This Week in Native Ads 10/14

Brands are still doubling down on content, especially in finance. This week we saw Goldman announce its new initiative and Vox partnering with Chase to produce Meridian.

With this continual focus of content, brands as publishers, more and more ad:tech will be now consumed by the brands direct, i.e. take a look at Chase.com they have News & Stories on the homepage. Tactics publishers use are now required client side.

Notable Stories this Week

Goldman Sachs wades into branded content. Alongside their millennial focused Marcus launch, we can only anticipate content becoming front and centre of Goldmans comms.
[More publishers on Google’s flex/native ads] The Daily Beast, eBay, Grupo Expansion in Mexico, Aller Media in Sweden and Trovit in Spain are also building custom ad experiences using Google’s component-based ads. Gannett expects to roll out its version in November.
FlipBoard launches Twitter Moments/Snapchat Stories/Instagram Stories/Facebook Canvas ad product.
Vox is launching a travel content site for Chase. Great to see publishers playing to their strengths here. The next question is – how do you measure success? Content is seen as the more effective (read: cheaper) way to acquire audiences.
[Tactics] Watch outs in executing native advertising campaigns.

Deals/M&A

Digital Trends, a Portland- based publisher (never heard of?) secured a $10M line of credit. They do 26M views?!

Smartest Commentary

“Our favorability increases [after people view its content rather than see a straight ad],” said Kaydee Bridges, VP, digital, social, social media, Goldman Sachs.
Are Google Flex Frame Ads the end of the publisher-side ad server? Very astute observation and smart. Removing complexity, will help improve client-side ad load, rather than a mish mash of code loading.

Datapoints of Note

FlipBoard has seen a 47% increase in time people spend reading articles and video in the last 12 months.
Demand for native is up 262% in the last 19 months—for a total of 2,265 advertisers buying native in July.
MediaRadar has tracked over 3,000 native ads for BP in the last four weeks.

Trends to Watch/Bleeding Edge

Standardising native, Google is looking at it from a component perspective (as they should be), how to break apart those components. And publishers are having a lot of discussion on the native content end.

Events