Twas the week before the last week of the year – and last minute campaigns were going out left right and centre, whilst some of us were lucky enough to begin to slip away for the holiday season! It was a quiet week on the release front but some good posts for the year ahead.
Yesterday, we launched The Best Native Ads of 2016, take a look, please share. And grab our slides from the webinar if you want.
- Publishers take on ad agency roles with branded content.
- DigiDay give a to-do list for the industry, 5 pitfalls of sponsored content.
- How you should be leveraging native ads in 2017. I like his notes on how native supports the whole funnel. Exactly what smart marketers are doing right now.
- IAB mirrors my thoughts, around the expansion of native through Uber & Lyft. There’s a whole new frontier here, where the economics of attention mean brands will consider more and more the return of doing so. It reminds me of the LinkExchange days, getting a credit for each click on a link.
Deals/M&A
Campaign of the Week
- Uniqlo on Esquire, 16 Things You Can Now Do That Winter’s Come. Timely with the snow this week!
Smartest Commentary
- Oldie but resurfaced this week – via Joe Pulizzi, “Native advertising is the gateway drug to content marketing.”
Datapoints of Note
- BuzzFeed expects branded content and agency services to drive nearly all of its $250 million in revenue forecast for this year.
- Vice Media similarly anticipates the lion’s share of its projected 2016 revenue of $750 million to $850 million will come from sponsored material and agency work.
- WSJ Custom Studios is forecasting $60m in native revenue through June 2017. Making up 10% of overall ad revenue.
Trends to Watch/Bleeding Edge
- Brands using advertising to subsidize their own activity, and/or monetize their attention as a marketing subsidy.
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