One of the biggest advantages native advertising has against traditional banners and pop-ups is their subtlety. And Yahoo is taking full advantage of their ad network to extend these ads outside its own properties to help other publishers promote their own stories. Featured as sponsored links, these “Stream Ads” from Yahoo will appear in the content recommendation box on sites like Vox Media and CBS Interactive, with more publishers expected to join in the near future.
Tag: native ads
Yahoo Sites Start Integrating Ads From Tumblr
Sponsored posts on Tumblr for brands like Lexus, Lipton, and “Hunger Games” will start showing up on Yahoo sites. This cross-platform integration makes perfect sense, given Yahoo’s continuous efforts in integrating the microblogging platform it purchased last year into its business. Plus, for the image-heavy digital magazines sites like Yahoo Tech, Tumblr already serves as the editorial publishing tool for these sites and has been used to create those sites’ ads since their introduction.
Native Ads On Upworthy Outperform Editorials
As a nascent category, native advertising is still a territory most publishers and brands are struggling to map out. So it comes as a surprise when Upworthy, which just announced its entry back in April, reports that they have figured out the secret of effective native ads. The viral site claims that its branded content, from sponsors like Unilever, Skype and CoverGirl, have outperformed its regular posts. Besides the caveat that native ads typically receive more promotion from publishers, sources contribute this usual success to Upworthy’s specifically sharable, viral-worthy content and the comparatively high amount of effort poured into the creation of its native ads. However, given the site’s narrow topical focus that restricts it to only advertise with brands that meet its social good standards, this success story is very unlikely to be applied to every brand.
Native Ads That Scale: Twitter Acquires Namo Media
Namo Media was one of MoPub’s main competitors as they offered an SDK that allowed developers to easily integrate native advertising into the feeds within their apps. They connected into multiple ad exchanges to dynamically fill ad inventory using existing assets and copy, adding the flexibility and scale mobile native ads were in need of. It was their SDK that was the main differentiator to MoPub, but Twitter’s offering obviously had more scale.
Now it appears Twitter has acquired the company in search of technological improvements to MoPub. Should be exciting news for mobile advertisers who can easily port over existing assets into native streams. If you can’t beat em, join em!
Video Ads Coming To Instagram
The image network with 200 million users has begun testing video ads on their platform. Like their image offerings, Instagram is being quite selective about the advertisers and creative, encouraging more lifestyle imagery opposed to traditional product shots and ads. The same will likely be the case for the 15 second video, so don’t expect to see repurposed video ads. While Instagram has a highly engaged audience, one has to wonder how long this tailor-made approach will last. With programmatic on the rise, one wonders when Instagram will go self-service.
IAB Releases Primer On In-Image Ads
With every site looking more and more like Pinterest, brands are getting savvy about making their ads more visual, or going a step further to incorporate branding within existing images themselves. Referred to as in-image ads, a number of providers from Stipple to GumGum are allowing advertisers incorporate overlays and interactivity across set imagery on publishers sites. While this works by enabling a defined set of images, recognition technology will let brands correctly identify brand imagery on user generated photos at scale. They don’t have rights for those images of course…at least not yet.
Check out the IAB’s recently released Primer for more information.
Exploring the Effectiveness of Branded Content
Forbes partnered with IPG Media Lab to conduct a unique study to explore the effectiveness of long-form branded content. 2,259 participants were recruited from relevant sections of the Forbes website, given a webpage to experience, followed by a post-exposure survey to measure branding impact. Participating brands included Chrysler, Woodford Reserve, and Charles Schwab.
Download the full report here: Effectiveness of Branded Content.Forbes
For press inquiries or to receive a high res version of this report, please email [email protected].
Tumblr Rolls Out Native Ads
A weeks after the Yahoo acquisition, Tumblr is rolling out its native ad product that features brand sponsored posts that appear as any other piece of content on the platform. The posts will simply include a $ sign to indicate paid content and will be integrated within the user’s dashboard stream. The new product has all the pros and cons of native advertising. The custom nature of Tumblr-specific content force brands to get creative about their posts but there are significant cost and time associated as well.
So will the new rollout attract advertisers? So far, Denny’s AT&T, Ford and others have taken part, likely attracted by the 46.5% of Tumblr’s audience that falls between 18-34. The average user–29 million uniques in total–spends 153 minutes on the platform per month as well.
140 Proof Targets Tumblr
140 Proof expanded its social advertising technology today by launching what it calls Native Ads for Social Sites, allowing advertisers to reach targeted consumers on an array of social networks including Tumblr and WordPress. The addition of Tumblr to the company’s arsenal is of particular interest as it allows ads delivered in “native” format to be reblogged and shared like any other post, while also taking advantage of strong targeting, and Tumblr’s largely unexploited advertising potential.
BIA/Kelsey Predicts Boom In Native Ads
A new release from BIA/Kelsey predicts “native” ad spend on social media sites to increase from 1.53 billion this year to 3.85 billion in 2016. For some reference, these native formats treat ads as any other piece of content, like a promoted tweet in your newsfeed. While we’ve seen much debate over their effectiveness, expect social ads to grow on platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, Foursquare and maybe new entrants like Tout and Pinterest.
