This Week in Native Ads 09/23

We have some interesting datapoints from Dmexco, thanks to TheDrums coverage and interviews with Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP and Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL. Further in exciting news this week, we at Nudge are sharing a case study in partnership with The Atlantic, demonstrating how native can convert. And Yahoo wading in to native retargeting for its search advertisers.

Notable Stories this Week

How Vertebrae is bringing native advertising to VR, ad platforms are developing faster than adoption! But great promise here.
Mode Media Shuts down.
[Native content] From our friends at Affinio: How networks can write data-driven storylines. Great insight.
From Tim Armstrong: If Facebook is social and Google is search, AOL is brand. Give the video a watch. Tim talks about how they’ve shifted from a wall garden to an open view, partnering with everyone.
[From us] Demonstrating how native content can convert and why that’s important even for brand campaigns.
Yahoo lets advertisers retarget with native ads. Surely something Google will be keeping an eye on, with their experiments in native units and existing retargeting infrastructure. The challenge here is dilution of search CPCS but with mobile search CPCs coming down it may not matter but requires treading carefully.
Twitter announces native ads over its audience network. Starting with app install ads, expanding over time. Easy revenue for Twitter to lock in, app install ads have been fruitful for Facebook. This will also help fill the ever expanding mobile inventory.

Campaigns of the Week

A higher education example, this for UConn is a way of sharing interesting research in order to position the UConn brand within the industry. These niche examples are where native really comes to life. Engaging content, in front of the right audience. Simple easy and a great reference.

Smartest Commentary

This from Mel: “If a reader is tricked, and they don’t know that it was sponsored content, no one is winning there. The reader is certainly not winning; the advertiser is definitely not winning because they haven’t gotten anything out of the experience that they paid to create and promote, and the publisher is not winning because they are potentially losing the trust of a reader. I think when it is done correctly, no one should feel tricked.”
And more from Mel on native content from the advertisers perspective.

Datapoints of Note

Programmatic display advertising market in Europe jumped 70.3%.
All this spend will be native in a few years.
26% of the content ads, on top 50 news sites, are going to clickbait sites.
89% of those sites are anonymously registered.
Read the full Clickbait Report here.
WPP has increased its spend with Facebook 70% in the last 12 months (from $1b to $1.7b).
Sir Martin expects by 2018 Facebook will be #2 to Google in terms of their media investments but that Google will continue its lead, ‘search is more powerful than branding.’
[From Nudge] Native content converts at 1-3%.
Twitter has found (via MoPub) that native ads have 220% higher click-through-rates than on their 300×250 counterparts