This Week in Native Ads 2/3

With Ben out this week I’ll be jumping in (Hollie-Blue) to look after TWINA. Another big week for news here in the US, Super Bowl LI around the corner and from native news a focus on programmatic, the future of native, revenue from content distribution and why newsletters are hot again.

Notable Stories this Week

How AI and New Technologies Will Push the Limits of Native Advertising. Native will reach highly customised formats, tailored to individuals based on their most personal preferences and real-time actions. They will be “native” to our lives.
Programmatic Native Grows Almost 90% In 2016, but overall adoption remains low.
Publishers made only 14 percent of revenue from distributed content
With newsletters hot, monetization strategies bloom, publishers across the country have all beefed up their investment in newsletters, focusing not just on growing their audiences but on improving their design, making them more technologically sophisticated, visually rich and engaging.
Programmatic advertising is under review, a poll among 59 members of WFA, found that nearly 90% of respondents are reviewing their programmatic advertising contracts, and seeking transparency and control over how their ad budgets are spent

Campaign of the Week

For Orville Redenbache popcorn on SB Nation – I’m not normally a fan of content hubs, but this is a hub with a difference. When I was looking for campaigns of the week, I looked at 20 or so different campaigns for the Super Bowl. These focused purely on the game, the technology, the food or the entertainment. This piece on SB Nation pulls in everything. It sends you through to Eater for your snacks, Vox for your Entertainment and Recode for the SB tech stories. All whilst including highlights from each. Throughout the whole piece Orville Redenbache has sponsorship, videos and banners. Once you click through to each site, each section is sponsored by the brand. Nice, in depth, and allows the popcorn brand to own everything Super Bowl related.

Smartest Commentary

“The ideal team [for a perfect native advertising project] would be a person from the brand who understands [native advertising] working closely with the content studio who understands what the goals of the campaign are and can articulate them well and who is strong enough to oversee what the content studio is creating, so that you’re working in tandem throughout. At the end the result is what everyone expected and then it succeeds.” Stephanie Losee is currently Head of Content at Visa

Datepoints of Note

Native ads with rich media like images or videos drive up to 60 percent more conversions than those without.

Notes from Nudge

Marketers are too often lead to believe that a conversion has to be a final step in the buyer journey; that’s not entirely true. ROI metrics have been, and still are the number one problem for content marketers. However, this is no longer the case for Nudge customers

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