Q&A with What’s New In Publishing: Dianomi, the native ad marketplace for professional services brands and B2B publishers

By WNIP2 days ago

Last modified on July 16th, 2020

Based in London, New York and Sydney, Dianomi is the native ad platform for the financial services, tech and corporate sectors, providing advertisers with access to a global audience of 200 million consumers. Despite volatility in ad spend during the pandemic, one exception has been a steady growth in financial brands spending on native advertising in premium outlets. WNIP caught up with Rupert Hodson, Co-Founder & CEO, Dianomi, to find out more…

What business problem is your company addressing?

Dianomi works with trusted publishers to monetize content through premium sponsored posts. While native advertising has received its share of criticism, with some people referring to it as ‘clickbait’, we approach sponsored content differently. Our focus from day one has been helping premium brands deliver native advertisements that people want to see in publications people want to read, honing in on the right audience and context.

We bridge the gap between advertiser and publisher, integrating advertising content with premium publication context, which ensures that no ads are served that aren’t relevant to a publication or reader.

Through our tech, every element of the communications mix is holistically optimised – audiences, advertising content, advertisement position, publication type, publication quality, delivery timing and delivery device work together.

What is your core product addressing this problem?

We’ve always prioritized premium campaign experiences and the best way to deliver that we believe is through native advertising with trusted partners on professionally curated content. Our cost-per-click model operates with complete transparency, scalability and all within a brand-safe environment.

Our marketplace connects 600 blue-chip financial brands — Prudential, Morgan Stanley, Chase and others — to a global audience of financially engaged consumers via 300+ of the world’s best-known business and finance publishers. Media properties for whom we drive revenue include The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Kiplinger and MSN. 

In terms of contextual targeting, we’ve identified 12 contextual audiences relevant for our advertising partners that allow for page-level targeting on our publishers’ sites. This level of granularity ensures advertisers are reaching the right audience without the reliance on third-party data, and at scale.

Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your solution?

Aside from the publishers mentioned earlier, our roster includes Business Insider, VOX, Recode, Bloomberg, Fortune, and other premium business and financial publications.

Pricing?

Dianomi works on a cost per click (CPC) model, or cost per view for video advertisements.

What are other people doing in the space and why?

Because our marketplace is niche, with premium advertisers and publishers, we guarantee brand safety as well as ensure the content is shared with readers in a contextually relevant environment.

While there are others in the native advertising and contextual spaces, none have the reach or access to premium business and financial content in our vertical.

How do you view the future?

Over the years, through programmatic advertising, the ad ecosystem has moved from a targeting landscape that relied and worked on contextual relevance to one where advertisers were chasing audiences over the web through the use of third-party cookies. This led to major brand safety issues and fraud.

With CCPA now fully enforced and prominent, plus Google’s move to remove third-party cookies and playing catch up with Apple’s focus on data privacy, we are seeing a return to the simplicity and relevance of ad targeting based on context and focused on premium professionally curated content. Marketing does not have to be uber complicated to succeed. Quite the opposite.

Thank you.

  • News & views

 
 
 
dianomi are exclusively representing new Australian site Stockhead for all display and performance advertising.
Some of Australia’s most famous business reporters have joined Stockhead to cover the stories behind hundreds of publicly-listed companies all competing to become the “next big thing” in the sectors of technology, healthcare and resources.
Tim Treadgold, Barry FitzGerald and Tim Boreham will bring a combined experience of almost 100 years reporting on Australian markets to Stockhead, a new business journalism platform led by David Higgins, former editor-in-chief of two of the country’s most popular news websites SMH and News.
“There are more than 2000 companies listed on the ASX, but only a fraction of those are being covered by existing business publications. At the same time, there’s a renewed interest among young people for investment opportunities as housing prices continue to skyrocket and interest rates remain low,” said Higgins.
“Stockhead won’t be about the ASX200 – we’ll be covering the ASX2000. There are so many stories going untold every day about the hundreds of emerging companies striving to cure diseases, invent new technologies or find the next big deposit of ‘tech metals’ like lithium and cobalt,” said Higgins.
The proportion of young people between 18 and 24 holding investments has doubled in the past five years, according to the ASX Australian Investor Study 2017. The same study found that 37 per cent of Australian adults, or 6.9 million people, held investments on a financial exchange.
“Young people are the fastest-growing demographic of investors and there’s a huge opportunity for Stockhead to breathe new life into business journalism the same way new media brands like Vice, Mic and Buzzfeed have done in other areas. Stockhead will be the place to read business news you won’t find elsewhere, told in a surprising and engaging way,” Higgins said.
For advertising opportunities, please contact us. More about Stockhead on Mumbrella.

ASX dianomi ads
There’s no be-all and end-all formula and I’m not presenting any data here to back this up but here are some thoughts on what performs well in performance ad units.
Use a content image, not your brand logo
Performance advertising is not branding, content images perform better than brand images in almost all cases. Brand logos can work well if they are well recognised – in this case you could use a hybrid as shown above.
Don’t use other people’s logos – this can upset them – but see below “Mention a company in the news…”
Empathise
What interests the user that you want to attract? Don’t sell your product, mention what is most interesting to the user that your product will help them with.
Ask a question?
Asking a simple question will provoke the relevant user. “Do you have enough to retire?”
Make it timely
Don’t keep the same adverts live for months – change the creative to relate to current issues – news, markets up/down, interest rates up/down, particular sectors on the rise/fall.
Mention a company in the news specifically
Is it time to buy XXXX shares? Mentioning companies in the news gets great results, timely issues also work – “Is oil going to stay this cheap?”
Don’t advertise to the young, advertise to the mature – they have more money
Much advertising is targeted at the young but Nielsen recently called the current over 50s “”the most valuable generation in the history of marketing” – read this article. The boomers have all the wealth, so tailor your creative and imagery towards them.
Context really does matter, don’t appear next to spam, clickbait or plain rubbish
Appearing next to rubbish makes you look rubbish, is bad for your brand and cheapens your message.
Avoid appearing next to rubbish, spam or click bait. Here are some choice examples appearing on mainstream networks at the moment – do you want to appear next to these?
Yahoo - cancer
Outbrain - dead children
 
People love lists – use listicles
People love (or love clicking on) 3 things to do, 5 things to buy, 9 ways to get something (you did!). Don’t just use listicles, you can over-do these.
Test
Test different text with the same image and different images with the same text. Deactivate the worst performers quickly. Add new variations regularly.
Don’t betray the click
Give the user what you promised in the ad. Strictly speaking this doesn’t change the CTR but it may effect your future CTR and it will certainly have a bearing on conversion rates. For example, you clicked on this article to read “9 ways to get the best click through rate of any financial services ad ever” but I gave you ten – added value (!?) and your click was not betrayed.
Happy to answer questions, this is also posted on LinkedIn.
 

Mercedes online ads viewed more by fraudster robots than humans
A distinction between display and performance digital advertising remains in many people’s minds but I’ve come to believe that there’s no such thing as digital display advertising – not in the same way that there is in print, outdoor etc: all digital advertising is performance advertising. It can be tracked like no other medium, required actions can be quantified most of the time and performance of one medium, platform or publisher can be measured against another.
Just showing the ad is not enough, particularly when you consider that according to accepted standards a “viewable” impression is “a minimum of 50 percent of pixels in view for a minimum of 1 second” – even then there’s a good chance the user didn’t see it and in most cases these standards are not being imposed: The Financial Times reported this week that in a recent campaign Mercedes online ads were viewed more by fraudster robots than actual humans and Business Insider recently reported that fewer than half of all U.S. video ad impressions were viewable in 2013.
‘Display’ advertising campaigns run by agencies now drop a post-impression cookie from almost every banner served – this allows them to measure how many users going to their client’s site were exposed to the banners. So it’s actually performance based – attribution is key to these display campaigns.
66% of all digital advertising by spend is already what is today called “performance”. If not now, then over time, digital will come to be viewed as a performance marketing medium only.
Read more about context, click bait and ROI.