Banners weren’t cutting it for Vaibhav Gupta, CEO and founder of Bidstalk, a Singapore-based company that provides a white-label mobile and video DSP platform for advertisers and publishers. But the alternative – native – presented its own attendant complications. “Marketers are ready to experiment with newer mobile-focused ad formats, but such traffic is still limited,” Gupta said. […]
Yahoo is buoying its push to be a mobile player with a mobile dev suite, revealed Thursday at the company’s first-ever mobile developer conference – but the products, and Yahoo’s plans, are highly contingent on an important factor. Will developers see the value in Yahoo’s app-monetization tools? Flurry’s SDK now includes demand from both Gemini, […]
Mobile is the mother of all invention at BabyCenter, an online content hub for pregnancy and parenting-related content. Founded in 1997, BabyCenter has always maintained a digital-first mindset – but the changing consumption habits of its more than 40 million global monthly users, mainly current and expectant mothers, means that mobile is fertile ground for […]
Pandora will leverage its data assets and introduce mobile programmatic capabilities later this quarter for its iOS and Android platforms, CEO Brian McAndrews said during the company’s Q4 and year-end earnings call Thursday. “Advertisers are looking for high engagement on mobile,” McAndrews said. “In terms of digital revenue opportunities, we are positioning Pandora to lead the […]
The New York Times reported relatively modest fourth-quarter and full-year earnings on Tuesday, but chief Mark Thompson hailed it as “the most encouraging year-over-year trend” for total advertising revenue since 2005. To that end, he touted strong growth in digital advertising, sponsored content and subscription-based revenue. “We were particularly pleased with the strong growth in digital […]
Can BitTorrent – often regarded as the de facto file sharing protocol for online content piracy –achieve the legitimacy to attract brand advertisers? While that remains to be seen, the company took a step toward improving its ad offering when it unveiled a partnership with Adzerk on Wednesday. Adzerk, which works with publications like social […]
The singles ad would read like this: Mobile native inventory seeks demand. In an effort to act as matchmaker, global mobile ad platform Opera Mediaworks launched Tuesday a private marketplace native extension of its mobile ad exchange, Opera Mediaworks Ad Exchange (OMAX), which until now had just focused on programmatic display and video. Because the […]
If banner advertising has peaked, native advertising is still on its way up. Proponents of native cite better consumer engagement and higher rates for publishers. London-based market research firm Mintel pegged the current native advertising market at $1.8 billion, predicting it will rise to $9.4 billion by 2018. Of course, “native” is a broad term […]
Native is a bit like awkward teenager – it’s still trying to figure itself out and it just wants to fit in. Sharethrough is looking to help native advertising blend in a little better with a new unit that takes a cue from the way players like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest display third-party content on […]
Intel dove deep into content marketing to connect with millennials. For two and a half years, it’s used the IQ website to reach consumers through articles connecting technology to everyday life. In addition to using homegrown pieces, Intel places articles on sites like BuzzFeed and Mashable. All receive extra pushes to drive traffic. That’s where […]
Although native advertising is typically used for branding, it can provide results for direct-response campaigns. That was the goal for Microsoft Store – the software giant’s answer to the Apple Store – when it launched a test in early July along with Seattle-based agency Point It and native ad-tech platform TripleLift. The native ad-tech company […]
Distributing the same sponsored posts across a network of sites isn’t a widespread practice – yet. While planning the media spend for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, ad agency Mediasmith turned to Distroscale, which allowed the team to leverage existing content to connect with readers about the hospital at scale. “Native advertising had a key role to […]
The Association of American Railroads (AAR) is after the kind of Washington, D.C., influencers who can impact change. But with a limited budget and a potentially boring topic, the organization needed to find a way to tell people about the vital role freight trains play in the economy. After “a difficult year for freight rail,” during […]
Given the building momentum around native advertising and the growing number of publishers and startups seizing on the trend, it was only a matter of time before the 800-pound gorilla of ad technology threw its hat in the ring. While Google has yet to formally introduce its native offering, numerous AdExchanger sources with knowledge of […]
Last month, Slate served 100 million impressions of native ads in 30 days. For the coming fourth quarter, 15 native campaigns are in development. Some are running for a few weeks. A handful of native campaigns involve publication of dozens of posts over a year. Despite that scale, until April of this year, Slate created and […]
Men’s Health is selling mobile native advertising campaigns directly to advertisers using Sharethrough. The move is part of an expansion in Sharethrough’s business from an in-feed native ad exchange to a facilitator of native deals sold directly via SFP (Sharethrough for Publishers). As of today, all publishers will be able to sell native directly through […]
Few publishers can match the scale and reach of The Huffington Post’s 86 million monthly global uniques. The AOL-owned property also has a highly international and social audience, said Tessa Gould, senior director of native advertising at the HuffPost Partner Studio. The studio, created last June, helps brands conceptualize, execute and evaluate native campaigns. “Being […]
A year-long effort to redesign About.com and ramp up native ad formats forced the publisher to take a hard look at itself. On the plus side, there was no dearth of content onsite. “We make 6,000-7,000 new pieces of long form content every month and we have a corpus of over 3.5 million articles,” Neil Vogel, About.com’s […]
Coming from the agency world three years ago, Alexa Christon brought creative rather than media experience to her evolving role at GE, where she is now head of media innovation. And, with responsibility for GE’s US media today and an eye toward what her mega-corporation can produce globally, she’s helping to push the envelope of more […]
Refinery29 started out as a fashion blog, but it’s since expanded its vision: It plans to be the go-to source for millennials on the subjects of beauty, travel and points of view on subjects ranging from dieting to news coming from Ferguson, Mo. It’s also a high-growth company. The digital publication has 15 million monthly uniques, according […]
Ever since his company, Automated Insights, announced a partnership with the Associated Press (AP), CEO and founder Robbie Allen says it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. The idea that his Durham, N.C., firm’s technology could automate what reporters do with the appropriate data inputs clearly has larger implications. As The Washington Post and Poynter, among […]
“Remember, I’m on day five,” Greg Coleman said on Friday. The former president of Criteo, which went public earlier this year, recently hopped aboard BuzzFeed, where he’ll serve as president and on the board of directors. The switch reunites Coleman with many of his old co-workers at Huffington Post, including BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Shortly […]
AOL is both a technology company and a publisher, a fact that works in Gravity’s favor. Acquired by AOL in January, Gravity’s 45-person team is a part of AOL’s 4,800-strong workforce and its content personalization engine now powers internal links to AOL’s content repository, which sees 4,000 to 5,000 new articles every day. Gravity’s engine […]
Marketers hunger for native ads and publishers, spurred by the format’s lucrative cost, are happy to feed it to them. Yet while most publishers – 93% according to a survey conducted by the Online Publishers Association – claim to have a native offering, 47% of marketers said they were unsatisfied with their ability to distribute […]
Earlier this month, Upworthy – a curator of socially-conscious content – revealed native content was outperforming editorial content. The data was striking: Branded content received 3.5 times as many views, 2.9 times more “Attention Minutes” (an Upworthy-developed metric) and three times as many social shares compared to its in-house editorial content. All this for a […]
Like many publishers, The Washington Post’s Kelly Andresen grapples with success metrics for native advertising campaigns. As director of ad innovations and product strategy, she has a front-row seat on her publication’s digital evolution and oversees teams that are dedicated to creating new digital advertising revenue, including native. “When you move into content marketing, it’s […]
Native advertising doesn’t fit into a 300×250 box. But as the category has taken off, so has the need to gather meaningful metrics in a manner similar to standardized display advertising. So when mobile-centric publisher Quartz developed a special native ad campaign for US Trust touting the bank’s sponsorship of the Aspen Ideas Festival, it […]
Whether or not you think native advertising is all buzz and no bite, one thing is clear: Banner ads have a less than a 1% click-through rate, which means many brand advertisers are on the lookout for a new solution. Retailer Old Navy, whose predominantly teen audience would most certainly roll its collective eyes at a performance-based […]
IZEA, a company that connects social media content creators with brands, recently rolled out a cloud-based “Sponsorship Marketplace” to help advertisers automate content distribution and measurement. IZEA’s network is comprised of over 50,000 registered advertisers and agencies. Some of the company’s agency partners include Mindshare, Starcom, Initiative, Ogilvy and Hill Holliday. Founder and CEO Ted […]
Programmatic and real-time bidding capabilities are quickly emerging as differentiating factors in the native advertising landscape. But as more companies enter the space offering similar features, telling them apart becomes increasingly challenging. Nativo and TripleLift are two such native ad companies that both offer programmatic capabilities. Here’s a snapshot look at how they differ. For […]
