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Nearly half of millennials (43 percent) have been misled by medical information on the internet. A recent Harris Poll found that people tend to click the first article that comes up in a search, even though such articles are often advertising content aimed at selling medicine or medical devices. When people aren't searching, they are often coming across such misleading content via social media. Of the 20 most-shared articles about cancer on Facebook last year, over half, according to The Independent, contained claims discredited by doctors and health authorities. How does this misinformation make its way into widely circulated articles? Often, it is there on purpose: Content marketing -- corporate advertising disguised as articles, videos and information -- is being systematically manufactured on an industrial scale....
Polar tested different ad formats including image-based content (graphics, image galleries, and slide shows), article-based content, and video-based content. It tested more than 30 pieces of content, with each type tested by a minimum of 1,000 people via desktop, mobile, and both. Among the findings of the study, conducted in March 2017: --Consumer awareness of a brand increased to 69% after engaging with branded content, while purchase intent was 51%. The study also used a control group with no branding. --Incorporating companion display ads next to branded content improved purchase intent by 17% and didn’t have a negative impact on brand perception --Imagery (infographics, image galleries, and slide shows) performed the best among content formats. And notably, video isn’t always needed to tell the story. However, imagery outperformed articles by 11%. "We found that consumers responded a bit more favorably when there was less obvious branding,” Bella said....
The nonprofit Online Trust Alliance (OTA) on Wednesday conducted a study that found 71% of native ads on top media sites fail to offer adequate labeling, transparency, and complete consumer disclosure.
This is a blow to the native ad/branded content business and should be a wake-up call for publishers and content studios.
The study, an analysis of native ads on the top 100 news websites, found that 71% earned failing scores for disclosures, delineation, and discoverability. The bottom line: The sites didn’t offer consumers the ability to easily discern pure editorial from ads.
As most readers of this column know, native advertising refers to Web site content that’s funded and produced outside the publisher’s editorial review or influence, yet is designed to appear similar to editorial on that site. As the OTA mentions, “this illustrates the tension -- paid for and controlled separately, but presented in a way to appear as editorial. The potential for audience confusion or misinterpretation is obvious, and the rapid rise in the deployment of native has already prompted concerns from advocates, media and regulators.”...
“While the industry looks at native advertising as the holy grail to drive new revenues, they are failing to address the long-term issue. With 71% of native ads failing to pass the consumer transparency acid test, this report should be a wake-up call to the industry. Inaction is not an option. Conversely, providing these concrete examples and recommendations helps advertisers, networks and publishers in moving forward,” Craig Spiezle, executive director at the Online Trust Alliance, told Native Insider via email.
Have you been thinking about turning your organization's communications into your version of a metropolitan newspaper newsroom? Here are some examples you should look at.
An ad is an ad is an ad. Or is it? Millennials have grown up with a media diet far different than the generations that came before them. Has that changed their media taste? Do brands need different types of ads to reach people of different ages? Google partnered with L'Oréal Paris to find out....
“Storytelling.” It’s the flavor of the day, whether you’re talking about content marketing, visual communications or public relations, and for good reason. Stories are how humans communicate – with each other individually, across populations and over centuries.
In fact, many organizations are pretty good at identifying and defining their key story lines. The key to success in brand storytelling is in the next step – the strategic deployment of the story. Telling the brand story effectively requires a plan.
And to be clear, we’re not talking about hanging a touchy-feely post up on the blog and then calling it a day. No. Brand storytelling, in this context, means developing a sustained plan to create and execute a strategic approach to telling the brand story, in a way that supports company’s objectives. Personally, I don’t give a hoot about impressions. Let’s gun for something a bit more meaningful....
How do readers feel about all of this? Most research suggests that audiences prefer sponsored posts to banner ads, but they also appreciate it less than regular content. If you’ve come across sponsored content before, you’ll probably understand how it can be both confusing and frustrating.
In 2015, as brands continue to pour dollars into these projects, publishers will keep growing their resources and improving their output. Consequently, audiences will begin to realize that content underwritten by brands can be meaningful too.
Let’s look at some publishers that are currently leading the pack in terms of content quality, formatting and design, and reader experience:...
Today's fragmented media landscape and information-loaded digital world offer brands new opportunities to communicate directly with their audiences—building visibility, affinity and even search traction along the way.
However, success in the uppermost reaches of the funnel requires organizations to put the corporate agenda in the back seat, adopting instead a more journalistic approach to crafting and publishing their stories.
Enter brand journalism.
Not to be confused with content marketing, brand journalism is an upper-funnel tactic that delivers more than mere brand awareness. Telling the brand's stories in a compelling, audience-focused way can create affinity, earn media coverage, build brand credibility and (when coupled with search and social strategies) deliver long-lasting online visibility.
Native is one of the hottest topics in digital media, and advertisers and publishers are taking notice.
By creating advertisements that are in the same format as the content audiences are there to consume, marketers hope to provide a much less disruptive advertising experience. Native ads have also proven effective, drawing higher click rates than traditional banner ads, particularly on mobile devices.
New and exclusive data from BI Intelligence finds that spending on native ads will reach $7.9 billion this year and grow to $21 billion in 2018, rising from just $4.7 billion in 2013. We are the only research service that has provided a detailed breakdown of spend projections and growth rates for each of the three main native ad types — social-native, native-style display ads, and sponsored content. ...
There are two important parts of delivering a message: the delivery and the message. If one is a dud, it doesn’t matter how good the other one is.
You wouldn’t read a story if it was printed underneath a bus, and the most atrocious film in the world is still a car-crash if played on an IMAX cinema. The same applies to your brand storytelling, you can have the most heartwarming and engaging campaign in the world, but if it’s not delivered effectively your time and money has been wasted.
You wouldn’t want to spend months creating an incredible story only for nobody to hear it, would you? Every day there are brands who do this by not thinking carefully about how to present their message to their audience. An intelligent delivery strategy will make it easier for people to hear the story you want to tell, optimizing your chances of turning them into customers. Here’s how to ensure that the story your brand is telling doesn’t get missed...
It says something about our media culture that in a short time the term “native advertising” has gone from industry buzzword to pop culture punch line.
The two most memorable references come from HBO. On “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s Hannah takes—and soon leaves—a writing job in the sponsored content department at GQ. More recently on "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver delivers an entertaining riff about the profusion of “sponsored content” on news sites.
Oliver conceded that Netflix's native ad for the New York Times about female prison inmates, promoting the series "Orange Is the New Black," was “about as good as it gets.” This got us thinking about all the other noteworthy executions this year which demonstrate that sponsored content can indeed be good—nay, great—content. With that in mind, we asked some of the native advertising gurus here at HuffPost-AOL to name their picks for the most notable native or branded content campaigns of the year thus far, both from around the Web as well as in-house.
Here’s what we came up with, in alphabetical order by advertiser....
At a time when good-paying freelance assignments are harder to come by, many journalists are heeding the call of native advertising, where the pay is decent and the work is steady. But there’s a cost. Many worry about the impact on their credibility as a journalist. Some are even finding they aren’t so welcome back in newsrooms once they work for the business side.
In the latest in Digiday’s “Confessions” series, we talked to a veteran freelance writer who has written for top women’s magazines and other national publications about the dark side of native. In this case, the journalist was working for a publisher’s content studio, which assigned stories a given client wanted written....
It seems like everyone has something controversial to say about sponsored content these days, from John Oliver on HBO to even us here at Contently.Much of that controversy centers around two key questions: Is brand-backed content on publisher sites labeled well enough? And is it eroding the publishers’ editorial independence and reputation?
Now, a Google engineer has taken on this transparency and labeling challenge with a browser plug-in for Chrome and Firefox called AdDetector, that adds another layer of labeling to sponsored posts. It’s drumming up a fair amount of buzz in the media world already....
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“Content needs to be highly entertaining or informative to break through the clutter in today’s media environment,” says Stacy Taffet, Senior Brand Director at PepsiCo. That’s why the old View-Master toy now has 360-degree imagery and virtual reality capabilities. Automaker Lincoln put itself back on the map with stylish ads featuring an alluring new identity with Matthew McConaughey. And they’re not the only ones. The following old-school brands have recently made comebacks through clever, creative, and strategic content marketing....
John Oliver may have called it "repurposed bovine waste," but it appears as though native advertising isn't going away anytime soon. In fact, a new eMarketer study says that native digital display ad spending in the U.S. will grow 36.2% this year to reach $22.09 billion.
And why not? As marketing opportunities continue to splinter across a myriad of platforms and channels, at the same time as traditional interruptive ad intervals are ever avoided like a consumerist plague, brands need to find a way to get their messages across in ways we might actually want to see it. Back in 2014, The New York Times' executive vice president of advertising Meredith Levien said readers were spending roughly the same amount of time on advertiser-sponsored posts as on news stories, and the company sold upwards of $18 million worth of native ads that year. It's T Brand Studio continues to roll out some of the best examples of the ad genre, most notably still is the 2014 interactive piece "Women Inmates," a detailed look at incarceration of women sponsored by...you guessed it... Netflix for Orange is the New Black....
Therefore, content creators and advertisers may find themselves scratching their heads about how to break through the clutter with compelling branded content that attracts an audience and makes them want more. “While there’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to creating impactful branded content, we’ve identified some common themes in our research and content testing that can be used as best practices for making content resonate with audiences,” said Harry Brisson, Director of Lab Research at Nielsen. To better understand how consumers are reacting to this new form of marketing content, Nielsen assessed consumer reactions to more than 100 pieces of branded content and found that a brand’s effectiveness (e.g., how a brand resonates with viewers) is largely affected by the format and environment the message is delivered in. The results of the analysis uncovered three key takeaways that can help brands deliver strong content that resonates with and builds audiences: - Branded content can drive higher brand recall and brand lift than pre-roll - When viewers enjoy content, they view the integrated brands more favorably - Partnering with a publisher can drive ad impact....
On Monday, Gucci will release its latest fashion film, a Gia Coppola-directed spin on the tragic Greek love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in present-day New York City and starring Lou Doillon, Marcel Castenmiller, Laura Love, Rocco Di Gregorio, among others. Coppola and stylist Arianne Phillips worked in tandem with Alessandro Michele to capture the dreamy feel of the hot-shot creative director’s Pre-Fall 2016 collection, which the film — shot across five locations and broken into four episodes — was created to promote. Michele even designed a custom pink 10-foot long wedding veil for Doillon’s character.
But while shorts like these are nothing new, the genesis of the film was fairly unorthodox. Instead of tapping its internal marketing team or a traditional agency, Gucci worked with 23 Stories, the branded-content studio launched in January 2015 by publishing giant Condé Nast. Beyond Gucci’s own marketing channels, the film will be distributed through six Condé Nast (US) properties — Vogue, GQ, the New Yorker, W, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork — which, together, attracted a total of about 32 million unique visitors in April 2016, according to Comscore. Beyond their URLs, those six publications boast a cumulative social media following of nearly 67 million. The film will also be promoted via Vogue China and Vogue Japan. Gucci and Condé Nast suggest the project is bigger and more ambitious than anything else either party has previously done in the branded-content space, both in terms of the level of talent recruited and also the scale of the production.
To be sure, the Kering-owned Italian luxury house has the resources and capacity to create video content like this on its own. But Gucci is after Condé Nast’s larger, and presumably more diverse, audience. For instance, Gucci has 8.8 million followers on Instagram while these six titles combined have about 18.5 million. In this deal, Pitchfork’s millennial male followers — an important demographic for Gucci under Michele — are as crucial to the equation as W’s affluent luxury consumer....
Upworthy said that according to NewsWhip — which measures how content from a variety of media sites performs on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook — the site’s sponsored content performed 38 times better than the industry standard for social interactions involving content at the top 25 social publishers.
Brands have more than dipped their toe into the publishing pool in recent years. They’ve come a long way from listicles, and the future is bright for the ones who are willing to experiment. The leaders are using native advertising to produce not just words on a page, but immersive media experiences.
Still, there’s room for improvement, and it starts with moving away from what’s easy and on to what’s hard....
“Deconstructing the art and science of storytelling, This sentence, the one you're reading right now, is the most important one in this entire feature.”
Ten months ago, Dell debuted as The New York Times' first paid post partner.
Dell’s paid post went live in January to neutral reviews. We called it “solid, if unspectacular… the type of boilerplate story about the changing millennial workforce that nearly every brand seems to write.”
But now, the brand is back for a second go-round with a visually impressive exploration of enterprise cloud computing. Both Dell’s first posts and the new offering were written by journalists hired by The New York Times, but this one is enhanced with proprietary research on corporate security and interactive global market data....
...But while brand storytelling may be dominating the trade conference stages, it’s not enough on its own for brands aiming to add meaningful value to their customers over the long term.
Strategies for Retention: Own Every Consumer Touch Point
Most content marketers know this particular statistic: 70 percent of consumers prefer getting to know a company via content over ads. To deliver this type of lasting, comprehensive value to their audiences, brands must build their content strategy around three core areas of focus: Foundational content Engagement content Social content...
...Spark and its sibling branded content and entertainment division LiquidThread and Genworth are launching an integrated partnership with CNN that makes Genworth the first advertiser to use CNN’s Content Development Studio, a unit under the network that works with advertisers and agencies to develop branded entertainment and sponsored programming.
Under the deal, Spark worked with the CNN production team to develop new informational brand creative -- both :15 and :60 second versions -- to convey the importance of planning for the future. "CNN was immensely collaborative and it is useful to use their voice to lend credibility to the conversation," says Levin.
At the same time, CNN is publishing a series of articles to educate Genworth's target Boomer audience about the importance of long-term care planning and best practices to prepare for their future. These articles will run on CNN's online channels as sponsored and organic content.....
Doug Scott’s recent departure from OgilvyEntertainment, the successful unit he founded eight years ago, has raised questions about whether its WPP parent might fold it into another corporate entertainment sibling like media agency Mindshare Entertainment or GroupM Entertainment at the operating level. While Ogilvy execs say that isn’t in the works, such speculation still begs the larger industry question: As media, creative and PR agencies—along with production companies—vie to lead the growing number of marketer content initiatives, where should responsibility for branded storytelling reside? With traditional advertising becoming less profitable, everyone, obviously, is scrambling for these new income sources.
On the creative agency front, proponents argue that without a great concept born from understanding a brand’s narrative, long-form storytelling doesn’t hold an audience’s attention and justify the media expense....
...I don’t know if the guy owned stock in Second Life, or was shacking up with the founder’s daughter, or if his Second Life avatar owned the biggest fake ad agency in that big fake world and he planned to corner the Second Life fake ad market.
All I know is that he made it clear. Laid it bare. If we weren’t building campaigns to include a serious presence on Second Life, we were doomed. DOOMED!And so today, whenever I hear someone declare that the future of digital advertising is native ads, all I hear is Second Life. And all I smell is poo....
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Spin is spin, even when it is written by journalists. Tamara Pearson takes a look at fake content marketing.