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Yesterday Was Officially “Mock Native Advertising Day”

On Monday, The Atlantic ran a sponsored post from the much-maligned Church of Scientology, which was subsequently picked up by Gawker, mocked, and shared across the interwebs.  Since then, The Atlantic has pulled down the post, but not before spoofs appeared on The Onion and TechCrunch, among others.  While the entire web used yesterday as “Mock Native Advertising Day”, we wanted to use our blog to do the opposite. Instead of focusing on why this particular sponsored post was received so poorly, we wanted to highlight a few publishers (including The Atlantic) and brands that have implemented sponsored content in a meaningful way. In a new category like native advertising, mistakes will happen, but growing pains are bound to happen in every industry.

The most important part of successful sponsored content integration, whether it’s a video, post or another format, is that it is relevant to the publisher’s audience.  A post about Scientology may not work for The Atlantic, but on other sites it may be the perfect piece of sponsored content. With that in mind, below are five pieces of sponsored content that were excellent matches for the audiences of the respective publications in which they appeared:

Mashable/IBM – The Rise of Mobile Shopping
Audience: Business professionals, entrepreneurs, technology enthusiasts

 

Coca-Cola’s “Happiness Is” Tumblr
Audience: Teens, young professionals, females

 

The Atlantic/IBM – Why Social Media Matters For Your Business
Audience: Business professionals, marketing managers, social media enthusiasts, technology enthusiasts

 

 Men’s Journal/Land Rover – Remote & Refined
Audience:  Males, affluent individuals, car enthusiasts

 

Slate/Mini – Hipster Roadtrip
Audience: Males, entrepreneurs, affluent individuals

 

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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 Round-Up: The future of mobile is the future of native is the future of advertising

Every week the Round-Up tries to locate a native theme or common thread that carries throughout all of the articles. Well, this week the theme is actually the lack of a theme. Yes, you read that right. We are devoid of an overarching narrative to guide this week’s native conversation, which should tell you something about how quickly the native landscape is growing. Almost no advertising market will be untouched by the native advertising revolution (Brands, RTB technology developers, media companies, small publishers, video streamers, social media sites, etc.), and as a result conversations now abound across each of these areas about the impact and future of native ads.  This is all good news of course, since increased discussion usually leads to more innovation and opportunities for everyone.

Highlights from this week include multiple articles on the future of native advertising on mobile devices, a video platform retiring pre-roll altogether in favor of native monetization and a financial breakdown of the native vs banner debate.

While there may be no theme, there’s a lot of good stuff to read. And we grouped them into categories (you’re welcome). Enjoy the articles:

Video

GigaOM – No more pre-rolls: Livestream ditches all ads for its free streams

The native pioneer award goes to Livestream this week, who announced that they will discontinue the use of pre-roll and instead go completely native for monetization. The article notes that when it comes to the dominant social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, “None of these are plastered with banners,” said Haot. “But all of them have tons of users, and often a lot of valuable knowledge about these users.”  To make it work, their succes now hinges on increasing the number of publishers and users.  In their monetization model, those publishers will now pay to promote their events in a native (and live) way.  Congrats, Livestream.  Welcome to the native world.

Mobile

AdAge – Mobile Is a Clear and Present Danger to the Ad-Media Industrial Complex

Steve Rubel, exec VP-global strategy and insights for Edelman, eloquently sums up the impact mobile is having on advertising in the article’s first line: “A perfect storm is brewing that is poised to disrupt a long-standing equilibrium that’s upheld the entire advertising economy for decades: the right to interrupt.” With the end of interruption will also come the rise of native advertising. The ever-growing presence of smart phones has accelerated the shift to native formats, as they are the only realistic option for successful advertising on mobile.  Steve ends the article on an equally concise point, “the shift away from interruptive ads toward content-centric experiences is good for everyone who participates — the marketers, the media, the agencies and, above all, the consumer.”

All Things D – Another Taste of an Ad Network: Facebook Debuts Off-Site Mobile Ads

Facebook announced that it is in a test period of serving Facebook ads on mobile apps and Web sites outside of Facebook, which has everyone talking about the future of Facebook’s mobile monetization.  With a nearly unrivaled amount of user data, Facebook certainly has enough information about us to create contextually relevant native ads and deliver them to our mobile devices, now we just have to wait to see how it is executed. We got a sneek peak at some of the changes they are making in their announcement that small companies and app developers can now essentially buy ads for their products directly from a smartphone. Mobile first, native first, welcome to the future of social advertising.

Brands & Publishers

Venture Beat – The secret sauce of native ads — the next wave of advertising

According to John LoGioco, Outbrain’s SVP and GM,  the switch from banners to native benefits all parties. A) It makes the site’s user-experience; B) Publishers make more money; C) Advertisers see higher clickthrough rates. We agree. John also dives into the numbers to outline how native stands to ultimately drive higher revenues for publishers versus the returns they are current seeing from the paltry clickthrough rates on standard banners.

TechCrunch – The Power Of “Native Advertising” Is In The Hands Of The Brands

Brands need to create native content that works for them, and they need to deliver it in ways that are completely interwoven into publisher sites or media channels.  Unfortunately, most brands are not completely sure how to do this. Well, the first step is for them to start consuming more content in real time. Once this happens, brands will begin to find their voice and native content ideas will begin to flow much easier.

Ad Tech!

AdExchanger – How Do Native Advertising and Real-Time Bidding Meet?

In this piece, AdExchanger asked several digital advertising executives how they felt native advertising and RTB overlap.  Their answers all differed, but the one thing they don’t dispute is the power of native as an engagement tool.  How native scales within an automated setting, how it works itself into auction-based bidding, or how publishers sell newer forms of native, are still questions that are being debated and in the end, may not even be the right questions to be asking. The good thing is that native is cementing itself in the adtech conversation.

We hope you enjoyed these articles, and we look forward to bringing you even more next week.

 

Natively,

Your Sharethrough Team

 

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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: Native Conversations Galore, Mobile Joins the Party and Facebook Searches For Answers

Some of us in the digital advertising world have been pounding the drum of native for a while now, so it is refreshing to see the term taking off  among the broader advertising and technology audience.  In fact, for some in our industry, the term is starting to feel like a “Call Me Maybe” or “PSY” video: its simply everywhere.

In a recent post on The Awl, reporter Choire Sicha talked about the ongoing evolution to a native web. Sicha gives a very thoughtful analysis about the potential revenue streams for the next wave of publishing platforms, like Branch and Medium, whose sites are currently clean and devoid of all advertising. These sites have gone so far as to cut out anything that makes them feel like a money making operation (no words like revenue, profit, etc.), which begs the question of how these pretty sites will monetize.  For Choire, it is not a question of how they will monetize (hint, native), it is about how they will keep native advertising relevant and engaging and not disrupt the user experience.

In addition, GigaOm also discussed the growing native web, specifically the growth of streams as the #1 avenue to share and consume content.  Because streams are, by nature, a way to discover content,  interrupting banners or pop-ups are much less effective than ever before.  Now, when a user comes across an interruption they will either skip it, ignore it, or leave the location where that interruption happened.   To reach this increasingly savvy, stream-using base of individuals, it is imperative to be where they are, which is…you guessed it, in-stream.

In other news, there has been a growing focus on native advertising within the mobile environment.  In fact, The Makegood featured two articles last week that discussed this very topic. With Twitter recently announcing that the majority of their ad revenue comes from mobile, it makes sense that many in the advertising industry would want to take a much deeper look at their mobile monetization strategies.  With more publishers perfecting their mobile platforms, there is now a much greater opportunity for advertisers to think more creatively (and natively) about how to fit seamlessly into the users mobile experience.  One thing these articles make clear: Full screen takeovers are not the way to go.

Lastly, Facebook continues to stay front and center for both positive and negative reasons.  On one hand, Facebook’s launch of “Sponsored Results”, which appear when you search for a person, page, or event, is another step in the native direction.  Also, with another ad product to offer, Facebook can show Wall Street that it is exploring new revenue streams (while also keep their anti-banner users happy). However, the pressure from Wall Street has also caused Facebook to roll out an ad-product that Mark Zuckerberg swore against, it is called a “Logged Out” ad.  Basically a gigantic banner that now appears when a user logs out of Facebook.  With Facebook’s ad strategy a white hot topic for Wall Street and their shareholders, there’s never been a bigger spotlight on native advertising.

As always, let us know if we missed anything! Enjoy the articles.

Natively,

Your Sharethrough Team

TheAwl-  The Pretty New Web and The Future of “Native” Advertising

Choire Sicha dives into the wonderful new web, which is less cluttered with banners and is more focused on content discovery.  However, this brings up a larger discussion about native advertising.  Not whether it will actually be the future of digital advertising, but what exactly it will look like when it does take over.

GigaOm - What happens to advertising in a world of streams?

So since we are now accustomed to taking in content in the forms of a stream (Twitter, our favorite blogs, Facebook), what does that mean for native advertising? While it is clear that in-stream advertising is ideal, how do we make those advertisements appeal to users? This article explores those questions and asks many others.

Dashes - Stop Publishing Web Pages

Entrepreneur, Anil Dash, tackles the stream conversation as well by outlining ways in which to organize sites other than the typical webpage layout.  He sets up a real life example that goes like this:  When you are searching through your Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest streams, you are incredibly engaged with almost everything taking place within that stream.  However, when you click on an outside link you are almost immediately thrown into a site that is stressful, cumbersome, and probably makes it difficult for you to consumer the content you clicked on the link for.  Hmm, interesting thought and something to think about when creating a publisher site or an application.

The Makegood – Is Native Advertising the Saviour of Mobile for Publishers and Marketers?

While first setting out to bash mobile banner ads, this contributor takes a more open approach by exploring ways in which mobile ads can work.  I cannot sum up this article better than how it already concludes, ”If the last five years has taught us anything about mobile, it’s that we can’t do things the old way any more. The post advertising era has arrived. It’s time to get native.

The Makegood - Another Post on Mobile Ads

This article does a great job at outlining what native SHOULD look like on mobile.  Obviously, it should not be a full screen take over or a value exchange feature, but a truly native experience that lets the user discover the video on their own.

TechCrunch – Facebook Officially Launches “Sponsored Results” Search Ads

Facebook has launched yet another native ad unit. This product lets advertisers target users searching for specific items by including their own page or custom tab at the top of the results. While its not yet possible for businesses to link off-site yet, that is an interesting feature that may eventually find its way into the product.

CNET – Bigger ads, Bigger Bucks? Facebook Feels Wall Street Heat

According to this article, it looks like Facebook has jumped into the banner game as well as the native game.  While this article also discusses Facebook’s new strategy for creating native mobile ads, the biggest newsmaker is the gigantic “Logged Out” ads that now appear.  How will this hybrid model work for Facebook and will this move into banners expand into mobile as well? If so, how?  These are all questions to keep in mind over the next few months.

 

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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

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Native Advertising Round-Up: Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter evolve their native ad strategies

With the release of Facebook’s first ever quarterly earnings report, as well as the significant amount of coverage about their partner Zynga’s disappointing report, we’ve decided to keep the focus this week on the heavyweights in the native advertising space.

For the first time Facebook broke out individual revenues for its marquee ad product, Sponsored Stories, reporting that they are now on a $1 million a day annual run rate. Out of that total, half comes from NewsFeed Sponsored Stories on mobile; not bad for a company constantly bashed for not being able to monetize mobile. As a little background on the evolution of Sponsored Stories, they originally only appeared within the right column of the page, where a standard display ad unit would sit, but shifted their strategy in 2012 they decided to place these ad units within the native content experience of the site, the newsfeed. This bodes well for their success on mobile, as the mobile layout strips away much of the right rail of the desktop Facebook page.

What may be even more interesting than Facebook’s Sponsored Stories run-rate is their willingness to run outside of their guarded walls. With last month’s announcement that they were now advertising on Zynga.com, Facebook made a bet that their ad units are appealing enough that individuals will click on them outside of the platform. This may work well on Zynga, where the general layout and feel is similar to Facebook, but any future expansion should take into consideration how well the ad unit can integrate with the native user experience.

Twitter, still basking in the luxury of being a private company, stirred up news this week with rumors about its discussions with Hollywood producers about an in-stream video option.  This theoretically would place short films in the Tweet stream and would allow companies to buy advertising within the films.  While standard interruptive advertising within a film is not native, this would open up numerous video advertising possibilities that could uniquely integrate promoted Twitter hashtags, accounts and trends. 

In other news, FourSquare launched a new native ad product and BuzzFeed released an internal memo from their CEO that discussed the company’s strategy and vision. Lots to catch up on, get going:

TechCrunch – Facebook’s “Sponsored Stories” Ads On $1 Million Daily Run-Rate, Half From Mobile

 While investors are concerned about Facebook, their advertising strategy does not seem to be the problem.  With the ability to show ads to 543 million monthly users via Sponsored Stories, the potential for increased revenue is extremely high.  In fact, CPM grew by more than 20% overall due to the new Sponsored Story format.  It will be interesting to see how additional targeting and contextualization will fit into Facebook’s overall ad model over the coming quarter and year.

 The New York Times – Facebook Efforts on Advertising Face a Day of Judgment

Leading up to Facebook’s Q2 earnings, the New York Times discussed Facebook’s ad strategy and talked about their recent hiring of Gokul Rajaram.  Rajaram, as some of you may know, ran Google’s AdSense engine.  He brings with him a sophisticated understanding of native.  As he recently stated, ““You would much rather hear a message from your friend than hear a message from a brand.”

AdWeek – Well, Actually, It Turns Out Twitter Ads Beat Facebook

When a study last week showed that Facebook mobile ads badly outperformed Twitter ads, it raised eyebrows.  Spurred by a flurry of questions around the study, the firm reassessed their results and confirmed that the original results only took Promoted Accounts into account, not Promoted Tweets.  When the firm looked again, they found that for Promoted Tweets in stream, the CTR was close to 3 percent, which is higher than Facebook’s Sponsored Stories.  Regardless of which company has higher rates of engagement, the most interesting takeaway is something we probably already knew: in-feed ads produce better results than banners or those outside of the main news feed.

Forbes – Foursquare Launches First Revenue Product: Promoted Updates

Foursquare has been focused on finding a successful monetization strategy for a while now. Finally, they seem to be on to something (guess what, it’s native). Their new Promoted Updates, which contextually promotes businesses to people who are looking for places nearby, has the potential to impact for both small businesses and larger chains. While their Local Updates only targeted people who checked-in at similar locations, this new strategy appears in the “Explore” tab, where users go to find locations close to them.  The ability to target people when they are in the act of searching is extremely important and gets to the heart of what native is: choice-based interaction.

Engadget – Twitter rumored to be pitching in-feed video shows to studios

One of the most interesting rumors out there is that Twitter is pitching in-feed video shows to Hollywood movie and TV studios.  The fact that they are talking to these types of individuals shows that they are focused on content, not ads. While there is talk that this content would have ads running throughout it (not native, since the user is being interrupted), the ability to embed video into Twitter could lead to eventual video sharing, which brands could leverage in order to share content.  That would be a huge step, albeit one that brings up new questions about Twitter’s overall business strategy.

Gigaom – What the mainstream media could learn from BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed, along with Digg and Reddit, has helped shepherd in a new era of content discovery. Not only has BuzzFeed discovered a successful way to package and share content, but they have also embraced a completely native ad strategy. This article discusses some of the practices that BuzzFeed does so well; one of them being advertising.

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