This Week in Native Ads 9/15

With all this year’s Dmexco attendees en route home here’s this week in native.

Notable Stories this Week

Predictive recommendations creating new inventory for Facebook. This is part of a wider narrative developing around AI content and the ad revenue created from it.
WaPo robot reporter has published 850 articles, 500 articles generated 500,000 clicks (around the election).
Jack Marshall at WSJ asked FB why they allow brands to edit the headlines of news stories (to promote favorably), their response: to stop allowing it.
Google responds to the Intelligent Tracking Prevention update coming in iOS11.
Ally Stuart of ShareThrough on publisher alliances from a European perspective.
Apple News is testing video, initial phase is manually curated.
OutBrain launched their affinity index. Neat stuff.
Twitter promises to make it easier for advertisers to run campaigns on the platform.
Hearst is going after Amazon’s commerce advertising business launching their own alternatives.
Awesomeness opens a content agency, and related what branded content means to the future of your agency?
Ritz tests branded voice activation on Amazon Echo.
A local case study of a cleaning company using native content to drive business. Examples like this are important – to show this isn’t just for the top 1% of brands but also supporting local content creators.
Forbes favorite metrics for native content.
[From us] We just shared some exciting new features in our latest product newsletter, see it here.

Deals/M&A

Campaign of the Week

Smartest commentary

“If we want to see true investment in great content within companies, content needs to be accountable to more than just top-of-funnel audience building and results.” –Joe Lazauskas, Director of Content Strategy, Contently

Datapoints of note

NBCUniversal is the top media company producing 2,512 Branded Facebook posts for H1 2017.
For H1 2017, branded content that featured an advertiser within a media asset produced a 30% higher response rate than content just sponsored by a brand.
Across all ad categories, autos lead advertiser adoption of social branded content from TV networks with the highest share of posts, at 23%, and the highest response rate, at 20%.
^ From a nativeception content for Turner Ignite.
Scan these datapoints on the impact of podcast advertising. One highlight, 65% of listeners remembered the ads the next day.
Last year SF Chronicles StoryStudio produced 400 native ad stories, this year it’s on pace for more than 1,000.