This Week in Native Ads 9/15

• 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

• OMD & Pressboard partner to scale & measure sponsored content.

Campaign of the Week

• New Orleans Tourism introduces me to Boudin in partnership with Bon Appetite.
• How to think differently about a flexible workforce, Catalant with HBR.

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.

Events

• [Sep 27, New York] Native Forum at AdWeek.

We’re also on the hunt for Account Exec roles with a few more roles in the pipeline, if you know anyone please send them our way.

Ta,

Ben