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We’ve Gone Mobile: Introducing Sharethrough Mobile

We are very excited to announce the launch of Sharethrough Mobile Sponsored Stories, a technology solution to power native ads across the mobile web. We’ve been hard at work for many months testing and iterating on this platform, aiming to deliver a product that will make a significant impact on solving the problem of mobile monetization and brand advertising on the mobile web. We believe that today’s options for mobile advertising don’t provide a user experience that matches the quality of the phenomenal devices we hold in our pockets, nor do they provide publishers with a simple way to integrate brands into their content experience. With the launch of this new Sharethrough offering, we believe that things are about to change. (See here to try it out for yourself).

A number of industry leading publishers, including PEOPLE, Serious Eats and Forbes, are already using the Sharethrough mobile platform to power native ads on their mobile websites.
pepsi mobile

Pepsi ®, one of our mobile launch brand partners, shared some thoughts on why Sharethrough Mobile Sponsored Stories is important to them:

“At Pepsi, we strongly believe in creating advertising that is genuinely entertaining and promoting our content through ways that are respectful to our audience,” said Josh Nafman, Sr. Digital Brand Manager, Pepsi ®. “Sharethrough’s mobile platform will help Pepsi reach audiences in a way that upholds our values of engagement and compelling advertising experiences. We’re excited for this new channel to connect with our fans on their mobile devices.”

We are also working with leading brands including Cruzan® Rum, Sauza® Tequila, and Pepsi. Both Cruzan Rum and Sauza Tequila will be using the Sharethrough mobile platform to reach engaged audiences for their entertaining video campaigns, including Sauza Tequila’s irresistible “Make It With a Lifeguard,” video series. sauza image “With Mobile Internet usage on the rise, Sauza’s excited to be one of the first brands to test Sharethrough’s Native advertising distribution method specifically in driving consumers to watch our ‘Make It With a Lifeguard’ videos,” said Lindsey Lewis, Brand Manager, Jim Beam Inc. We are thrilled to provide engaging content whenever and wherever our fans want.”

So how does it work?
Sharethrough Mobile Sponsored Stories allow brands to promote their original content, such as videos, articles, posts, reviews and more, across mobile sites in a scalable way that respects and enhances the user experience of each site. Mobile Sponsored Stories appear as part of the stream of content within a publisher’s mobile site experience and are automatically updated to match the look-and-feel of the organic site content. This allows advertisers to promote their content in placements across the mobile web that feel native to each site they appear on.

How do you make ads look and feel native?
Real Time Templating (RTT) a technology that Sharethrough developed, allows our advertising platform to identify the style elements of any webpage and match each ad to those attributes, in real time. Even better, we are able to match any future updates to the style template, so even if a publisher changes their design, your ad will stay consistent with the new style elements.

Are these ads effective?
In a word, yes. The Sharethrough solution was built to work in a “scroll-centric” environment, it does not interrupt mobile site usage – which according to Forrester is users’ most frequently requested mobile ad feature. Our mobile ads are ideally suited to the smaller screen size of mobile devices, where there is less real estate for content and advertising to run adjacently. Sharethrough Mobile Sponsored Stories enables brand messages to stand out among the site content, with up to one-third of the entire screen dedicated to brand content.

Our Vision
The launch of Mobile Sponsored Stories marks a big leap for Sharethrough and the native advertising industry at large. Our goal is to be the leading provider of native ad products across all platforms and to create technology that makes advertising better – today we feel just a little closer to that vision. If you’d like to learn more about our mobile advertising solutions, please click here.

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INFOGRAPHIC: Native Advertising Effectiveness Study by IPG Media Lab and Sharethrough

Over the past several months, we have worked with IPG Media Lab to complete the industry’s first native ad effectiveness study using both eye-tracking and survey-based techniques. The goal of the study was to measure visual attention and brand lift for native ads from top brands, including National Geographic, Southern Comfort, and a premium travel brand in comparison to traditional display ads. After surveying 4,770 consumers and using eye-tracking technology on 200 consumers, some of the more telling statistics were:

  • Consumers looked at native ads 53% more frequently than display ads.
  • 25% more consumers were measured to look at in-feed native ad placements (the most common editorial native ad format) than display ad units.
  • Native ads registered 18% higher lift in purchase intent and 9% lift for brand affinity responses than banner ads
  • 32% of respondents said the native ad “is an ad I would share with a friend of family member” versus just 19% for display ads.

To see full results take a look at the infographic below.

 

sharethrough-IPG-Infographic-web

 

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Yahoo! Joins the Native Party

Late last year we made a few predictions about the native advertising market, and one of them was that Yahoo would roll out a native ad solution.  So today’s announcement of Yahoo! Stream Ads makes us at Sharethrough feel a little Nate Silver-esque.  We also noted that native would be the answer to mobile, so it comes as no surprise that Yahoo will feature Stream Ads on their mobile application.  In addition to our predictions, we offered Yahoo suggestions for a native redesign, which included several takes on Yahoo native ads.  In the redesign piece, our CEO, Dan Greenberg, noted one major reason why Yahoo was the prime candidate to “go native”:

“Yahoo’s undeniable strength is content. From Sports to News to Entertainment, Yahoo has far exceeded any other Silicon Valley company’s efforts to build loyal audiences through original content. There could not be a better time for Yahoo to go native with content-driven advertising. Brands are investing unprecedented budgets in their own original content and publishing efforts, and are in deep need of new mediums to promote this branded content in native ways.”

Ok, enough with the back-patting. The main reason for this post is to welcome Yahoo to the native party. Their inclusion is a large step for the entire digital advertising industry and  a very important stamp of approval from one of the largest media companies. We look forward to additional publishers and media heavy weights following their lead.

From the 1st ever Native Advertising Summit, to an increase in branded custom content, to today’s announcement, 2013  has been a big year for native.  To reflect that growth, we plan on rolling out another version of the Native Adscape, which offers the only all-inclusive view of companies, technologies, and publishers involved in the native movement.

Until next time, stay native, friends.

 

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New native advertising study from Nielsen and Sharethrough shows why choice beats interruption

While the interest and conversation around native advertising has only continued to escalate, there has been a lack of concrete data about the effectiveness of native ads. To that end, Sharethrough recently conducted a study with Nielsen to compare the brand-building effectiveness of native video ads against pre-roll video ad units. Sharethrough worked with five leading advertisers to serve the same creative message in both pre-roll and native advertising formats for each advertiser’s campaign and used Nielsen Online Brand Effect for in-depth metrics on brand lift and the campaign elements driving that lift.

So what happened?! Native advertising showed higher brand lift across all the campaigns in the study. You read that right, in 5 out of 5 campaigns native ads delivered higher brand lift than pre-roll.

In fact, in one campaign for soft drink brand Jarritos, native ads generated an 82% brand lift amongst users exposed to the ads as compared to just 2.1% for users exposed to the campaign’s pre-roll ads.

The study also found that users were actually “more likely to have negative brand opinions after being exposed to the pre-roll creative than the native ads.”

In another campaign for a consumer packaged goods product, native ads generated a 42% lift in purchase intent, while pre-roll did not generate any lift.

While we’ve always considered it to be self-evident that choice beats interruption, sometimes you just need data to help hammer home the case. This report helps illustrate the positive impact that native ads can have for brand advertisers and why they should be careful about the use of interruptive advertising mediums.

To download the full report, please visit here.

Ok enough of these long blocks of text, here’s an infographic that sums up the key findings:

infographic3

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Native Advertising Explained at South By Southwest

Our CEO, Dan Greenberg, met with Mashable’s Lauren Drell at South by Southwest (SXSW) last week.  The above interview hits on several important points, including how we define native, the importance of branded content, and how Sharethrough fits into the native conversation. Here are a few key quotes:

On defining native, “We have always defined native as taking whatever core form or function of the site is and using that to define the advertising that shows up on the site. On YouTube a native ad format is a promoted video, and on Twitter the native content unit is a promoted Tweet.”

On Sharethrough’s role, “Facebook and Twitter are doing what we call ‘native advertising.’ What Sharethrough is doing is bringing that same type of native ad format and native ad technology to the rest of the internet (more traditional publishers).”

On branded content, “Branded content and native are two sides of the same coin. You have to start with content before you talk about anything native. If you try to push bad advertisements through anything native it totally fails. So you have to have branded content and then you can use native ad formats to scale it beyond just the walled gardens of whatever platform is started on.”

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What is native advertising?

Native advertising is defined as ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a website or app. Native ad experiences differ from traditional digital ad formats such as display and pre-roll because they are well integrated to the visual design of a publisher’s site and are choice-based, meaning that they do not rely on interruptive or distracting mechanisms to force a user’s attention.

Native advertising exists in many different formats, including promoted videos, images, articles, music and other media types. The consistent attributes of native ads across all of these types of media are 1) Strong visual integration with the publisher’s look and feel 2) Choice-based interaction 3) Content-based experiences, i.e. ads are experienced as standalone content, not attached to unrelated media on the site.

Native ads are distributed across two specific types of online platforms: Closed and Open.

Closed Vs. Open Native advertising:

  • Closed – Native advertising on “Closed” platforms is defined by brands creating profiles and/or content within a platform, then promoting that content within the confines of that same closed platform. Examples include Promoted Tweets on Twitter, Sponsored Stories on Facebook and TrueView Video Ads on Youtube.
  • Open – Native advertising on “open” platforms is defined by the ability for a brand to promote the same piece of branded content across multiple platforms within native ad formats. Unlike closed platforms, the branded content asset lives outside the platform. For example, Sharethrough is an open native advertising platform, as it allows brands to promote the same video file in native ad placements across multiple publishers.

See below for examples of platforms and publishers that offer native ad experiences:

nativeAdscape-20130215

The Native Adscape is a reference tool that provides a holistic look at the Native Advertising market landscape. The Adscape segments companies and publishers by several different categories, including social vs. editorial, platform vs. publisher, open vs. closed platforms, and mobile vs. PC. As native advertising continues to grow as both a publisher monetization and branded content distribution strategy, the Native Adscape will continue to add new companies and platforms.

Wanna know more? See below for published articles on native advertising:

Join the Conversation!

Stay up on everything happening in the native advertising space by following Sharethrough on Twitter, visiting our Native Advertising Leaderboard, and viewing the best branded video at Sharethrough.TV.

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Sharethrough Sponsored Stories Brings Native Ads to the Rest of the Web

Today is a big day for Sharethrough. We’ve taken another major step towards our goal of becoming the industry’s leading native advertising platform through the launch of our newest native ad product, Sharethrough Sponsored Stories. Sponsored stories is the first distribution solution that allows brands to promote articles, posts, reviews and more in native ad placements across the open web. Brand launch partners Land Rover, Pop Secret, and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, helped us ring in the news with a phenomenal set of campaigns ranging from infographics on movie consumption trends, educational editorial content about our health and original brand entertainment created in conjunction with leading media companies.

One of the main reasons we are so excited about this product is that it now allows us to promote an advertiser’s entire suite of branded content, beyond just video.  While we will continue to be the go-to distribution partner for great video content via our Sponsored Videos product, now brands have the ability to promote their written custom content and/or amplify the rollout of a new video campaign or product. Even better, they are able to promote their content on many of the high-performing publishers that we have always offered.

The reason we built this product is that we noticed that when a brand creates a sponsored post, infographic or other piece of original content, they are stuck with limited options for promotion and distribution. Some may turn that post into a Facebook ad, but that ad is then stuck within Facebook and not available to the rest of the web. If they try to buy ads across the web, they are stuck with banners, boxes and other forms of advertising that limits their ability to tell their story and build their brand. We think advertisers creating great original content deserve better distribution options than that. Likewise, publishers deserve advertising partners that can offer native ad placements with the same ease that they can plug in standard ads on to their site.

Below is an example of a Sponsored Story unit featuring Pop Secret’s infographic on the changing trends in ‘How we watch movies.’ You’ll notice that the unit is labeled as a Sponsored Story, fits the native look and feel of the site’s content and features a large visual canvas with many different sharing options.

native ad Sponsored Stories screenshot

One of the best parts about Sharethrough Sponsored Stories is its flexibility. We can customize images, headers, sharing options and automatically update the ads to fit the native look and feel of each site it appears on. To help our advertising partners drive even higher success rates, our custom content team can also create multiple versions of headlines and descriptions and optimize each campaign to find the highest performing version.

We founded Sharethrough with the vision of the being the premier distribution platform for branded content across the web. We couldn’t be more excited about the market we are in and the times ahead. Content marketing has been recognized as the number one priority for marketers in 2013, as marketers across the board are realizing that quality original content is the best way to reach audiences online. As the industry is also learning, native ads are the media distribution strategy for brand content marketing.

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NAS Panel Spotlight: The Separation of Editorial and Branded Content, Where is the Line?

As publishers search for new ways to monetize both their desktop and mobile publications, native advertising has emerged as a viable and exciting option. However, many publishers have wrestled with the thought of bringing the forever-separate worlds of advertising and editorial closer together. Will it really improve the user experience? How will it be disclosed? How big of a role should a publications editors play in sponsored content?

The Native Advertising Summit panel, titled “Beyond Church and State” and moderated by Fast Company’s managing editor Terresa Iezzi, will discuss many of these questions.  But before we kick off the discussion on Wednesday, lets take a look at two trends that highlight the undeniable convergence of brands and publishers.

Brands Thinking Like Publishers 

As publishers pin their business models on native inventory, it is allowing agencies and brands creative leeway to think outside the “banner box” — fostering a new era in creative development. This means that agencies must be thinking about a wide range of content, including serialized videos, awesome sponsored posts, photo feeds, meme-jacks and branded music playlists.

Much of the creative know-how to achieve this already exists within agencies, but many have also created roles such as earned media directors, real-time copywriters, and content producers.

These individuals help weave editorial’s strong points into the branded content creation process, such as real-time storytelling, long-form writing, and the inclusion of content that lends itself to social network sharing. Strategies that help make up a concept known as  ”newsroom marketing” (Newsroom marketing was evangalized by companies like  Virgin).

Publishers Thinking Like Brands

As Upworthy’s Peter Koechley will talk about during his Native Advertising Summit presentation, “WHOA: Click Here For The Shocking True Story Of A Publisher That Thinks Like An Advertiser”, it is not just brands who are taking cues from editors, but vice versa.  In our headline-focused, article-skimming culture, publishers are now using attention-grabbing techniques deployed by brand marketers, such as creating great content teasers (Brand example: Mini’s Backflip; publisher example: most of the headlines and descriptions on Upworthy) and humorous articles and videos (Brand example: Dollar Shave Club; publisher example: Guardian & Observer). When you think about these examples and other successful marketing campaigns (Budweiser, Nike, and Old Spice come to mind immediately),  the thought of trying to borrow brands strategies to drive attention to editorial content might not be such a bad idea.

Panel Details
Beyond Church and State
No one can speak to a site’s audience like its editors and writers. Recognizing this, a number of media companies have created teams dedicated to the creation of custom content for brand customers. Are we now in a world where ads truly are content? What are the ingredients to create sponsored content that people widely share and enjoy? What does the relationship between pure editorial content and sponsored posts look like in the future? Leading publishers will discuss where the new lines are being drawn and debate the effect on journalistic integrity.

Moderator
Teressa Iezzi – Writer and Editor, Fast Company

Participants
James Del – Executive Director, Gawker
Paul Greenberg – CEO, CollegeHumor Media
Kimberly Lau – VP and General Manager, The Atlantic Digital
Eddy Moretti – CCO, VICE

Lastly, If you want to take a look at some of the leading publishers who are experimenting with native ads, make sure to check out “The Native Adscape” for a holistic view of the native advertising landscape.

 

 

 

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CEO of appssavvy Joins The Native Advertising Summit’s Mobile Panel

The Native Advertising Summit has made another big addition. Chris Cunningham, co-founder and CEO of appssavvy, will participate in the “Is Native Advertising the Answer to Mobile?” panel on February 27. Chris will join a stellar group of panelists, including Evan Giamanco (PEOPLE Digital), Akshay Kothari (Pulse), and moderator Dan Greenberg (Sharethrough).

The signs of a growing native advertising movement on mobile are everywhere. For anyone who listened to Facebook’s earnings call earlier this month, it was clear that their mobile ad products are rapidly becoming a cornerstone of their advertising strategy.  In fact, mobile business accounted for 23 percent of Facebook’s total ad revenue, compared to 14 percent in the third quarter. For Twitter, the majority of its ad revenue already comes from mobile devices.  Need a little more mobile validation? Here are a few quick stats:

1) Right now, mobile ads account for 2% of the ad market. By 2016, EMarketer expects mobile ads to account for 11%.

2) BIA/Kelsey estimates social-mobile ad revenues will increase from $500 million in 2012 to $1.5 billion in 2016.

Ok, so mobile is huge for social networks, but what about for the rest of the web? How are publishers like People using social advertising strategies to help create and deliver similar native ad experiences on their mobile sites? And what type of products are advertising technology companies creating to allow publishers to deliver these campaigns at scale?

This panel will tackle these questions, as well as the larger question: Is native advertising the answer to the mobile ad problem. (And on a related note, is mobile the answer to the native ad scale problem?)  

As you can see, these questions are bound to stir up some interesting discussion and that makes us excited.

To foreshadow the upcoming conversation at the Native Advertising Summit, appssavvy CEO, Chris Cunningham, notes “Mobile marketing is making a mistake following the well traveled path of containing advertising, just in much smaller boxes. The opportunity ahead is to understand what people are doing, and deliver and receive advertising with context and at natural breaks in the mobile experience. Native is the path to mobile advertising success.”

Panel Details:
February 27, 2013
4:05 PM ET

Is Native Advertising the Answer to Mobile?
Publishers and advertisers are both grappling to figure out the right way to connect with consumers on their mobile devices. While mobile advertising has been slow to attract premium rates and solidify optimal ad experiences, a number of new native ad formats that are native to mobile layouts have shown encouraging early results. This panel will bring together mobile advertising specialists to discuss the latest mobile ad models and where the market is headed.

Chris Cunningham – CEO, appssavvy
Evan Giamanco – Director, Business Operations, PEOPLE Digital
Dan Greenberg – CEO, Sharethrough
Akshay Kothari – Pulse

 

 

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The Native Advertising Summit Has Arrived

summit header
It’s game time folks. 2012 saw a constantly escalating amount of conversation and coverage about the native ad market. In 2013, we’re going to start providing some answers. We’d like to officially announce The Native Advertising Summit.

The Summit, which will be held on February 27 at the Standard-High Line in New York City, is the first conference dedicated to defining and discussing the future of native advertising. And the timing could not be better.  With over 25 speakers from top brands (GE and Citi), publishers (AOL and Vice), agencies (MediaCom and OMD), and platforms (Tumblr and Pandora), the Summit will offer substantive discussions on some of the most pressing issues facing native ad industry: scale, branded content, mobile and editorial standards.  Each topic will be discussed by leaders in the field and broken down into digestible segments.

If you just can’t wait until the Summit, have no fear. Over the next few weeks we will preview each panel, the panelists, as well as highlight a few successful native ads campaigns. Until then, feel free to follow Summit news on Twitter: @NativeAdSummit.

See you in New York.