Ben Young
Ben Young
October 13, 2016

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 Googleโ€™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

Smartest Commentary

Datapoints of Note

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

 


โ€œJoin