To power native placements, Condé Nast’s Food Innovation Group selected TripleLift as a technology provider. It will sell native placements directly and through private native marketplaces.
In-feed article previews for branded content, such as a recipe, will appear across the Food Innovation Group’s sites. The group reaches 50 million uniques a month across its portfolio, which includes Epicurious, Bon Appétit and a network of approximately 80 food blogs.
Food Innovation Group brought on TripleLift to enable brands’ programmatic strategies. And with over half of its traffic now on mobile, native offered a more powerful advertising solution for smaller screens.
“Brand and agency partners should have alignment between their overall brand strategy objectives and their programmatic efforts,” said Craig Kostelic, head of digital sales for the Food Innovation Group. “Both of these things should be working hand in hand, but there is a disconnect because strategies used in media to help drive awareness and create emotional connections between brands and consumers are not yet available programmatically.”
Kostelic is exploring use cases with advertisers. One idea will be to use TripleLift in its blogger network to drive traffic to sponsored posts created on Epicurious or Bon Appétit.
The second use case will be creating private native marketplaces. Brands will create Deal IDs with custom terms.
The Food Innovation Group will also be open to demand provided by TripleLift, but only for its blog partner sites.
TripleLift’s technology allows creators to pick an image focal point, which assures that the center remains in-view even as it’s customized to the article feed of each site.
“It needed to be rooted in an image-based solution, and TripleLift is the best in class from an image standpoint, and from a technical standpoint, it seemed smooth,” Kostelic said.
TripleLift’s native technology allows partners to layer in their data for audience targeting, of particular value to CPG brands with their own recipe sites.
“The Food Innovation Group can pass custom information, like affluent consumers with a history of xyz, and transact that in a completely automated fashion with a set CPM,” said Ari Lewine, chief strategy officer of TripleLift. “That hasn’t been possible before.”
That could include targeting segments to kitchen technology readers, dessert recipe seekers or readers who spend time with the travel-based restaurant recommendation content. Food Innovation Group creates those segments through its DMP, Adobe Audience Manager.
Food Innovation Group also employs semantic algorithms to create segments. It would allow a paper towel advertiser, for example, to target “messy” recipes and serve ads only on those pages. That type of targeting, now only available in direct buys, will be rolled out to programmatic buys.
By adding in native, and making it programmatic, Food Innovation Group will enable buys based on first-party data.
“Especially in the CPG space, all these advertisers have different recipe sites and their own relationship with consumers,” Kostelic said. “Their goal is to figure out how much duplication they have with your audience, and how to engage with the audience that is not duplicated.”
