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Forbes Insights Report – Native Video Content is Gaining Steam

Two diverging media phenomenons are impacting how marketers are advertising online: Branded video content growth and the demise of interruptive media tactics.  As we have discussed in length on this blog before, ‘native advertising’ has emerged as a solution to the convergence between quality brand video content, and the changing media ad consumption habits of consumers.

Now, we have some pretty compelling research to back up that claim.

Over the past few months, our research team partnered with the Forbes Insights team to survey 136 marketing executives from leading brands such as Intel, JetBlue, Heineken, Honda, & K-Swiss to assess the market’s appetite for native advertising and branded video content. It turns out that branded content and native advertising have a ton of supporters.

Here are a few of them:

“Consumption has changed, and advertisers will have to continue to follow [consumers]. Quality has become more important now.” — Ron Amram, Senior Media Director, Heineken USA

“If you do something that’s exciting and relevant, you can far expand your media spend in terms of its impact.” —Matt Jarvis, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer, 72andSunny

“We’ve gone beyond  the thought of interactive digital into creating our own digital content wholesale.” — Marty St. George, SVP, Marketing and Commercial Strategy, JetBlue

In addition, many of the largest online platforms have been first on board to adopt native advertising (including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and WordPress). So while the term ‘native’ ads is still growing among marketing executives, a majority of them value the attributes of ‘native’ video:

With 32% of CMOs saying they have bought or are planning to buy native video advertising in the next 6 months, we invite you to download the full report here.

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Native Advertising Round-Up: Sharethrough Sponsored Videos, The Atlantic’s Native Solution, and a lot of Conversation

It was a big week for us over here at Sharethrough, as we launched our native video advertising platform, Sharethrough Sponsored Videos. Below are five articles that detail the launch of our platform and the impact that scalable native advertising solutions stand to have on the media industry.

In addition to our announcement, this week was also a good time to look at the growing conversation around native (as Mashable did here).  Whenever a new advertising term or concept emerges there is an innate desire to immediately place it in a box, and in some cases, illegitimatize it as another buzzword.  A consistent thread of the native ad debate has been its relationship to content marketing and advertorials. Both of these marketing strategies can be a part of a native advertising campaign, but where native advertising is fundamentally differentiated from advertorials and custom content marketing is the issue of scale. Native advertising is a media solution that allows advertisers to promote their original content in native placements across many publishers, not just on a single customized editorial placement. Whether it is a sponsored playlist, an in-feed status update, or a video placed within a branded post (see the Media Post article for the different types publisher layouts that support native), native encompasses a new channel in media distribution that allows brands to be a part of a publisher’s core experience, at scale.

And we are just getting started. Major publishers including The Atlantic’s and USA Today have kicked off significant redesigns and native strategies that foreshadow where the online media industry is heading at large.

We hope you enjoy the articles below, and we hope these lead you to many other native discoveries!

Sincerely,

Your Sharethrough Team

 

Sharethrough Sponsored Videos Announcement

TechCrunch – Sharethrough Unveils Its Sponsored Videos Platform To Deliver Native Ads
Forbes – Sharethrough’s Sponsored Videos Bringing Branded Content To Websites, Apps
AdWeek – Sharethrough Promises Video Ads That Look Like Content
MediaPost – Video Ads Go Native with Sharethrough
Venture Beat – Native ads go mainstream with ShareThrough Sponsored Videos

Defining Native

Mashable – What Is ‘Native Advertising’? Depends Who You Ask

Publishers

MediaPost – The Future of Media: Going Native in Grids, Feeds, and Galleries
Digiday – The Atlantic Tries Native Ads

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Native Advertising RoundUp: Lessons Galore for Publishers, Advertisers and Developers

Ask and you shall receive. For those in need of a quick 101 on native advertising, we’ve created an animated GIF sequence to bring you fully up to speed. PandoDaily published it this week and you can find it right here:

PandoDaily – Native Ad Part Deux: The Growth of Open Native Advertising

In addition to the Pando piece, there were actually some other articles published this week on the subject of native advertising. We’ve broken out this week’s highlighted articles by key segments of the larger native advertising ecosystem: publishers, advertisers, and developers. As a whole, these groups have the ability to accelerate change within the online advertising world, and as they find new ways to work together through native ads, we will see an internet that looks cleaner, feels more natural, and is less interruptive.

1) For publishers, our very own Dan Greenberg discussed how they can best organize and build out native ad strategies. While many of the “new web” content publishers have already begun to embrace native, many of the old guards are still wrestling with how to seamlessly incorporate it within their web properties. With those publishers in mind (as well as newer entrepreneurs), we created a four-part strategy for successful native integration:

1. Creating an “open” native experience at the outset, then build out “closed”
2. Use a native friendly user interface (grids, galleries, streams)
3. Build with brand content innovators in mind
4. Provide sophisticated analytics to track engagement

TechCrunch- 4 Pro Tips For Publishers Building a Native Ad Strategy

2) For advertisers, Ad Contrarian focused on the flaws with display advertising strategy and the overstated importance of media science.  The article argues that display ads, despite becoming more contextually relevant, are inherently flawed.  That flaw comes from their actual location, or physical property.  In other words, all the the fancy media science around consumer behavior is of little importance if the advertisements are ignored from the start.

While knowing what people want to focus on is helpful, it cannot make up for the interruption or misplacement that are inherent characteristics of display.

To the Ad Contrarian, there are really only two types of advertisements: visible (delivered within the content) and invisible  (display).

Ad Contrarian – Invisible Advertising

3) For developers, Forbes tackled an issue that has lived in Silicon Valley for a while now: Programmers despise online advertisements.  So, what is their beef?  Well, they believe that many of the Silicon Valley “geniuses” are no longer focusing on how to improve their products. Instead, they are now focusing only on how to monetize their sites through display advertising, and it is affecting the quality of the applications and products that are being created. To programmers, their solution to this monetization issue is for large platforms like Facebook to simply sell access to their “social graphs” instead of advertising.  In their minds, this would allow developers the creative freedom to build cool stuff. What the sale of that “social graph” actually looks like (and how that makes money), is not completely clear, but what is clear is that developers seem to be missing the importance of advertising as an important (and proven) monetization tool.  Advertisements do work … well the ones that aren’t interruptive.  So instead of bashing them, these developers should be working to create a better, more native, digital advertising experience for all users.

Forbes - Why Do Programmers Hate Advertising So Much?

What these three articles highlight is that native advertising has now infiltrated all three major groups of web professionals – from product promoters to content creators. While we have not reached the pinnacle of display ad frustration, we are seeing an increase in native advertising discussions across the board.  And that makes for exciting times, my friends.

Natively,

Your Sharethrough Team

PS – In late breaking native ad hiring news, Tumblr recently announced its hiring of Groupon sales exec Lee Brown. Congrats Lee!

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Native Advertising Round-Up: Yahoo’s Native Ad Strategy, Twitter’s Brand Advertising Attraction, and Forbes AdVoices

For many of us, Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail were revolutionary, game changing communication tools. Remember all the fun chain emails you used to send? Yea, so do we. In fact, Yahoo! itself has been one of the major players in the creation of the World Wide Web as we know it. Given their level of prestige (and their history of innovative advancements), we decided that they would be the perfect publisher to feature in our first ever “native ad redesign”.

To showcase how native would look and feel on Yahoo, we took five of their properties and completely stripped them of banner advertisements. In their place, we replaced them with native units such as promoted videos, promoted playlists, promoted trends, promoted images, and promoted articles. The feedback we received from brands, media agencies, creative agencies, and consumers was overwhelmingly positive, which tells us that there is a real hunger for new, native monetization strategies. We urge you to check out the redesign in the link below.

In other native news this week, AdAge wrote an in-depth piece about Forbes AdVoices, an advertising product that allows brands to create their own content and place it natively within the Forbes flow of news. Forbes responded with a thoughtful take on both AdVoices and the state of content marketing, including publications such as the Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Gawker, and Buzzfeed. Forbes continues to be a leader in native marketing solutions and is now looking to evolve its use of video for AdVoices.

In social ad news, Twitter‘s ad products continued to make headlines this week, as Pepsi publicly stated how impressed they were with the results of their Olympic Twitter campaign. Pepsi, which rolled out a campaign centered around music videos by Katy Perry and other celebrities, used “Promoted Tweets” to help boost their Twitter audience reach. The results were dramatic, as 24 percent of Twitter users who received Pepsi’s tweets clicked on, replied to or helped broadcast them. Twitter is one of the industry’s leading examples of how brand advertising can be successful through native media solutions.

Lastly, the discussion around Facebook’s social ads continued in a Forbes hosted interview with Greg Badros, Facebook’s VP of engineering and products and Tom Bedecarre, chairman of digital agency AKQA. While the conversation touched on many different aspects of Facebook’s advertising strategy, one major takeaway was that ads saw more engagement in native environments. As Bedecarre stated, “We see more response to Sponsored Stories than to the right-hand ads. We’re seeing higher engagement rates.”

Native News Round-up:

TechCrunch – Dear Yahoo, I Redesigned Your Website (And Took Out 512,240 Pixels Of Banner Ads)

So what happens when you take out banner advertisements on five of Yahoo’s top properties? Well, you have a lot less distraction. Make sure to check this one out.

AdAge – Forbes’ AdVoice Has Plenty Of Take, But Impact on Revenue Is Unclear

The first of two articles on Forbes’ AdVoice, this piece discussed how Forbes is currently pricing the product. While AdVoice participation currently requires brands to buy ad packages totaling $1M annually, there are discussions about shorter, cheaper requirements that could come to fruition soon. In addition, Forbes intends to roll out AdVoice for video with a preferred partner in October. This will be a major milestone for native video advertising, so make sure to check in with the Native Roundup when Forbes’ makes an announcement.

Forbes – Inside Forbes: The Advertising Trend That Will Shake Up 100 Years of Journalism

Straight from Forbes itself, this article discusses AdVoice and compares it to other content marketing products currently on the market. For Forbes, they are very clear about setting boundaries between AdVoice, true journalism, consumer reports, and other relevant voices, but they also stand by the need to merge it all together to create a native experience. This understanding that content can come from all sources is a gigantic step, and we look forward to seeing what else Forbes will do as one of the pioneers in native.

Reuters – With Olympics backdrop, Twitter goes for gold in ad strategy

With impressive results from the Pepsi Olympic campaign, Twitter is now seeing some positive conversations centered on their ad products. More specifically, it has led to theorizing about what exactly Twitter does for brands, since it is not a direct response product. Instead, Twitter is a platform for brand marketing, which some believe is an underused resource in the digital advertising arsenal.

Forbes – Facebook Social Ads: What’s Working, What’s Not

In this interview featuring Greg Badros, Facebook’s VP of engineering and products and Tom Bedecarre, chairman of digital agency AKQA, we learn more about the future of Facebook’s advertising strategy. For one, we learn that more people are engaging with Sponsored Stories than right-hand ads. On the other hand, we learn that many marketers are still weary of Facebook advertising. Whether it is developers at Facebook who are rolling out too many ad products (such as Facebook’s “related ads” that debuted last year) or just a general leeriness to be the first brand to try something new, Facebook has hurdles to overcome. But as Badros noted, Facebook is still at the beginning of their advertising lifecycle.

Like always, let us know if we missed anything, and feel free to get involved in the comments section.

Natively,
Your Sharethrough Team

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Native Advertising Round-Up: Agency Teams Shift Towards Native; Digg’s Relaunch, Google’s Wildfire Acquisition, and Facebook’s Promoted Posts Drive Headlines

Is your team ready to take on native? Whether it is producers who can create excellent branded content or real-time copywriters who can work on the fly, there are clear signs that show agency dynamics are fundamentally shifting. In a Sharethrough-authored article on AdAge, we breakdown the reasons behind this shift as well as the type of roles that will help drive native content moving forward. For many of the companies below, these types of roles are already being examined, and in some cases, filled.

Additionally, while most of us have been busy watching the Olympics this week, the trio of Facebook, Digg and Google have been busy making headlines.

Don’t call it a comeback — this week Digg launched their new, advertisement-free site. By removing all ads (both native and display), Digg is making a decision to refocus on their users and rebuild a community base that long ago moved to competitors like Reddit. While their initial plan centers on community building, their clean, image-focused layout hints at a monetization strategy that will be focused solely on native. As Digiday’s Brian Morrissey points out in article below, “For content-based sites like Digg, the banner is unwanted.”

Google got a little bigger this week with its $250 million acquisition of Wildfire. Wildfire, a social marketing company, allows companies to manage their social media campaigns across the Internet. While their ability to offer sophisticated insights into application development and analytics provides tangible value, TechCrunch points out that they do not have the social API relationships to allow them to place ads. Instead, they have an exclusive social ad deal with social start-up, Adaptly. Safe to say that their social advertising M&A acquisitions are far from over….

Speaking of social advertising, Facebook continues to make news after its earnings last week by teeing up their new ad product, “Promoted Posts”. In this model, brands pay per status update based on how many of their followers they want to see the update. This is another attempt by Facebook to segment brands’ followers into groups that they can individually monetize, next up “Targeted Posts” a la Linkedin.

AdAge – The Future Belongs to ‘Native’ Ads, Is Your Agency Ready?

Don Draper may not understand why having a native team is important, but we certainly do. In an age where branded content and native postings are becoming the norm, it is imperative that agency teams stay ahead of the curve. By bringing in new talent that knows how to work within a native environment, agencies can think more creatively, respond to social media suggestions quicker, and pivot to new trends more efficiently. This article does an excellent job breaking down the talent categories that matter.

Digiday – The Aesthetic Pity of Web Advertising

Brian Morrissey does an excellent job breaking down what he calls the “display advertising industrial complex”. In layman’s terms, this essentially means that some form of banners will exist for the foreseeable future because advertisers are already used to dumping billions of dollars into them. Because of the complex, it is even more important for native platforms, like Sharethrough, to continue to find scalable solutions and showcase analytics highlighting the power of native advertising over banners. When you have people like Gawker founder Nick Denton saying he hopes one day his sites won’t run banners, you are on to something.

Mashable – Digg is Back With New App and Site Re-Launch

As discussed in the opening paragraphs, Digg rolled out a new website. By using larger story panes and a cleaner approach, the website looks more polished and is receiving positive feedback. One thing that is interesting to note about the new site is that much more of the content is picked by editors than users. This is very different from previous Digg versions that tried to remain user-centric. However, given that BetaWorks, which owns the news aggregator News.me, acquired Digg; it is no surprise that Digg has taken on more of an editorial voice and has moved further away from purely user-generated content.

TechCrunch – Wildfire Only Sells Ads Through Its Partner Adaptly, So Will Google Buy Them Too?

With the $250 million acquisition of Wildfire, Google made a statement that they consider social a very important part of the future. While AdWords has been a gigantic moneymaker in the search world, gaining access to social data will allow Google to find in-roads within Facebook and Twitter’s ad strategies. Wildfire is an excellent first step for Google, as they can help educate Google on social and begin to think of a strategy around social advertising.

Forbes – Facebook Page Owners Can Pay $500 For 250,000 Eyeballs With ‘Promoted Posts’

While last week was all about their earnings, this week was all about Facebook’s new “Promoted Posts”. Facebook, in essence, has (smartly) decided to charge brands to interact with their followers. While the prices range significantly depending on how many followers you want to engage, brands are now met with a choice every time they have a new link, statement, or video they want to post. Now the waiting game is on to see whether brands consider their Facebook community as valuable as Facebook believes it is.

If you like this round-up and want to receive even more insights into the world of native advertising and branded content, make sure you sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter.

Natively,
Team Sharethrough