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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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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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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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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: 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 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.

We hope you enjoyed this week’s edition.  Now go sign on Facebook and click on some Sponsored Stories!

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Native Advertising RoundUp: Defining Premium In the Native World

There is no more overused word than “premium” when it comes to online advertising. It’s universally desirable, even though its exact definition continues to change with the evolution of the web.

This week OMMA dug into the definition of premium as it relates to display advertising in a recent article called “What is Premium Now?”  In a fitting kickoff for the native advertising round-up, OMMA’s Laurie Sullivan noted confidently in the piece “Native targeted display ads provide the best results.” We agree.

Laurie’s article obviously opens the door for future conversations about what is ‘premium’ among the native ad market, but we’ll stop short of getting into that just yet. For now, we are working with the broad world of native ad platforms to flesh out the native ad framework and further define open versus closed native ads. Lets figure out just exactly who the players are before we decide on the all stars.

As some of the articles below highlight, the race to premium native is very much on. From Twitter’s enhanced targeting capabilities to Foursquare’s massive redesign, major social platforms are investing heavily in improving their user experience and enhancing their native ad offerings.

The native ad space is moving fast, so read up below to get caught up on the week in native ad news:

OMMA – What is Premium Now – This article tries to tackle everything in one swoop.  It discusses where the display ad market current stands, where it seems to be going, and how that ties in with the growing mobile and native strategies.  The general goal of the article is to figure out what constitutes a “premium” display advertisement. Given the incredible statistic that the display ad market in the United States will reach $15.4 billion this year, up from $12.4 billion in 2011, it is no surprise that there is still substantial focus on display as a viable advertising option.  However, with Microsoft recently writing off billions of dollars in losses stemming from display advertisements, it may be a strategy worth discussing.  For those (like us) who are proponents of native, the author points out is that many of these display ads are rolling in native elements. Unfortunately, only partially interrupting users is not the answer.   While I applaud the reporter for trying to come up with an interesting hybrid model that ties in mobile, native and display, the growing social landscape is showing that true native content is the most effective model.

Twitter Advertising Blog – New targeting adds greater relevance to your Promoted Tweets – Rumored for the past two weeks, Twitter is now rolling out targeted Promoted Tweets.  Similar to what Facebook is trying to do with their Sponsored Stories, Twitter is trying to figure out a way to use their massive collection of data to push out information to specific DMAs or demographics without blasting the entire Twitisphere.  For Twitter, they are itching to figure out ways to raise their ad numbers. According to a study released by TBG Digital, Facebook’s mobile ad click-through rate is 1.1%, while Twitter’s sits at .266%.

Venture Beat – Foursquare paves way for ad products with release of Local Updates – Foursquare needed to figure out a way to make some money, so it is no surprise that they went back to the drawing board and completely redesigned their entire user interface and experience.  For those of you who use Foursquare, you probably notice that the redesign is both visually appealing and more interactive. By allowing users to interact with each other, it creates an experience that feels similar to Facebook or Twitter.  Not only can users interact with each other now, but businesses can now weave themselves into the stream of discussion. Their ad unit, Local Updates, will be contextual.  Users will only receive updates on those businesses that they have shown interest in based on past check-ins.  While Foursquare advertising may appeal mostly to local businesses, large brands need to consider creative ways to reach Foursquare’s nearly 20 million users.

FMP Signal (Blog) – The Rise of Native Advertising – Federated Media’s recent Conversational Marketing Summit featured this presentation by Stumble Upon’s Jack Krawczyk.  One interesting topic he touches on is the cycle of content discovery and how native fits in that model.  The general thinking breaks down like this: Discover –> Share –> Amplify (Repeat).  Think about it, our main goal of using content aggregators, social sites, and other online mediums is to discover content. If we find awesome content (hopefully branded content), we share it.  Following those shares, native ad units work to amplify and reinforce the importance of the content that is being shared.  This process should not work in a Facebook or Twitter silo. Each of the social sites interacts with its users in different ways, so brands need to think about the complimentary process that buying across multiple platforms offers them.

Digiday – Brands Try out SocialCam – Despite a controversial $60M acquisition by Autodesk earlier this week, brands are beginning to check out what SocialCam has to offer.  While SocialCam has not jumped into the “Promoted” and “Sponsored” monetization game with their fellow social sites, they are garnering significant organic interest from the likes of Brisk Iced Tea and The Washington Post. In fact, WaPo just formed a partnership with SocialCam to allow a select group of London Olympic reporter to use SocialCam as their online video recorder.  This is a great first step for an app that has seen  massive adoption in such a short amount of time.

Hope you enjoyed this installment.  As always, make sure to check in again next week.

Natively,

Team Sharethrough