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.
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.