Category: News

This article featured on adotas.com, to view the article on Adotas click here.

As Native advertising matures, performance is getting better. But what’s driving it? Native advertising now makes up 50 percent of digital ad spend and will be a $22 billion dollar market in 2017.  But what makes native advertising so successful? For a while now, all the credit has been given to the discrete unit and it’s adaptability with the form and function of the page.  But, while the unit does deserve a great deal of credit, the growth of native advertising is also being driven by other things.  Specifically,  the contextual relevance of the content inside drives its performance.  Data from Nielsen shows that contextual relevance directly correlates to performance; contextually relevant ads increase performance by 50 percent.

Context and native are not interchangeable terms.  A lot of native advertisements have little to no contextual relevance to the content they live with.  And, yet despite this lack of contextual relevance, they still outperform banner advertisements.  Context takes the native ad one step further: it fits with the content around it. For example, if you’re reading an article on 2017 cars on a car site and see a native ad directing you to Kelly Blue Book’s review of a 2018 Ford, that’s context.

Relevance, the ability of a native ad to further be targeted to the reader, is the peanut butter to context’s jelly. Individually, they positively impact performance, but combined they possess an opportunity to grow engagement.  A native ad becomes relevant when its content is timely and/or further targeted to that specific reader.  For example, on Bonnier’s Swedish news site, Expressen, readers recently spent an average of 55 seconds with a timely native article (one that corresponded with the news of the day), compared to 35 seconds with typical native content on the same site.

With these performance improvements, one would think that all advertisers who utilize native would also want to squeeze these gains from their buys. But, unfortunately, this is not always the case.  One of the reasons is that context and relevance, unlike native advertising itself, haven’t always been easy to scale, but this is all changing.

For example, in the past, to increase relevance, some marketers would work directly with a publisher’s content studio, and create the right content for that site’s own readers. This content lived and breathed only with that publishers ecosystem.  Great for relevance, bad for scale. However, smart publishers are building audiences for this content, driving traffic through native ad buys from other relevant publishers and even social.

Having access to publisher data, in aggregate, is also a boon to context and relevance. Specifically, knowing what topics are resonating in aggregate–across multiple properties–can help advertisers target readers much more efficiently.

Finally, targeting technologies have never been more mature and they’re only getting better.  Some native ad vendors allow for real-time targeting of individual users by combining several different data sets, including layering situational data on top of data from the advertiser’s DMP.  For example, native ads can now target specific users in specific locations with ads that consider time of day, weather, current events etc, adding to relevance.

As CMOs pour more and more money into native in 2018, they should jump in with eyes wide open.  As a whole, yes, the native unit performs better than display. But, can they do better than just the performance of the unit? Yes. Adding context, relevance and price transparency will help them get more out of native.

 
This week, journalist Steve Smith wrote a piece in Folio magazine explaining why Kiplinger have chosen dianomi as their sole content network partner. You can find the article written here.
Clutter happens. It’s one of the sad consequences of online ad economics. Publishers hungry for more digital dimes seem unable to resist slapping in another line of code and adding that next bright shiny ad network widget to squeeze a few more pennies of revenue per page. In recent years, the ubiquitous and nearly invisible banners and badges have been joined by so-called “native” sponsored content networks that only add to the mess. These boxes of paid headline link to other content and sponsors often promise contextually relevant information users appreciate. But they are just as often responsible for planting Kim Kardashian clickbait into the latest news from the Middle East or a retirement advice piece.
This is precisely the problem legendary financial advice brand Kiplinger.com found at its own site. “A year ago we were looking at our website and realized we have a lot of noise,” says business development manager, Phil Hawken.
Kiplinger was working with up to five redistribution partners as well as using an entry page interstitial that greeted newcomers with an ad. “While the ad had great visibility, it didn’t have great performance,” he admits. “It was a terrible user experience.”
Kiplinger also suspected that the clutter was not only eroding the user experience but overall revenue as well. More was not necessarily more.
The Kiplinger cleanup theorized that a cleaner U/X would also lead to better performance for the ads that users were now seeing. The site eliminated the opening interstitial unit and now only serves it for email sign ups.
“We still have site banner ads,” he says. “But we try to limit that to a number of key placements and talk more to the advertisers.” There is still a prominent leaderboard unit, but it actually performs well for Kiplinger. “A lot of users say they don’t click on banners. But our audience does skew older and are interested in personal finance. So when we run personal finance ads next to that content we see a bit of an uptick for advertisers.”
To be sure, Kiplinger enjoys the advantage of skewing older and still seeing more of its traffic coming from the desktop than many competitors. The mix is still 75 percent desktop, 18 percent mobile and 7 percent tablet. But the site is fully responsive, so the same new pared down ad experience moves to mobile as well. Kiplinger does still use some pop-ups on mobile because of the limited real estate and “ads don’t perform quite as well on phones in terms of clicks and engagement,” he says.
But the real lesson from the Kiplinger rethink was not only that relevance matters in ad performance, but irrelevant ad content negatively impacts overall ad effectiveness.
Kiplinger reduced the number of content network partners from five to one, settling on Dianomi, a native ad platform that specializes in financial content. The test, says Hawken, was “let’s see if we can feature the right links rather than even the ones that could make the most money. By putting more relevant content up and taking some of the others away, we found that more people were engaging with the content that was up there.” They did considerable A/B testing of different formats and link content to discover, “when we put [fewer] contextual links in the right places the performance was much better than having many things vying for attention.”
Relevance and utility are the winning combination for Kiplinger now. Widgets like mortgage comparison tools have proven especially engaging in visitors in the lead-to- sale process. By focusing on content links from a single specialized source like Dianomi, Kiplinger is seeing not only better performance from third party sponsored content but from ad performance overall. “We were up 10 percent in terms of the advertising side, and up 40% on the site partnership level,” he says.
The lesson here is that experience matters (user experience, that is). And it matters to more than responsiveness to the clutter on any single page. It matters to a user’s overall interaction with a media brand. That Kardashian clickbait may have an immediate CTR and CPM payoff, but that math is short sighted. The full equation calculates overall impact on ad receptiveness. “We found not only that our users didn’t have interest in irrelevant content links, but that it was a negative. It turned them off to engaging more in our site.”
View the redesigned site here.

Today an article by Dianomi CEO Rupert Hodson’s has featured on Media Post, you can read the article below:
 
For publishers online, more ads on the page have meant more revenue. And over the years, some have taken this approach quite literally, stuffing pages with every ad unit that would fit, from pop ups to video ads that follow the user down the page.
Now, whether due to the attempts of search engines that have tried to force them to declutter, or just a response by those continuing to evaluate their ad strategies, many publishers are re-thinking their ad approach.
They are analyzing the value their ad mix provides to its readers.
Some are succeeding and cashing in on more revenue, most spending months to find the right combination between user experience and advertising. To do that, they are testing different ad units, placements and vendors.
Most are finding there is no exact science, but rather success is a balance of a few things, specifically:
Focusing on ads that are most engaging.
Over a period of a year, online publisher LittleThings stripped its site of clickbait-heavy content recommendation ads, interstitials and autoplay video ads. Instead, it uses display, user-initiated video and contextually relevant native content advertising.
By cutting disruptive ads, focusing on those with contextual relevance, and reducing overall ad clutter, the company saw both its ad revenue and user engagement increase: revenue grew 36%. More publishers are seeing a correlation between context and ad revenue.
This is especially important in segments such as financial services and b2b technology, in which the reader places a high expectation on the value of all of the site’s content.
Aligning the business opportunity with your customers values
Content publishers have gone so far to one side of the spectrum in finding ways to make money from casual website visitors, their core users are rebelling against these efforts by using ad-blocking software.
One of the reasons why some publishers are more successful at achieving a dramatic ROI increase in a redesign is because they narrowed their focus on the unique experience their customers expect e.g, more context, better relevance and less disruptive.
Most publishers know the basic facts of who their users are, but lack an understanding of why they visit. What is that implied contract between them and the publisher? Understanding the expectation of that user in both content and ads will help publishers distinguish between which ads will work the best with their customers.
Cutting your preload time
Studies have shown that websites that load in more than five seconds have bounce rates 2x higher than a website that loads in one second. Website load times are a double-edged sword for publishers. Ads are needed for revenue, but they can also hurt it.
For example, a recent Google+ App study found that when users were presented with an interstitial or prestitial ad, which can increase pre-load time by two seconds or more, 69% of visitors abandoned the page entirely, costing publishers money.
Publishers can cut their page load times and abandonment using a number of techniques: employing a CMS that uses caching, getting rid of interruptive ads like interstitials and reducing image sizes.

Dianomi, the only native content marketing and intelligence platform, focused exclusively on business and financial services, today announces the launch of Dianomi Insights, a new content intelligence product for advertisers. Dianomi Insights provides advertisers with access to intelligence on the products and content that are trending with readers, so that advertisers can quickly target them with the most relevant native advertisements.
“With Dianomi Insights, we are solving a major targeting challenge advertisers face today:  knowing what trends and topics are most relevant to their customers at any given moment,” said Rupert Hodson, CEO of DIanomi. “Using Dianomi Insights, advertisers can make their native ad spend even more efficient.”
Dianomi Insights are accessed through Dianomi’s recently launched DMP, which gives advertisers data on the 18 million articles and 100 million unique users on the Dianomi business and finance network each month.  For the first time, this data now includes insights on content and themes that are trending with readers; what content and themes audiences and readers are engaging with most and who is consuming their content.  Advertisers can then use this intelligence to distribute the most targeted content to readers in the form of Dianomi Native ads.
For example, a content producer who wants to engage with millennials would want to know what those millennials are reading, right now. With this knowledge, they can apply them to their product content stream e.g. if millennials are consuming a lot of content on climate change, an ETF provider can use that data to create content that tackles the matter and inject information about their ETF that focuses in renewal energy companies.
“Customizing content to improve media performance has become a universal need for advertisers,” added Hodson. “Using Dianomi Insights, they can get the maximum revenue and conversion for each native ad.”
About Dianomi
Dianomi™ is a global leader in premium content marketing. We are the only native content platform that focuses exclusively on the Business and Finance vertical. Through our natively integrated Sponsored Content Units, we promote links to our advertisers content across leading tier 1 global publishers and stock exchanges. For more information about Dianomi, go to www.dianomi.com.

This week, Dianomi has been featured in the AdExchanger following an interview with our CEO, Rupert Hodson. Please see the article written by Sarah Sluis below:
 
Even as many advertisers embrace audience-based buying, context remains a key performance driver in many verticals.
Take finance, a category in which advertisers often sell sophisticated products to niche audiences. Third-party data can be expensive, with iffy quality, so it’s often better to reach audiences while they’re reading about finance and business.
Dianomi, a profitable native ad platform for financial services advertisers, knows the power of context for its platform. It has tested ads on non-finance and non-business sections of publishers’ websites, with poor results.
“As soon as you go out of a contextually relevant environment, conversions drop dramatically,” “said Dianomi co-founder and CEO Rupert Hodson.
But the company has not soured on audience buying.
On the contrary, over the past two years it has built a data management platform (DMP), which it rolled out this summer. The DMP will enrich the targeting and insights that can be applied to its platform. And Dianomi is exploring letting advertisers use audience data from its DMP to buy inventory programmatically across the web.
Dianomi works with a 300-strong network of publishers in the finance and business verticals. They add Taboola/Outbrain-style native ad units, which advertisers pay for using a cost-per-click model. Dianomi claims to serve 4 billion of these ads a month.
For advertisers, Dianomi says it offers a more brand-safe environment for content than Taboola or Outbrain, as well as contextual relevance.
“Running on financial websites like CNBC or The Street closes the aperture on the opportunity,” noted Joe Soriano, group media director at GRP Media, who uses Dianomi for two financial services clients. “There is minimal waste toward people who might not understand [the client’s financial products].”
Dianomi also offers its clients network transparency. Advertisers can access a full site list and see publisher-by-publisher performance, and they can whitelist or blacklist sites, critical for advertisers who want brand-safety assurances.
The DMP will allow advertisers to look at performance through the lens of content, not just on a publisher-by-publisher or user-by-user basis. Its content insights feature reveals trending stories across Dianomi’s 300 publishers, which advertisers can use to improve creative.
“We will find out what people are latching onto, and serve them something relevant to the topic,” Hodson said.
Also, advertisers can use LiveRamp to bring in third-party data sets and, soon, their own first-party data.
Although Dianomi has just 30 employees, the network built its own DMP so it could lower costs and customize the product to suit the network’s needs, according to CTO Cabell de Marcellus. Building it in-house ended up being one-third the cost of licensing.
By building its own tech, Dianomi also doesn’t worry about data leakage. It can ensure its tags load quickly to minimize latency on its publisher partners’ sites. And it can create more flexible targeting products than if it used an out-of-the-box solution.
Dianomi is running audience targeting and analysis within its network, though it may eventually make the audience data available for private marketplaces.
“The DMP will open us up to the programmatic space down the line,” Hodson said. But Dianomi will make sure its publishers profit, too, since the network would build on their reader data. “We would need to look at creating private marketplace deals where the publisher is part of that, and there are various ways to do that. It’s extremely early days.”
 

 
 
 
Situation Overview:
The Kiplinger Washington Editors is a 96 year old publisher of business forecasts and personal finance advice, available in print and online. Their award-winning Website, Kiplinger.com, attracts 3.5 million unique visits and 30 million page views per month and has become a vibrant portion of the company’s revenue, through online sales and subscriptions as well as advertising and onsite partnerships. It’s readers are highly engaged and money savvy. They spend an average of eight minutes on the site per day with an average household income of $90K.
Like many publishers today, Kiplinger understands that there is no longer a direct correlation between the number of ad units on a page and an increase in ad revenue: more units ≢ more money for publishers. So, in early 2017, when Kiplinger.com embarked on a major redesign, not only did it focus on streamlining its aesthetic but it also sought to evaluate both the contribution that each ad unit had in sales and the contextual value that the units provided to readers.  Included in this was a review of several native advertising partners whose sponsored content links appeared on the site. Dianomi was part of this review.
 
Solution
Kiplinger began working with native ad platform, Dianomi, in 2015. Like Kiplinger, Dianomi’s advertisers and audience skew toward the business and finance user. Dianomi works with publishers to increase both their native ad yield and improve the user experience by delivering the right content to the right reader at the right time.
Kiplinger uses Dianomi’s Sponsored Content Units, which features the native ads of  over 300 global business and financial advertisers, running at any moment. Dianomi’s Sponsored Content Units are optimized by Dianomi’s algorithm to deliver the placement of those advertisers that drive the most engagement and the most revenue on the publisher’s page. Kiplinger’s readers only see contextually relevant, brand safe ads on the pages where they are most likely to engage.
“We went all-in with Dianomi and gave them dedicated placements and utilized their link tools,” said Phil Hawken, Business Development Manager, Kiplinger.com. “With Dianomi, we’re able to target our readers with native ad content on the topics they might be looking for, like an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF).  We can test different sponsored content on the site and target content to different sections and identify which channels and exactly where these ads will best perform.”
 
Results
Dianomi is now Kiplinger’s exclusive contextual native ad partner. Using Dianomi, Kiplinger is able to make more revenue off of a clearer page. The publisher is seeing a growth in revenues from native ad placements. Kiplinger now has a Dianomi native ad unit on almost every page and has reduced the number of native ad partners from 5 to 1. Most importantly, Kiplinger is benefitting by giving its readers more of what they want.
“We looked at several native ad companies, and Dianomi was most relevant and highest performing,” said Hawken. “The presentation works well for our readers; Dianomi helped us clean up the site and the sponsored content is relevant and provides value to our readers.” 
 
KPI Improvements
Growth in click through – slideshows +77% articles +48%
Percentage growth in CPM – slideshows +336% articles +248%
 

As the saying goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, but what are your image ads saying about your brand?
With over 51% of B2B marketers prioritizing visual content assets, how do you ensure the visual content ads you are using stand out and makes your target audience pay attention? Communication with your audience is unproductive if your audience doesn’t retain the information shared. When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.
As well as helping your audience remember information you are sharing, content ads that include images, visuals and the company logo have also been proven to encourage your audience to engage with the ads more, providing the images used match the look and tone of your company and clearly telling the audience who the company is.
Guaranteeing the right images are used can be tricky, as ads can perform differently with just a slight tweak of image or text, hence why image testing ads is important.
Image testing ads can be a necessity, as often brands will create image ads without thinking about why they are needed. Brands need to decide what their plans are for the ads before creating them in order to execute them well.
Considering different ads may require a different strategy; designing different ads marketed at the same group of people will help gage a strong idea on which will be more successful, as well as marketing the same ad to a different group of people so as to gage the type of audiences that will be interested and engage with the ads presented to them.
The dianomi self-serve platform and the in-house executives can save you time on testing your ads. Our in-house executives will spend time testing different images and ad texts against each other, to find out which receive the most engagement from your target audience, and discovering which performs best. By working with dianomi, clients can find the best visual content ads for their brand in a quicker and data-driven way.

We’re delighted to announce that dianomi has made The Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100, the prestigious league table which ranks Britain’s top 100 private technology companies with the fastest-growing sales over their latest three financial years.
Our inclusion in the Tech Track 100 is testament to the success we have achieved in the market. Thank you to all who’ve supported us so far – this achievement has only been possible due to our dedicated customer base and our fantastic team.
To view the full list click here.

NEW YORK CITY — Dianomi, the only native content marketing platform focusing exclusively on business and financial services, today announced that publishers and advertisers can more effectively target individuals and audiences, with native advertisements on Dianomi’s network of 275+ business and finance publishers, using Dianomi’s just launched data management platform (DMP).
 
Using the DMP, publishers and advertisers can gain access to insights on the 100 million monthly unique users on the Dianomi business and finance network and use these insights to better target them with the native ad content that will resonate best.
 
“Dianomi’s proprietary DMP is the core of our platform and the engine behind which we will be continuing to roll out new features for both our advertisers and publishers,” said Rupert Hodson, CEO of Dianomi. ”Right now this includes audience targeting, but soon we’ll be able to dive deeper, using the DMP for content intelligence.”
 
In the future, advertisers and publishers will be able to use Dianomi’s DMP for content intelligence, specifically: looking at the 18 million articles on the Dianomi network each month and analyzing the data to understand what topics are trending and which topics readers are most engaging with. Armed with this data, advertisers can target readers ensuring that their contextually relevant native ads are aligned within the publisher’s environment.
 
“We are uniquely sitting on a wealth of data within business and finance,” continued Hodson. “Our DMP is central to enabling us to understand the digital behavior of the audiences that we reach and ensuring that we present the most relevant sponsored content to them.”
 
 
About Dianomi
Dianomi™ is a global leader in premium content marketing. We are the only native content platform that focuses exclusively on the Business and Finance vertical. Through our natively integrated Sponsored Content Units, we promote links to our advertisers content across leading tier 1 global publishers and stock exchanges. For more information about Dianomi, go to www.dianomi.com.
 

Last December, a consortium lead by internet giants Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube announced it would cooperate on a plan to help limit the spread of terrorist content online. None of the organizations made a commitment, at this time, to remove these videos.
So, it should have come as no surprise to advertisers when, three months later, they learned that their ads may have appeared next to videos filled with hate speech or those that directly funded terrorist organizations on YouTube.
What advertisers may not realize is that the problem they are facing is bigger than brand safety. Rather, the explosion of user-generated content and the growth of audience-based targeting have all but completely eroded context from the advertising buy. Advertising aligned with terrorist propaganda on YouTube is an artifact of this trend.
How did we get to this point? The ad industry as it stands is a duopoly, with Google and Facebook racking up over $50 billion in ad revenue in 2016 out of $72 billion in total. It is estimated that YouTube’s piece of that pie is annually around $10 billion, 15% of the total industry. Read the full article here.
The appeal of YouTube to advertisers is its huge audience and seeming unlimited pre-roll inventory. But, combining scale and automation with inventory diversity is not without its challenges, as we’ve seen. If you have scale and inventory, but lack context, you’re significantly decreasing purchase intent and branding.
Two years ago, at an industry conference, Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia said of contextual advertising that “if content is king, context is god.” He then urged advertisers to “respect the room you’re storytelling in.” The problem with automation is that most advertisers don’t know the room in which they’re telling their story.

So, what’s a brand to do? – Read the full article here.