the Week

• AdWeek + Millions. The future is bright for brands that master sports advertising.

• “Mozilla believes the web should be for everyone — open, empowering, and safe. In its best moments, the web exemplifies these values today. But too often the web today does not deliver on this promise.“ –FireFox’s Vision for the Future of the Web

Datapoints of note

• White papers, those relics from another age, are back. Last year, the number of uploads by marketers grew by 20.3%, outpacing the growth of all other B2B content formats, according to the State of Content Consumption & Demand Report, a study by NetLine. Netline reports that B2B content consumption increased by more than 9% last year.

That’s it for this week.