#sharethrough

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Sentimental postings on social media are turning out to be pure gold for advertisers

Image Credit: JKirsh/Shutterstock

Sharethrough believes the sentimentality of social media postings can help brands “viralize” their mobile and desktop ad campaigns.

The San Francisco ad company launched their new content library platform this week. Executives there are calling it the largest in-feed content library built around branded content. They may be right. They’re hoping so.

“We want the best things for a brand and campaign to get promoted. While Google cares about the clicks, our focus and interest is on the attributes of the underlying content,” said Sharethrough product director Curt Larson in an interview with VentureBeat.

Building in an analytic capability that gauges consumer sentiment based on their social media postings — Instagram and Vine for instance — and using it as a one of the ingredients for targeted campaigns makes sense for advertisers.

“We are monitoring the sentiment of people tweeting about it,” Larson said. “Our platform is driving traffic to the campaigns that are doing the best.”

Sharethrough’s approach is hardly unique but it works. Its format is real-time, and its platform monitors who’s clicking on campaigns and then on driving traffic to them. Pretty standard, except in this case Sharethrough’s monitoring tools further synthesize the data that advertisers in mobile covet and deliver it on a single screen for customers to see for themselves.

Indeed, at the end of the day, publishers and brand advertisers know that good data analytics for laser-guided-bomb accuracy in campaigns is crucial but is not the only ingredient assured to get eyeballs on a mobile or desktop ad. The real quantifier is consumers hitting the buy button.

Sharethrough has 100 employees and did $30 million in business last year. Its chief and co-founder Dan Greenberg has extensive experience building apps for Facebook, and he is the co-chair of the Native Advertising Committee. Native advertising is what gets him out of bed in the morning.

What Sharethrough does with their exchange is also aggregating the intelligence from disparate sources, like social media, in order to show their clients what in the campaign is working — and what is not. Sharethrough truly believes that campaign optimization for mobile is what makes or breaks successful ad deployments.

Transparency is key here. And publishers and brands are increasingly refusing to hire ad companies that only share parts of their data on a campaign. Clients want it all. And Sharethrough, for its part, recognizes this.

“Our objective, at the end of the day, is to sell. And our focus is on content,” the cheerful Larson said.

Dopo aver costituito a Giugno di quest'anno una task force dedicata all'argomento, finalmente IAB rilascia un primo documento ufficiale sul Native Advertising: si chiama Native Advertising Playbook ed è un tentativo di fare chiarezza in un mercato che sta esplodendo. Il documento di 20 pagine non solo cerca di definire il Native Advertising ma cerca soprattutto di preparare il mercato per far sì che 'gli acquirenti comprino e i venditori vendano'.

Un primo passo nella giusta direzione. Ci sarà tempo per approfondire meglio il contenuto del documento IAB, intanto mi sembra che ci sia ormai una definizione standard del Native Advertising – anche se non ancora completamente condivisa – che è più o meno la seguente:

Native advertising è una forma di advertising online che assume l'aspetto dei contenuti del sito sul quale è ospitata.

IAB a parte, mi sembra che la definizione di Sharethrough sia quella in assoluto più evoluta, perché tiene conto della funzionalità oltre che dell'aspetto grafico del contenuto 'Native':

Native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed.

Molto interessante anche lo scenario di integrazioni 'native' indicato da Sharethrough, analogo per certi versi a quello IAB (che infatti lo cita):

In-feed ads

Recommended content widgets

Search & promoted listings

Custom

Addirittura Sharethrough si spinge oltre, arrivando a identificare 2 tipologie di contenuti: Publisher-Produced e Brand-Produced.

Sharethrough, a San Francisco startup, has become one of the leading voices in the conversation about native advertising. The company runs a leaderboard and compiles monthly reports that highlight the best in branded content.

Mashable's piece about the Hollow Flashlight, in Lenovo's Tech Innovators Series, yielded 26,129 social actions and was one of the month's best-performing branded content pieces on the web. Sharethrough commented, "Lenovo has established itself as a pioneer in the content marketing world by creating emotionally resonant content."

Mashable also led the pack with branded content that generated the most LinkedIn shares (2 of the top 5 articles were written by Mashable) and Twitter shares (3 of the top 5 articles are on Mashable, in series presented by Lenovo, Capital One Spark and Southwest Airlines).