Native Ads Today

The infographic about infographics

NYC, 1981

The Atlantic looks at how The Onion’s in-house ad agency -- which didn’t exist three years ago -- pulls in 81 percent of the company’s total revenue.

And Bloomberg TV has announced a three-year partnership with the Hyundai Motor Company to launch a global series about the world’s most interesting art personalities. There will be 25 half-hour episodes of “Brilliant Ideas” each year, which will also appear online.  The car company has been aligning itself with the arts as a unique angle on luxury. Says the press release: “ Hyundai Motor has been a strong supporter of the arts, reflecting its deep commitment to foster innovative interaction. In recent years, Hyundai Motor has announced global initiatives with MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) in Seoul, Tate Modern in London, and LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) in Los Angeles to support the global art community and encourage the public to enjoy art."

I’m about a year late to this Delta Innovation Class, where they pair up mentors and those who can learn from them for a flight. But it’s one of the best custom content ideas I’ve yet to see. 

--  Vox Media Chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff in the Wall Street Journal

-- Extra, extra: Grumpy journalism refugees are (often) bad at branded content, Digiday

From a NY Times native ad page for Chevron. Check out the second set of graphics, headlined “When Key Energy Sources Entered The Mix And How They’ve Evolved”.

The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal both debuted redesigned sites this week. The magazine revamp is all about big images, and it provides major space on its homepage to sponsored content, with the promotion running all the way across the page (see above). The newspaper, meanwhile, seems to limit promotion of sponsored content to the very bottom of the home page, and then only in text links. 

The new guidelines are located here.

That’s Dow Jones’ global head of ad sales Trevor Fellows talking about native ads to Digiday. To which one can only say “Amen, brother.” The 32-person WSJ Custom Studios 50 campaigns involving custom content (including native) in 2014, and 12 percent of the Journal’s ad revenue last year came from custom. 

Of the five named, the Tinny Vision campaign on SnapChart to discourage teen drunk driving gets my vote. Great marriage of platform, message and audience. 

Hearst uses its editors to provide advertisers with an “editorial understanding of what’s important to an audience,” and as a final check on whether the proposed native content is up to the publishing company’s standards, he says. While it doesn’t expect to have editors actually draft native content -- as competitor Conde Nast has said it will -- people are making too big a deal about using editors to create native content, he says. 

Native ads run in feed were seen twice as often as banner ads on sites viewed on tablets, and 25% more on sites viewed on desktop computers, according to an eyetracking study from Sharethrough and Nielsen, MarketingProfs reports.

A brilliant content campaign from the Metropolitan Opera that puts a spotlight on its stylist customers. Run by the Opera and its ad agency on Tumblr, according to the Wall Street Journal. (That’s designer Vera Wang, above.)

And other reasons native beats banners on mobile devices, from Yahoo. 

This is brilliant work, even bit as engrossing as the storytelling in the magazine itself.